User:Furicorn/Partei für gemäßigten Fortschritt in den Schranken der Gesetze

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Further developments[change | change source]

In 1913 the first party congress was held in the restaurant "Na Smetance" in the Prague district of Žižkov, but was only attended by a few party members. When the party leader inadvertently sat down on the service cap of the supervising police commissioner, the event was dissolved. Hašek reports on a subsequent "long-term persecution of the party", [1] a subsequent dramatic exaggeration.

After the outbreak of the First World War Hašek was called up in February 1915 as a soldier, and was captured by Russians in September 1915. In 1916 he joined the Czechoslovak Legion, but deserted to the Red Army in 1918, where he held various functions, mainly serving as political commissar in the Political Department of the 5th Siberian Army. In December 1920 Hašek returned to Prague under false papers. [2]

During the year 1921 the second PMPWBL congress took place in Prague-Žižkov, in a large hall in the restaurant "Yugoslavia," and was attended by about 300 people. The highlight of the congress was the unanimous adoption of a foreign policy resolution calling for the demolition of the globe due to the hopeless world situation.[1]

Although it had been declared that a third, secret party congress would be announced by newspaper advertisements in the section "Where to Today?," the activities of the PMPWBL ended in 1921. This was due to poor health of the party founder and chairman Jaroslav Hašek, who retired to Lipnice nad Sázavou in August 1921, where he worked until his death in January 1923 on his novel The Good Soldier Švejk .

Reality and literary treatment[change | change source]

The actual existence of the Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law is beyond dispute. Apart from the literary treatment by Jaroslav Hašek, there are numerous contemporary newspaper and magazine articles describing the activity of the party. Furthermore, it comes up repeatedly in the memoirs of participants and contemporary witnesses[3] as well as in scientific works.[4] According to Kindler's Neuem Literaturlexikon, Hašek's published speeches appear to have actually been delivered "in the same or similar form."[5] On the other hand, there is no realistic basis for the allegation that Hašek attended over 1,000 election campaign events during the campaign.[6]

In 1911-12, Jaroslav Hašek wrote almost 30 texts about the PMPWBL and its members. These are partly literary accounts, partly fictitious satire. The manuscript was bought in 1912 by the Prague publisher Karel Ločák, but not published because he feared problems due to the personality rights of the described persons. The next owner of the manuscript, Alois Hatina, only published ten of the texts in the magazine "Směr" after Hašek's death in 1924/25. [7] Nevertheless, the party was remembered. In 1928, when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia wanted to distract from its failures with intensified populist propaganda campaigns, the Social Democratic newspaper Právo Lidu asked ironically: "Are the Communists the Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law? " [8]

In 1937, the newspaper Rudé právo published 23 of Hašek's works. They appeared in their entirety in book form for the first time in 1963 in Czech, and in 1971 in German translation.[7] In the appendix to this edition ("Quellen und Materialien") there are two further texts obviously written by Hašek for the election campaign of 1911, as well as one of Hašek's election speeches as recorded by František Langer and Josef Mach.[9] Separately, in the early 1920s Hašek also wrote Minutes of the Second Party Convention, first published in German in 1957.

Legal status of the party[change | change source]

From today's perspective, the freedom Hašek and his colleagues exercised for their party activities seems amazing, given the Habsburg Monarchy's contempt for the party system and the monarchy's lack of a constitutional role for political parties. In legal practice at the time, the concept of "party" was used either in the sense of a political "club", an "association" or in the sense of "electoral list" as outlined in contemporaneous electoral regulations.[10] A party law was not issued in Austria until 1975. Prior to this date, a party could be founded either by a simple statement of the participants, [11] or by a "founding agreement" according to the rules of the Association Act.

Starting in 1867,[12] founding legally recognized associations with no longer required approval of the supervisory authority, and they were instead only subject to a four-week "prohibition period" (§ 6), which the PMPWBL effortlessly survived due to its "pro-state" demeanor. However, due to the presumed danger of parties in the Association Act, association activities were regulated in great detail. These regulations included the obligation to report all association activities to the government, and the right of the government to send officers to supervise the association. The election events of the PMPWBL were also subject to police supervision. While the supervising officer was allowed to dissolve meetings, he was explicitly forbidden to interfere in the debate or talk to anyone other than the club chairman, [13] which severely curtailed his practical threat to PMPWBL public gatherings:

"Below an impromptu podium, the founders of this party, the Central Committee, sat at a long table with weighty faces. On the podium, at a small table with even more serious faces, the young chairman and a police commissioner were enthroned. Beside him stood Hašek, delivering his 'election speech. [...] The hall roared with laughter. And the police commissioner, who had absolutely no idea what was going on here, looked around lost and did not know whether he should intervene here." [14]

Scholarly assesment[change | change source]

There is wide academic agreement on the motivation for the founding of the PMPWBL. The author and publisher Günther Jarosch argues social critique and ridiculing the contemporary opportunist party system through "hyper-loyalty" were the driving force behind the founding of the PMPWBL. [15] These forces were also the basis for the Prague Czech cultural elite's acceptance of the party's provocative activities, which can only understood in the context of the decades-long smoldering problem of nationalities in Bohemia. [16] The political scientist Ekkehart Krippendorff emphasizes that in a "mixture of jests, and ultimate seriousness [...] the confusion and the morally pretentious rhetoric of party politics of the time was pointedly" brought into sharp relief.[17] Only the Hašek researcher Gustav Janouch considers the party a kind of drunken joke, which was only supposed to increase the beverage turnover in the inn "Kravín". [18] This is contradicted by Jaroslav Hašek son Richard [19], "My father took his candidacy in the elections of 1911 very seriously and was operated from the assumption that he would get the number of necessary votes. After the election defeat, he was very disappointed and depressed. " [20]

According to Slavist Gisela Riff, the actions of Hašek and his party comrades reveal a merciless play on the "concepts" and "values" of political life. [21] The philologist Walter Schamschula describes Hašek's goal as disillusioning spectators by breaking bourgeois taboos - not only in relation to Austro-Hungarian parliamentarism and its leading figures, but also in relation to individuals themselves. Therefore Hašek did not limit himself to criticism of himself and his party, [7] but also anecdotally described accounts of their own willingness to lie deceive and deny their own political beliefs for personal gain . [22]

Gisela Riff also emphasizes the "impeccable" character of Hašek's performances. [21] Hašek's main means of doing so was freely improvised speech, where he used long chains of association to combine the important with the trivial, fact with fiction. [7] Hašek said in a campaign speech:

"Regulatory laws and security officials keep watch over us, and not so much as a single hair falls from our heads without their supervision. That's progress. If we look elsewhere, to China, for instance, where the security organs cut off people's heads, then must ourselves admit that here there is progress." [9]

As events went on, however, the lines of argument would become more and more absurd:

"Friends, we are at a point where we did not want to be. Like the man who wanted to Budweis and got on a train in the opposite direction. He was caught by the conductor in second class, although he only had a third-class ticket and was thrown off the train in Bakov. And as one of the pioneers of our party, Mr Galileo Galilei, once said, 'And yet it moves,' I say now: Move, Miss Bożenka, and please bring a new round: three more beers for me , an allasch for Opočenský, a quarter of white wine for Langer, a beer and a Magador for Diviš and a mineral water for Gottwald. This is proof of Galileo's words, 'And yet it moves' and clear evidence that the Party for Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law, knows how to assert itself and care about what its constituents want."[23]

Riff and her pupil the linguist and translator Jana Halamíčková drew parallels to artistic forms and mediums such as happenings, Dada events, audience participation, and the play Offending the Audience.[21] [24] Thus, the PMPWBL is one of the precursors of forms of political action that, since the 1968 movement and the formation of a new alternative culture, have questioned the established political institutions, forces and media. This type of political practice led to new practices of political expression emanating from average citizens. For example, see Sponti groups, revolutionary spontaneity or guerilla communication strategies. [25]

Consequences[change | change source]

After the collapse of communism in November 1989, the party, which according to self-mystification continued to exist illegally since 1921, returned to the public under the leadership of the cartoonists Josef Kobra Kučera and Vít Hrabánek and hosted the long-ago announced third Party Congress. Furthermore, from 1990 to 1992 the party published Skrt, a satirical magazine with an official circulation of 300,000. [26]

In the following years, the party faced contemporary political problems: In 2000, it called for "moderate globalization within the bounds of the law" and suggested sending as many of its own children abroad as possible - and to have them demonstrate against globalization there. In January 2006, Richard Hašek, grandson of Jaroslav Hašeks and a leading member of the party, concluded a "non-aggression pact" for the upcoming parliamentary elections with KDU-ČSL , the Christian Democratic Party of the Czech Republic. The contract, in which reciprocal attacks with beer and slivovitz continued to be expressly allowed, was signed by the then chairman of the KDU-ČSL Miroslav Kalousek in the presence of his deputy Jan Kasal, vice-president of the Czech House of Representatives . [27]

In 2003 a sister party was founded in Austria under the name of the Party of Reasonable Progress Within Moderate Limits. [28] Since no activities of this party are detectable, it is assumed to be a mystification.

See also[change | change source]

Books[change | change source]

  • Jan Berwid-Buquoy: Die Abenteuer des gar nicht so braven Humoristen Jaroslav Hašek. Legenden und Wirklichkeit. Berlin: Bi-Hi Verlag 1989, [./https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/3924933022 ISBN 3-924933-02-2]
  • Jaroslav Hašek: Die Partei des maßvollen Fortschritts in den Grenzen der Gesetze. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1971 (2. Aufl. 1990); Neuübersetzung als Geschichte der Partei des gemäßigten Fortschritts im Rahmen der Gesetze. Berlin: Parthas Verlag 2005, [./https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/3866013108 ISBN 3-86601-310-8]
  • Jaroslav Hašek: Protokoll des II. Parteitages der Partei für gemäßigten Fortschritt in den Schranken des Gesetzes. In: Ders.: Schule des Humors. Frankfurt a. M.: Büchergilde Gutenberg 1957, S. 231–237.
  • Radko Pytlik: Jaroslav Hašek in Briefen, Bildern und Erinnerungen. Berlin (Ost)/Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag 1983.

External Links[change | change source]

[[Category:1911 establishments]] [[Category:Satire]] [[Category:Pages with unreviewed translations]]

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Jaroslav Hašek: Minutes of the II.
  2. ↑ see.
  3. ↑ z.
  4. ↑ Helmut Rumpler, Adam Wandruszka, Peter Urbanitsch (ed.
  5. ↑ Kindler's New Literature Lexicon.
  6. ↑ Felix Krüll: The Confessions of a German Stammtisch.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Walter Schamschula: Afterword.
  8. ↑ Wolf Oschlies: The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938).
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Speech on the occasion of the founding of the party.
  10. ↑ s. Austrian constitutional law.
  11. ↑ see. the later foundations of the ÖVP , SPÖ and KPÖ , known as "Declarations of Independence", s. Austrian constitutional law.
  12. ↑ Association Law of 1867 [1] .
  13. ↑ s.
  14. ↑ Arnošt Kolman: The lost generation.
  15. ↑ Günther Jarosch: Afterword.
  16. ↑ s.
  17. ↑ Ekkehart Krippendorff: The fatal comedy of the logic of state order: Jaroslav Hašek.
  18. ↑ Gustav Janouch: Jaroslav Hasek.
  19. ↑ Cecil Parrott: Jaroslav Hašek.
  20. ↑ Jan Berwid-Buquoy: Party for Moderate Progress in the Limits of Laws (PFGFIDSDG).
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 Gisela Reef: Special Features: None. About Jaroslav Hašek, born 1883.
  22. ↑ Jaroslav Hašek: The party of modest progress within the limits of the law.
  23. ↑ Czech in František Langer: Byli a bylo .
  24. ↑ Jana Halamíčková: Afterword.
  25. ↑ Umberto Eco : For a semiological guerrilla (1967).
  26. ↑ Strana mírného pokroku v mezích zákona. [2]
  27. ↑ Co nového ve Strané mírného pokroku v mezích zákona. [3]
  28. ↑ s.
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