Zprávy památkové péče 2018, 78(5):422-430 | DOI: 10.56112/zpp.2018.5.03

Peripety of legislative heritage protection during the First Republic

Michal Novotný

Univerzita Palackého Olomouc

The period between the proclamation of the Republic on 28 October 1918 and the Munich Agreement on 29 September 1938 can be perceived as a time of efforts by the young nation to manage its own affairs independently, after its former political dependence on Austrian Vienna (or Hungarian Budapest). The issue of heritage protection was also part of this effort.
The following text is based on the assumption that one of the ways to better understand the status of heritage care in the society of that period is to study the laws that then existed to protect monuments as well as other legislative attempts. Even though the first heritage law was adopted by Czechoslovakia after this period (in 1958), archival documents and the printed periodicals of the time show the dissatisfaction with the insufficient legal regulation of heritage protection. Along with this dissatisfaction, we can also see a continuous effort since the beginning of the Republic to write up and enforce such a heritage law. The archival documents also include a number of documents on the legislative activities of the Awareness Department of the Ministry of Education and National Awareness (Ministerstvo školství a národní osvěty, or MŠANO), as well as complaints, memoranda, resolutions, and summons to associations, professional societies, and politicians all calling for the adoption of a relevant legal regulation for the protection of monuments. In the absence of a heritage law, the very existence of these documents is a valuable testimony to the ability of the heritage care community to formulate the principles, ideas, and ideals of the field; they also provide a picture of how heritage care was perceived by the lay and educated public.
This text selectively focuses on draft legislation (including responses to these proposals) drafted from the beginning of the Republic to the first version of the proposed heritage law of 1931. This is despite the fact that these regulations never entered into force, they did not make it to Parliament, and they can even be considered bizarre in both historical and contemporary contexts. The significance of recalling them here lies, among other things, in that they reflect a historically conditional path to solving the eternal tension between the interest in protecting a certain segment of material cultural heritage on one hand and the unwillingness to encroach into private property in the name of this interest on the other. To some extent, these problems and the arguments mentioned may be relevant to our present situation.
A strange mixture of continuity and discontinuity with respect to the previous period of Habsburg Austria was characteristic for the initial Czech (for Zdeněk Wirth, consistently Czechoslovakian) situation of heritage care from the very declaration of independence. The ethos of the new Republic as a young, progressive, democratic state, defining itself against the centralist policy of the Austrian monarchy, was manifest in the complicated relationship with Vienna's Central Commission for Heritage Care, which was active in Czech events through its volunteer preservationists and later the Monument Authority.
The official legislative initiative was focused on the Awareness Department of MŠANO, led by the art historian Zdeněk Wirth, an unforgettable figure of Czechoslovak heritage care. The legislative activity of this department was determined by the following aspects: first, MŠANO had been set up as a brand new office in which state secretary (and professor of philosophy) František Drtina advocated the concept of "expertise", according to which well-educated officials had the main say while lawyers were tasked with putting the content of official documents into their appropriate form. This method suited Wirth, as he saw it as an effective means of "learning the agenda". Secondly, the Awareness Department stood outside the main activities of MŠANO, so the heritage law never became a ministerial priority. Thirdly, the Awareness Department concentrated the entire field of "monumentika" (a concept coined by Ivo Hlobil which included a synthesis of the fields of material monuments in situ as well as in museums, archives, and libraries) and extracurricular science into itself.
The absence of a heritage law was criticized by representatives of professional circles, politicians, and interest-based civic groups alike, essentially throughout the entire period of the first Republic. They thus tied into the situation from the previous period. The dissatisfaction with the absence of a heritage law was formulated in the first Republic in three respects: legal, organizational-legal, and symbolic-representative. From the legal point of view, a heritage law was considered an effective coercive tool for protecting monuments. From the organizationa-legal point of view, it was necessary to secure the position of heritage authorities within the state administration system. The third reason pointed to the moral obligation to confirm the declared cultural progressivity of the Czechoslovak state by adopting the heritage law.
But why was the heritage law, despite the efforts of the MŠANO Heritage Department, not adopted during this period? The following reasons are offered: poor political support for the creators of the law, insufficient staffing of the MŠANO Heritage Department, the unwillingness of politicians to accept interventions into private ownership rights, and the undaunted insistence of Wirth and his associates on comprehensive legislation with a broad definition of the concept of a monument (heritage property). It is also necessary to emphasize how different ideas were concerning the concept of a monument between the law's processors and the educated and lay public.
The contemporaneous absence of a heritage law pointed out, above all, the failure of MŠANO (or specifically Wirth) and the lack of interest among political representation. After the Second World War, the absence of a heritage law was unequivocally explained as evidence of the inability of the capitalist state to take care of its national cultural heritage. From today's point of view, after experience with other monumental legislative acts in the 1950's (Cultural Monuments Act, 1958) and the 1980's (State Heritage Care Act, 1987), then from November 1989 to the present day, the possibility remains that the time-consuming nature of legislative preparations is characteristic for Czech heritage conservation. The lengthy nature of the legislative process is particularly clear especially when it comes to democratic consensus.

Keywords: legislation on heritage care, heritage law, monument law, Zdeněk Wirth, Jan Hofman

Published: December 1, 2018  Show citation