The Message of the European Peacemakers for Future

1
The Message of the European Peacemakers for
Future

• Comenius school project

2
The message of the European Peacemakers for
Future
Thomas Masaryk
Antonin Dvorak
Vaclav Havel
Karel Capek
3
Vaclav Havel

• President of the Czech Republic, prominent
  playwright and poet, one of the leading
  intellectual figures and moral forces in Eastern
  Europe.

4

• Mr Havel's answers cover many other points in his
  presidency the separation from Slovakia in 1992,
  an anti-Communist purge law, the restitution of
  property and the corruption that came with
  privatisation. The detail will interest mainly
  central European specialists. But perhaps because
  Mr Havel never took a higher degree in law,
  economics or international relations, a few
  sentences of his shed more light on such topics
  than dozens of expert reports. His description of
  the Havel family quarrel over their restored
  pre-1948 properties is telling and, he suggests,
  not untypical.

5

• Cutting into the interview every page or so come
  the memos to his staff. These are the book's
  serious-comic element. Many concern presidential
  speeches, which he wrote himself, hated giving
  but considered vital for creating the right sense
  of national identity for a new republic. He
  includes other extracts presumably to show that
  politics plods on, as he puts it, and that
  leaders are not only human, but boringly human.
  So we learn of the sleeping bat in the cleaning
  cupboard, the garden hose and Mr Havel's own
  temperboth of which he tells us were too short.
• At the end of his presidency, Mr Havel left
  behind neither heir nor party. This was no
  surprise. His whole career, like this book, can
  be taken as a plea for individuality, for not
  going with the crowd. Mr Havel is sage enough to
  know that not everyone wants to stand out. Still,
  his lesson is a good one, and at times even
  funny.

6
The message of peace

• We must see actions, not only words

7
Thomas Masaryk
8

• He wrote of himself that he was a Slovak, later a
  Moravian, finally a Czech. Was he not rather of
  German nationality and Austrian citizenship? He
  declared his mother Theresia to be a German from
  Auspitz (Hustopece). She was the daughter of a
  German innkeeper and butcher, who later was the
  Mayor of Auspitz. After several years in Vienna,
  she came to Goeding in 1849 to a well-to-do
  Jewish family by the name of Nathan Redlich to be
  their personal chef. She only spoke German, as
  the Redlich family also conversed in German.

9

• In Prague in 1896, thanks to his connections and
  those of his wife's family, Masaryk made an
  acquaintance with the extraordinarily wealthy
  American industrialist and diplomat Charles Crane
  (18581931), with whom he established a very close
  friendship. Crane became a large financial donor
  to Masaryk and financed, in a large scale, the
  then Czech and Slovakian resistance against the
  Habsburg Monarchy in the U.S.A.
• Masaryk was, from 1919-1920, Charge d'affaires at
  the State Department, that is Certified Counselor
  at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech
  Government and afterwards, until 1939, Czech
  Ambassador in London. Because England did not
  accept the Protectorate status in Bohemia and
  Moravia, he maintained his role. While at the
  side ofBenes, he became the Foreign Minister in
  exile and later from 1945 to 1948 in Prague.
  During the Communist take-over, he lost his life
  at the so called "Prague window dumping", details
  of which remain unclear to this day.

10
The message of peace

• Will we learn from the history, or will we
  continue the course of "reconstructing and
  policing''the world?

• Democracy is discussion The states keep alive
  through the ideals which gave rise to their
  existence.

11
Karel Capek
Their purpose was not only to entertain the
readers, but also make them think about some
problems of that time.
12

• The Capek brothers were prominent figures of
  Czechoslovak cultural life between the two wars.
  Josef was endowed with a versatile creative
  talent. As a visual artist he was influenced by
  Cubism which he further developed in a remarkably
  specific way, modifying its colour spectrum and
  intensity of expression. Together with his
  brother Karel, he wrote theatre plays and
  children's fairy tales. The personality and work
  of Karel Capek became an epitome not only of
  cultural but also of civic life in the period of
  the First Czechoslovak Republic. His faith in the
  values of humanity and justice, attention to the
  plight of ordinary people and exquisite feeling
  for dramatic fabulation continue to lie behind
  his popularity with the general public. Karel's
  Utopian drama entitled R.U.R., in which the word
  "robot" appeared for the first time, earned him
  an international fame. Both brothers committed
  themselves to a great extent to the fight against
  fascism. Josef died in the Bergen-Belsen
  concentration camp in 1945.

13
Capek started to write poetry and short stories
while still at high school. In 1909 he entered
Charles University in Prague, where he studied
philosophy. Capek continued his studies in
Berlin, and Paris, receiving his doctorate in
1915 for a thesis on "Objective Methods in
Aesthetics, with Reference to Creative Art",
which was extremely well received by his
professors.
Capek's plays often focused on large,
philosophical themes. Like expressionist
dramatist, he employed elements from science
fiction and fantasy and was not particularly
interested in portraying everyday life. In the
three-act symbolic fantasy R.U.R. Dr. Goll
manufactures robots which can feel pain. The
robots replace men as workers. When wars began
to break out, the robot formula is burned All but
one human is killed, and the robots discover
love, making the discovery of new formula
unnecessary. The film which popularized the idea
of robots was Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926).
With the famous novel "War with the Newts" (Válka
s mloky), published in 1936, Capek is returning
to his favorite utopian topics. Other works form
his anti-fascist campaign dramas "White Disease"
(Bílá nemoc) and "Mother" (Matka). His last work
"Life and works of the composer Foltýn" (Zivot a
dílo skladatele Foltýna)
Karel Capek was nominated for the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
14
The message of peace

• Much melancholy has devolved upon mankind, and it
  is detestable to me that might will triumph in
  the end ... Art must not serve might.

15
Antonin Dvorak
16

• The composer Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904) is the
  Czech nation's best known personality.His work
  has generated keen interest both at home and
  world-wide for over a century. The Czech nation
  is proud of having a personality whose music is
  heard both at home and abroad. The date the 1st
  of May commemorates not only a hundred years from
  his death but by a lucky coincidence it is the
  date of the accession of the Czech Republic to
  the European Union. Dvorák's music will be the
  best message from the Czech nation sent to the
  world at this historical moment.

17

• From 1892 to 1895, Dvorák was the director of the
  National Conservatory of Music in New York City.
  The Conservatory was founded by a wealthy
  socialite, Jeannette Thurber, who wanted a
  well-known composer as director in order to lend
  prestige to her institution. She wrote to Dvorák,
  asking him to accept the position, and he agreed,
  providing that she were willing to meet his
  conditions talented Native American and African
  American students, who could not afford the
  tuition, had to be admitted for free an early
  example of need-based financial aid. She agreed
  to his conditions, and he sailed to
  America.Dvorák had a colorful personality. In
  addition to music, there were two particular
  passions in his life locomotive engines, and the
  breeding of pigeons.He eventually returned to
  Prague where he was director of the conservatory
  from 1901 until his death in 1904. At the end of
  his life, Dvorák was in serious financial
  straits, as he had sold his many compositions for
  so little he had hardly anything to live on. He
  is interred in the Vyehrad cemetery in Prague.