comment 09/26/2024
Photo: Hans Stenberg
Caption: President Miloš Zeman
The end of September is anniversary time. Ondřej Suchý, who wrote on the pages of Krajské listů about his friendship with the author of Tank Battalion, solved the dilemma of whether I should wish in today’s text to the (dead) Josef Škvorecký on Friday’s centenary or on Miloš Zeman’s 80th birthday on Saturday. So I will comment on the hundred great natives of Náchod from a distance – today it is the turn of the eighty natives of Kolín.
I already thought of it when Miloš Zeman was resigning. It’s an old joke. A member of the Jewish community dies and, according to tradition, someone must speak well of him over the grave. But everyone has something against him. So one is found for a hundred, stands over the coffin, and says: “The best I can say of the deceased—against the heirs he left us here, he was still a sinless saint…”
But let’s start a little deeper. When the opposition pact between the main Czech political polarities, Klaus’s ODS and Zeman’s ČSSD, was concluded in 1998, journalists (who did not know at the time that both would take turns not only at the prime minister’s but also at the presidential oar) began to find similarities between the former rivals. They found out that Miloš Zeman (born in 1944 in Kolín on the feast of the national patron Saint Wenceslas!) shares with Václav Klaus the University of Economics and the Prognostic Institute of the Academy of Sciences, where they both worked (while Klaus recommended Zeman there).
But both politicians also have a deeper feature in common – they spent most of their lives alone with their loving mother, who was even named Marie in both cases. While Marie Klausová (1914 – 2006) was a widow, Zeman’s mother Marie, née Skokanová (1917 – 1997) divorced her husband when the future president was two years old, and Miloš Zeman did not even reveal his father’s first name for years. In 2019, the author of this article was the first (thanks to his colleague, genealogist Zdenek Horner) to publish the basic data of the ex-president’s father in Denik N – and much more:
The oldest documented ancestor of postal clerk Josef Zeman (1903 – 1957) was named Václav Zeman, and his vassal family lived in Milovanice in the Benešovsk region in the 17th century. During its history, the village, among other things, belonged to the Trauttmansdorff family, whose descendant Ferdinand Trauttmansdorff was coincidentally the Austrian ambassador to the Czech Republic during the presidency of Miloš Zeman, a descendant of the subjects of his ancestors. In 1656, when the first mention of the Zeman family appeared in the registers (Václav Zeman’s only son Mikuláš was born that year, who died in 1723), but the estate still belonged to the Czech family of lords from Říčany.
The Zemans, a family of small Central Bohemian peasants, made extra money by weaving, and in the middle of the 18th century they obtained the privilege of running a pub in nearby Bořeňovice, which then existed for a hundred years. For the mainstream tabloids, who for years made a good living from the ex-president’s relationship with alcohol, it will probably be a disappointment that of Miloš Zeman’s direct ancestors, only the founder, Ferdinand Zeman (1744 – 1816), ran the pub, as his son Matěj, the ex-president’s ancestor, was the younger son , who had no right to inheritance, and so was forced to make a living from the original family trade, weaving. His son, Miloš’s great-grandfather František Zeman (1837 – 1877), was a bricklayer, mason and soldier. After his military service, he married and settled in Radošovice in the Tábor region. His son, the ex-president’s grandfather Bohuslav Zeman (1876 – 1910), settled directly in Tábor, where he trained as a shoemaker and opened a shoemaker’s workshop. With his wife Josefa, a worker in a tobacco factory, he had six children, the third of whom was the ex-president’s father, Josef Zeman, who, during the First Republic, obtained the lucrative position of postmaster in Kolín, where his son Miloš was also born.
Josef’s siblings and their partners (uncles and aunts of today’s president) worked in ordinary jobs (confectioner, confectioner, cleaner, warehouse accountant, hotel cook), so the future president’s father achieved the highest social status of all his relatives during his lifetime – which was also reflected in in that he could marry a member of the intelligentsia, a teacher. The second one from the family who married well was his niece Miluše, the daughter of his brother Ferdinand Zeman (the ex-president’s cousin). Her husband was one of the representatives of the Prague Spring of 1968, the philosopher associate professor Emil Bok (1925 – 2007), who became an important artist and poet during the ban on the teaching profession, whose verses were set to music by, for example, Vladimír Mišík.
The ancestors of the mother of the current president, Marie Zemanová (1917 – 1997), the Skokan family, have been settled in Cologne since the 18th century, and during their long history they have also not avoided connections with Czech art. According to the unique name of the president’s great-great-grandfather, Josef Herčík, we find a kinship with the famous Czech stamp engraver of the same name, who in turn was related to Miloš Zeman’s opponent in the 2018 presidential election, Michal Horáček. By the way, he himself comes from the Heyrovský families, from which, among other things, the Nobel Prize winner, chemist Jaroslav Heyrovský, and Hanlů from Kirchtreu, from which, among other things, the bishop of Králové Hradec, František Karel Hanl from K.
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About politicians with their own heads
Miloš Zeman (although as prime minister and president he subscribed to the tradition of the Prague Spring of 1968, which combined the social regime with democracy) was a bit of an archetypal “stimulator” in social matters. Those who believed in his support for stopping the outflow of Czech “national silver” abroad, he woke up as prime minister by selling the state-owned Komerční banka to the French group Société Générale. He aroused those who believed in his connection to the historical values of social democracy with his statements that their mothers are to blame for the inability of children of single mothers to eat lunch in the canteen, that eighty percent of the unemployed in the Czech Republic do not want to do it, that the victims of Czech foreclosures are to blame for their problems themselves (after all, it was he who, as Prime Minister, returned the unprecedented Czech Enforcement Act 120/2001 Coll. Klaus to the Chamber, but then signed it):
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However, I quite liked the ex-president’s most typical quality (directness of statements) – if only because he is not exactly at home in our meadows and groves. Whether I agreed with his statements or not. To have his head and say what he thinks, regardless of the consequences and his PR – perhaps only Masaryk, the early Havel, and above all Zeman’s twin did that among his predecessors; Claus. When, as prime minister in the 1990s, when reconciliation with the Landsmanschaft was at its peak, Zeman declared that the displaced Sudeten Germans should be happy to have remained alive after the Second World War, or when, during his declared that they were idiots during the presidential visits to Moscow (not to mention “affairs” such as ashtrays or “passports”), the Czech press did not care at all that Zeman, following the example of Masaryk, established a fund in which he deposited a third of his salary (it was intended for public economic projects that could not be financed from state funds), let alone that after seven hundred years of our historical connection with Slavic Lusatia (absorbed by Germany a thousand years ago), he pushed for the Lusatian Serbs to be included in the Act on the Protection of Czech Minorities Abroad. Only we, who have been dealing with Luzica for a long time, were interested in this:
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At the same time, occasionally splashing in the water is a discipline that is quite common among politicians and is far from reserved only for Miloš Zeman. For example, when a rocket fell on Polish territory on November 15, 2022, killing two people, even before it was clear whose it was, they called for a NATO attack on Russia (and therefore the start of a world war): Pavel Fischer, Miroslava Němcová, Markéta Pekarová Adamová, Jiří Pospíšil, Tomáš Zdechovský and Jana Černochová. Less than a year later, the latter (in connection with the vote for peace in Israel, the result of which she did not like) called on the Czech authorities to leave the UN. And the ultimate statement: Peter Pavel’s call for the Russians in the West to be treated like the Japanese (who were in internment camps) were treated in the USA during the Second World War:
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But the Czech press and Czech “democratic” activists (God knows why – but I think I know too…) forgave them all. Petar Pavlov was forgiven even for his normalization presidency in the departmental basic organization of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic – unlike Miloš Zeman, who was frequented by the Prague café for his membership in Dubček’s Prague-based Communist Party of the Czech Republic with far worse insults than “comrade” and all those training actions, placards “Miloš Zeman is not my president” (did you notice that we would wear a similar one, why don’t we just gloat over Petr Pavel’s presidency?), hanging portraits of Zeman in various institutions and schools, and vultures campaigning for his recall after his health collapse at the end of 2021, regardless of the constant general media coverage of his alcoholism, which is undeniable, but which two of his predecessors, including a “democratic” one, admired by the press to the point of Byzantine…
This media hatred also stuck to all of Zeman’s colleagues, but especially to the spokesman Jiří Ovčáček, which is best seen in the case of his marriage to a Ukrainian refugee, whom Ovčáček hosted at his home. If anyone not associated with Miloš Zeman did the same, they would become a darling of the Czech press. But Ovčáček, no matter what he wanted to do, could not be a media darling…
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Yes, it cannot be denied that Miloš Zeman was pro-Russian for years, which was, of course, a perfectly legitimate political position at a time when Russia adhered to international conventions and did not use nuclear weapons. After all, French President Emmanuel Macron has made no secret of his above-standard relations with Vladimir Putin in the past, and nobody blames him either at home or internationally. In addition, Miloš Zeman continued the tradition of our wayward presidents-diplomats, who with their personality were able to achieve the impossible: that our state had above-standard relations with countries that often disliked each other very much. The TGM legalized its Czechoslovak legions in countries as diverse as the democratic presidential United States and France, but also royal Italy and tsarist Russia. Edvard Beneš was the president who stood in the forefront of the partners of Great Britain, the USA and the USSR during the Second World War, but and President Miloš Zeman had above-standard relations with Xi’s PRC and Putin’s RF – but also with Trump’s USA, and above all with Israel. With whom the Czech government maintains good relations, established by Miloš Zeman, even today (with whom, after all, being a top Czech politician, I should also have excellent relations – but I would rather be under the peace-making Prime Minister Bennett than under today’s Mr. Netanyahu…)
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Not only the Czech Republic no longer has good relations with today’s Russia, but neither does Miloš Zeman, who after his invasion of Ukraine declared that he was disappointed in his government and honored Ukrainian President Zelensky. However, I do not think that President Zeman would change his opinion for the same reason that the former presidential candidate Pavel went from a prestigious captain of the Czechoslovak People’s Army, who was trained for a diplomatic-intelligence career of the Soviet bloc in the west, to becoming a career NATO officer – who, by the way, as NATO’s second man in January 2018 supported the Turkish occupation of Syrian Kurdistan, which degenerated into outright genocide. However, our mainstream press, which is in love with Peter Paul, leaves this completely unnoticed…
In short: the era of headstrong, direct and outspoken heads of state, who the less real blood they had on their hands, the worse their media images were created by today’s unified doctrine (such as Miloš Zeman, the Filipino Rodrigo Duterte, and, I’m afraid, Donald Trump as well). , unfortunately ends. It’s time for remote control heads. And don’t ask who’s sitting at the joystick…
Sources: Seznam.cz, genealogical research Mgr. Zdenek Horner, Wikipedia
Posted by: Tomáš Koloc
