Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin
has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in
Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the
Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom
Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy.
Published
April 3, 2024
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Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum getting
defenestrated, which triggered the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), detail
of an 1889 illustration from the Finnish magazine Kyläkirjaston
Kuvalehti — [1]Source.
It was the spring of 1618 and Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor and past
King of Bohemia, had devised a plan that would prove calamitous.
Seeking to reverse the concessions granted a decade prior by his
brother and predecessor, Rudolf II, he tasked his deputies with
reigning in the rights of Bohemian Protestants. But these Protestants
lived in a tradition of religious dissidence preceding Martin Luther by
a century: they were accustomed to a degree of autonomous rule and
religious freedom uncommon elsewhere in Habsburg realms. When Matthias’
deputies halted the construction of chapels in Klostergrab and Braunau,
Protestants, noblemen, and free burghers found themselves united in
their indignation. Ordinarily, these groups had few interests in
common. At the time, they could not see — as subsequent historians,
painters, and poets would — that they were already becoming Czech, and
were about to take part in what, centuries later, would be
retrospectively recast as a kind of idiosyncratic national ritual. Nor
could Matthias and his advisors see that the Holy Roman Empire was
standing before a historical precipice. Keen to meddle in local
affairs, Matthias was shrewd enough to act through his zealous
deputies. And it was to them that the gravity of this situation would
first become apparent.
Two Catholic deputies, Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata
of Chlum, had grown notorious for openly disavowing the Majestätsbrief:
Rudolf II’s 1609 liberal guarantee of religious tolerance. When a
Protestant assembly spurned by the shuttered chapels in Klostergrab and
Braunau attracted a massive crowd, Martinice and Slavata began to
worry. And when the count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, elected defender of
the Protestant faith, called for their execution, they realized it was
already too late. The Catholic deputies had overplayed their hand; the
mood among the infuriated townspeople was rising to a fever pitch. A
large crowd followed the Protestant nobles to Hradčany Castle. They
poured inside and to the upper floors, cornering Martinice and Slavata
in a tower chamber. Shouting at, threatening, and then grabbing the
deputies, they chucked Martinice out the window first. Slavata,
meanwhile, held onto the ledge, begging for the Virgin’s intercession.
In one final push, the crowd expelled him from the castle window as
well. Only the deputies’ secretary remained. Shaking with fear, he
clung to the prominent Protestant nobleman Joachim von Schlick for
protection, but the defenestrators, as they would come to be called,
peeled him off Schlick and tossed him out the window too.
Exuberant, the Protestant rebels mocked these appeals to the Virgin
Mary. But when two of them leaned out the window to heap more insults
down upon their oppressors, what they saw left them flummoxed.
Martinice and Slavata were alive, as was their secretary, and the three
were already getting up to reach for a ladder extended by allies from a
lower window in the castle. How the Catholic deputies survived this
forty-foot fall was a mystery that has turned the defenestration into
an object lesson in framing. Catholic propagandists insisted that the
Virgin Mary had saved them: Slavata’s prayer for intercession worked,
effecting a miracle that legitimated their cause. Protestant
pamphleteers, on the other hand, noted that a pile of trash and human
shit directly below the window had broken their fall. They may have
survived, but only to remind others how loathsome was their attempt to
quash local rights.^[2]1
Words seem inadequate to the task of describing something so
outlandish, and yet “defenestration” comes close. This word is
grammatically a compound nominalization — and a flagrantly Latinate one
at that. “Fenestrate”, the verb ostensibly at its root, only appears a
couple centuries later, carrying two unrelated technical usages in the
fields of surgery and botany. From this we can surmise that
“defenestration” was a linguistic artifact constructed intentionally.
Perhaps it meant to lampoon the Latin of Bohemia’s Catholic rulers: in
Czech it is simply “defenestrace”, a rare Latinate word in that
language. The humor here derives from the fact that a form of free fall
carries a name as clunky as the doctrines and mores of the Catholic
rule it sought to swiftly overturn.
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Woodcut from a 1618 German pamphlet depicting Martinice and Slavata’s
fall — [3]Source.
Almost immediately, the task of illustrating the defenestration became
paramount. A 1618 Catholic Flugblatt (or pamphlet) depicts Martinice
and Slavata falling onto a courtyard paved with stones. An accompanying
caption renders the event as legend: thanks to the Virgin’s
intercession, the deputies’ lives were saved and they took refuge in a
nearby cloister. Foolhardy political revolt is here transfigured into a
leap of faith that furnishes its own proof: they were, after all, still
alive when this image was printed. Regrettably, opposing Protestant
pamphlets, depicting the pile of excrement that broke their fall, are
harder to come by.
Miracle or mere coincidence, the defenestration catalyzed a broader
Bohemian uprising: the first eruption of what would become the Thirty
Years’ War. News of the Prague defenestration traveled across Europe
within the year; its images proliferated in contemporary pamphlets,
fliers, and compendia of recent events. Centuries later, the act of
defenestration would serve as a touchstone of Czech national identity
and of Prague’s municipal history. But first it would be represented
and re-invoked so many times that this concrete, historical event
gradually became abstracted into a figure of thought.
We find the seeds of this abstraction in an engraving that was printed
in the Theatrum Europaeum: a German historical chronicle published by
Matthäus Merian in the mid-seventeenth century. Here, partisan framings
are eschewed in favor of neutral representation. Within the castle, men
are hoisting the Catholic deputies to the windowsills while their
secretary awaits his turn in the center of the image. The focus on him
as the engraving’s central figure suggests the perennial question that
haunts all news about violent revolts: who will be next?
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Engraving of the Second Defenestration of Prague (1618) by Matthäus
Merian for the first volume of Theatrum Europaeum (1662) — [4]Source.
Of course, the 1618 defenestration would not be the last one to take
place in Prague — but neither was it the first. Two centuries earlier,
Jan Hus, a wildly popular theologian, inveighed against the Church,
denouncing its political authority and its system of monetary
indulgences. He also called for Mass to be celebrated not in Latin but
in the local tongue, which was then named Bohemian but which we would
now call Czech. To this end, Hus wrote his Orthografia Bohemica
(1406–1412): the first dictionary of the Czech language, in which he
invented the haček and the vowel-length markers, which make Czech
spelling unique among European languages. This religious reformer and
fervent grammarian was subsequently arrested, found guilty of heresy,
and burned at the stake in 1415. By making him into a martyr, the
Church had all but guaranteed Hus’ legacy.^[5]2 And his followers
cemented this legacy by revolting. In 1419, they stormed the
Novoměstská radnice, Prague’s “New Town Hall”, and threw three
municipal consuls and seven citizens out of a window.
With this violent spectacle, Hus’ followers, who would come to be known
as Hussites, won the right to rule themselves and to worship as they
chose. They retained this right until 1483, when King Vladislaus II
stormed Prague and reestablished Catholic rule. Another defenestration
followed, as these proto-Protestants tossed the Burgomeister and the
corpses of seven town counselors out of various halls across the city.
Again the spectacle worked: a religious reconciliation at the 1485
Peace of Kutná Hora established the Hussite and Roman Catholic faiths
as equal before the law. Were the two defenestrations that opened and
closed the Hussite Wars decisive for their outcome, or merely
incidental? One could be forgiven for thinking that the act of
defenestration, as violent as it is theatrical, seemed to carry some
magical efficacy.
A compelling ritual is one thing, but lasting historical efficacy is
something else entirely. The Bohemian Revolt that followed the 1618
defenestration was decisively suppressed only two years later, in a
battle on the outskirts of Prague between the Bohemian Confederation
and the Holy Roman Empire. The 1620 Battle of White Mountain slammed
shut the window of possibility for Czech self-determination,
inaugurating a period of harsh Germanization lasting almost two
centuries. Germanophone Catholic agents of the Empire suppressed the
language and burned Czech books, under the pretext of a
Counter-Reformation strategy aimed at stamping out the Hussite
confession once and for all.
No surprise, then, that when the Czech National Revival broke out in
the early nineteenth century, it was led largely by radical
lexicographers and philologists. Josef Dobrovský published a Czech
grammar in 1809, and Josef Jungmann a five-volume Czech-German
dictionary over the years 1834–1839.^[6]3 Together the two Josefs set
down the medium in which Czech culture could flourish: poetry,
painting, and history writing — all fueled by the heady currents of
Romanticism — elaborated Czech-ness, making a nation out of the
language’s speakers. The wave crested in 1848 with the eruption of the
June Revolution in Prague. But this uprising, too, eventually failed.
The most enduring artifact of the Czech National Revival was a sense of
historical consciousness that recast the Prague defenestrations as
national revolts avant la lettre. Aberrant curios no longer, the early
modern defenestrations found new life as links in a chain that led
directly to the 1848 Spring of Nations. The visual archive from the
nineteenth century appears like an anchor line plunging into the abyss
of the past. It is here we find the earliest depictions of the
fifteenth-century Hussite defenestrations, such as an engraving from
the Česko-Moravská Kronika of 1872. Written by Karel Vladislav Zap, a
writer and pedagogue best known for popularizing Czech history, this
book aimed to instruct the Czechs about who they were. Defenestration
came to be at this point a national shibboleth: because they had thrown
their enemies from castle windows, the reasoning seems to go, these
Hussite rebels were, in fact, ancestors of the nationalists that we are
today. To be Czech meant not only to speak the language, but also to be
aware of defenestration’s significance.
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The 1483 defenestration of Prague, as imagined in Karel Vladislav Zap’s
Česko-Moravská Kronika (1872) — [7]Source.
More than any other defenestration, it was the 1618 instance that
captured the imagination of Romantic revolutionaries agitating for the
Czech cause. A somewhat earlier painting, from 1844 by Karel Svoboda,
stages this defenestration with all the trappings of the
nineteenth-century Czech National Revival. Open books and reams of
paper litter the left foreground, invoking the work of the
lexicographers who codified the language. A toppled chair suggests
authority overturned — a motif that later painters will repeat — and
the open window looks to be smashed in a curious way. Though this is a
historical painting, its call to revolutionary violence is rendered
here in the present tense.
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Karel Svoboda, Defenestration at the Prague Council in 1618, 1848 —
[8]Source.
Depictions like these elevated and abstracted the historical event of
defenestration into something more significant than a milestone.
Historical change might be called a “watershed” or a “turning point”,
but certain events forge their own metaphors. The 1789 Storming of the
Bastille evokes the tumult of the French Revolution, and the 1989 Fall
of communism suggests the collapse of a system that turned out to be
remarkably flimsy. “Defenestration” does something similar: for
nineteenth-century Czech nationalists, these events (and how they model
historical change) took on a poetic significance. Some historians
surmise that the 1618 Protestant crowd was deliberately reenacting the
earlier defenestrations; Czech nationalists certainly thought so,
placing the Hussite and Protestant defenestrations in a line of
succession that became a tradition and a figure for thinking about
history.^[9]4
The apogee of painterly depictions of the 1618 event came a
half-century later, in two paintings by Václav Brožík from 1890 and
1891. In the first, Pražská defenestrace roku 1618, the line of action
moves leftward as the dynamic image expresses the eruption of affect
that, for Brožík, defines this act. Martinice is halfway out the window
while Slavata, stupefied, is being dragged the same direction. Their
secretary is pinned to the desk among some papers, while in the
foreground, under the window, lies a toppled chair. A throne
overthrown, this chair perhaps embodies the anti-monarchic energy that
nineteenth-century nationalists ascribed to the Protestant rebels
fighting for political autonomy. The energy in this painting implies
hydraulic forces at work: it is as if the upswell of revolutionary
emotion tends naturally, automatically to the window, which is at once
a release valve and an opening onto the future. If to look out a window
is to imagine political possibility — the painting seems to say — then
to throw somebody out a window is to make history happen.
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Václav Brožík, The Prague Defenestration of 1618, 1890 — [10]Source.
Brožík’s 1891 painting depicts the defenestration’s aftermath, showing
how even the most ardent collective revolts can be stymied. In the
adjacent room, exhausted on a chair, one of the escaped Catholic
deputies recovers from their terrifying ordeal: miraculous or odious,
the defenestration they survived nevertheless shook them to their
cores. Among the crowd one finds some characters from the previous
painting, including Count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, in red. This crowd is
kept at bay by the Princess Polyxena of Lobkowitz, a politically-active
figure who played a significant role in the Bohemian
Counter-Reformation. All the way to the right, an empty chair with a
scepter laid atop it invokes monarchical authority preserved. Princess
Polyxena single-handedly stands between the Protestant rebels and the
accomplishment of their task, representing the forces that stood in the
way of Bohemian self-determination and Czech national consciousness.
However, by placing her at the center of the painting — and in this
powerful pose: index finger pointing downward, face stern — Brožík
created a far more ambiguous scene. Here, at least, it could go both
ways: perhaps Polyxena was right to protect these artifacts of divine
intercession.
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Václav Brožík’s 1891 painting, depicting Polyxena of Lobkowitz
safeguarding Catholic officials after their 1618 defenestration —
[11]Source.
Already a figure for representing historical change, defenestration
became the emblem of a uniquely Czech form of fatalism during the
twentieth century. Writers took it up, elaborating and unfolding its
significance, and made this idea into an object of obsession. The
word’s curious meaning in this century is the strange son of its
nineteenth-century usage: to grasp its significance we must briefly
retrace its paternity.
Of all the heroes of the Czech national cause, none looms larger than
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Born into a working-class Moravian family, he
pursued philosophy in Vienna and Leipzig, studying under Franz Brentano
and Edmund Husserl. He wrote a habilitation thesis on the sociology of
suicide: a topic that would prove eerily prescient. A scientific and
progressive thinker, he married the American Charlotte Garrigue after
meeting her in Leipzig, taking her surname as his second name. In 1918,
after a lifetime spent championing the Czech cause, including during
speeches given at the Treaty of Versailles, Tomáš Masaryk found himself
elected president of the newly independent Czechoslovakia.
Masaryk served as a widely beloved president until his death in 1935.
Three years later, Hitler’s Third Reich would annex the Sudetenland:
those border-regions of interwar Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by
ethnic Germans. So began the Second World War in Bohemia. If the 1618
defenestration spurred the Thirty Years’ War, what came to be known as
the Fourth Defenestration of Prague concluded this one. The beginning
of the end was heralded by the Soviet liberation of Prague in 1945. The
Czech and Slovak Communist Parties, already popular in the 1946
elections, staged a coup d’état in February of 1948. They had reason to
eliminate their opponents, and they soon set their sights on
Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Jan Masaryk.
The son of Tomáš Masaryk, Jan had served as minister plenipotentiary
for the new nation in London since 1925. In 1940, with his country
swallowed up by the Third Reich, he was appointed foreign minister of
the Czechoslovak government in exile. A reluctant supporter of Stalin,
he traveled to Moscow in April, 1945, to agree on Czechoslovakia’s
foreign policy. (He had signed a twenty-five-year alliance with the
Soviet leader two years prior.) With increasing disappointment, he
observed the postwar developments in Prague until, on March 10, 1948,
Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard of the foreign ministry wearing
only his pajamas. He had fallen from his bathroom window. The official
cause of death was listed as suicide, but in the popular imagination
this event came to be called the Fourth Defenestration of Prague.
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Photograph by Walter Sanders of an unidentified woman overlooking Jan
Masaryk’s 1948 funeral in the courtyard of Czernin Palace, where he
also fell to his death — [12]Source (not public domain).
The Czechoslovak authorities were quick to wrap up their investigation
into Masaryk’s death, having determined that it was a suicide. But the
case would be reopened, incredibly enough, half a century later. In
2004, the Prague Police enlisted forensic expert Jiři Straus to
reexamine the evidence, and Straus found that Masaryk, “a heavy[set]
man and certainly no athlete . . . would have landed much closer to the
building if he had jumped.”^[13]5 Because he had fallen so far away
from the Foreign Ministry, he must have been pushed. This official
finding confirmed what most Czechs had already suspected: no suicide,
Masaryk had been murdered on Stalin’s orders.
While defenestrations both real and suggested continued to proliferate
throughout the twentieth century after Masaryk’s death, many of them
carry a dubious, autotelic quality: writers would pine to be
defenestrated, but their desire comes to undo the act’s ritual
efficacy. Can defenestration occur without the element of surprise, or
without political rivals to carry it out? Is it possible to
autodefenestrate? By fixating on the window, writers sprung the frames
of what we could call traditional defenestration.
In a recently published academic journal article on the subject, Hana
Pichova counted in Kafka’s notebooks at least ten instances of
“falling, jumping, or being forcibly thrown from windows”, adding that
though such “thoughts occupied the writer more than fleetingly”, they
only occupied him so long as he remained in Prague.^[14]6 Bohumil
Hrabal, the pilsner-drinking bard of postwar Prague, was fixated enough
on open windows and falling out of them that he wrote, in the spring of
1989, a text enigmatically entitled “The Magic Flute”, in which he
assembles his own compendium of historical and literary
defenestrations. This was far from the first time he wrote about
defenestration, but never had he mustered such depressive pathos. The
text meditates on the stymied protests in Prague, on the
self-immolation of the student Jan Palach, and on the hopelessness of
existence under the communist order, which would incidentally collapse
just six months later.
Hrabal mentions the early twentieth century poet Konstantin Biebl, who
“jumped out of the window, but [who] first, and this was a long time
before, . . . had Štyrský paint him a picture, of a man falling
backwards out of a window, just like turning the page of a book.”^[15]7
This painting has unfortunately been lost to history, but Hrabal’s
description of it prefigures his own end. Eight years later, in 1997,
while in a hospital, Hrabal leaned out his window far enough to plummet
to his death. He had said over the days prior that he really wanted to
feed the pigeons. Could it be said that his obsession with
defenestration was what killed him?
It is almost as if, by the twentieth century, the collective attention
accorded to defenestration wound the coils of reason too tightly: in
becoming an object of literary fixation, it came to occasion a kind of
melancholy rumination, one that eats the fruit it bears for the mind.
Already a violent form of political murder, the act took on a character
even darker and more sinister. Nevertheless, retracing its history
reveals a trajectory at least as astounding as the competing claims of
Protestant and Catholic pamphleteers after 1618. Here we have concrete
historical events that congeal first into an evocative image, then into
a figure of thought for historical change in the Czech style, and
finally into a style of suicide. But maybe it is simply a trick of
historical perspective that makes it possible to excavate
defenestration in this way: the early modern defenestrators were
probably not reenacting anything, nor were nineteenth-century Romantic
painters necessarily aware that they were instantiating a metaphor for
historical shifts. There is something off-putting, even suffocating
about trying to concoct a grand theory of defenestration. One is
compelled to throw open the window, let in some fresh air, perhaps lean
out to get a better look . . .
Thom Sliwowski holds a PhD in comparative literature and critical
theory from UC Berkeley. He writes about history, Eastern Europe, and
the body, and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books
and in Sidecar. He lives in Berlin.
The text of this essay is published under a [16]CC BY-SA license, see
[17]here for details.
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13. file:///tmp/lynxXXXXAfIkeu/L1069826-3254TMP.html#fn5
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