National Unity in Central Europe: The State, Peasant Folklore and Mono-Ethnism

At the beginning of 1890 the Prague bourgeoisie, proud of belonging to the most industrialized and cultivated “nation” of Central Europe triumphally celebrated the first exposition of popular Czech art. Impassioned with the enthusiasm and romantic élan of the Pan-Slavic literary and populist movement, it discovered, with the naive astonishment of a neophyte, the proximity and strangeness of a culture which it had till then disdained or simply ignored. Fascinated, moreover, by the copious productivity in Germanic learned culture, which expressed and transmitted its thoughts in German, it found itself confronted with an intellectual and moral contradiction. To reclaim the specificity of its belonging to the Slavic world distanced it from Germanic modernity, since this Germanic modernity rejected the most archaic rural world, which, after the disappearance of the Bohemian aristocracy, had conserved the ethnic and linguistic marks of its cultural originality.