Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia Read Free

checkbook, and his father opens an account for him at the Guaranty Trust Company of NewYork. To pay his tuition fees, the boy presents checks to the proprietor of the school. At this elite school, the teenager from Czechoslovakia causes a sensation.
    At the age of fourteen, he goes back to Zlín and—in keeping with his father’s wishes—becomes a worker on the lowest wage. By now he can wear shoes.
    When he is eighty-eight, I will ask his American secretary whether I may ask him some questions. “Yes,” she replies. “Best to ask just one question, and to make it an important one.”
    I send it by e-mail: “Dear Mr. Bata, what’s the best way to live?”
    “You must study hard,” replies Mr. Bata. “Look around you with your eyes open. Never repeat your mistakes, and draw conclusions from them. Work honestly and not just for your own profit. I don’t think that’s so difficult, is it?”
1925: BATAMAN
    Tomáš Bata founds his first school. He does it out of compulsion, “because,” he explains, “there are no known cases of the best educators in the country becoming millionaires. Usually they are paupers.”
    He advertises that he will accept six hundred boys aged fourteen for the next school year, and so his School for Young Men comes into being. A student at the school must finance himself. For eight hours a day, he earns enough in the factory for his food, board and clothing, and for four hours, he studies. Any sort of financial help from parents is forbidden. Each week, the student receives 120 crowns, spends seventy, andsaves the rest in his own account. It is all worked out so that when, at the age of twenty-four, the young man returns to Bata from military service, he will have 100,000 crowns in his account. Tutors at the boarding houses keep track of booklets recording the students’ expenditures. They also watch over the boys to make sure they keep their hands above their quilts. They are all given talks about hygiene and masturbation.
    Emil Zátopek, the world’s top athlete of 1952, keeps his hands above the quilt. Others who will do so too include: the famous (forty years on) writer Ludvík Vaculík, and the leading representative of the new wave in Czechoslovak cinema (also, forty years on) director Karel Kachyňa. Kachyňa starts work at Bata as a cleaner, and finishes as a trained draughtsman. “I was a Bataman,” he’ll say, in the early twenty-first century. “At Zlín I learned to fight against fear.”
    Each of Bata’s students is a Bataman.
    You can become a Bataman through obedience and hard work.
SEPTEMBER 1926: MILK
    Tomáš is feeling pleased: he never went beyond elementary school, and has no title apart from “Chief” on his office door, but he’s the author of a handbook entitled
Affluence for All
.
    Tomáš Bata’s Academy of Commerce is established.
    Tomáš Bata slams his shoe against the desk when one of the students uses the money he has earned to drive all the way to Prague for a performance by the American dancer Josephine Baker—pioneer of the striptease.
    From then on, neither students nor workers are allowedto sit around in bars; drinking any sort of alcohol within the boundaries of Zlín is forbidden. Milk is recommended.
1926–1929: CHESS
    Eight years after the Great October Revolution, Tomáš Bata initiates his experiments with capitalist society. He builds the citizens of Zlín an eight-story Community Center with a hotel (after the war, it will become the Hotel Moskva). He gives orders for there to be no café or wine bar on the ground floor next to the restaurant, just a big hall with table tennis, a bowling alley and a chess room (“because one should never stop thinking”).
    His people will no longer work eight hours, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.
    Now they will work until 5 p.m., but at noon they will have a two-hour break. At that point the women can go home and make dinner, though Bata can’t see why they would, when he has built large canteens and a