Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia Read Online Free

while he says nothing, but then he comes to his senses. Just in case, he adds to the deceased man’s statement that a year ago he bought it all “under a verbal contract.” By law, a verbal contract is exempt from taxes, and thus the whole thing can appear to be true—there doesn’t have to be any evidence of the transaction at the tax office.
FROM 1932: A NEW ERA
    Two Bata representatives fly to North Africa to investigate the potential for sales there. They send two conflicting telegrams back to Zlín. The first one says: “No one wears shoes here. No market opportunity. Am returning home.”
    The other one telegraphs to say: “Everyone here is barefoot. Vast market potential, send shoes as quickly as possible.”
    Bata shoes conquer the world, and the company acquires its own mythological status.
    In the new era, statistics will be quoted constantly: in Tomáš’s time, there were 24 enterprises, and in Jan’s 120; in Tomáš’s time, there were 1,045 stores, and in Jan’s 5,810; in Tomáš’s time, there were 16,560 employees, and in Jan’s 105,700.
1933: SCAPEGOAT
    The world crisis of the 1930s is underway. The company makes an excellent scapegoat.
    In Germany, import duties on shoes go up, and it is announced that Jan Antonín Bata is a Czech Jew. Dozens of caricatures of him adorn the Nazi press: RABBI BATA SAYS IT ALL ! The manager of Bata in Germany comes to Zlín to check up on the family background. They are Catholics for seven generations of cobblers; there are no documents going further back. He returns to Berlin and issues a statement to the press about Bata’s origins. He is interrogated by the Gestapo. Jan decides to sell his German factory at once. In France, a factory has been in operation for a year, but it has to be closed because the competition starts up an incredible campaign: BATA IS A GERMAN . Huge photographs on the walls show Jan as the stereotypical Prussian, with fair hair and blue eyes. In Italy, the competition spreads a rumor that Bata has been attacking Mussolini in the Czechoslovak papers. In Poland, they say a secret Soviet commission visits Zlín each year: BATA HELPS THE SOVIETS .
    For five years, in spite of the crisis, Czechoslovakia holds first place for the export of leather footwear worldwide.
1933: VENGEANCE—ACT ONE
    The poster painter Svatopluk Turek publishes a novel called
The Shoe Machine
. The name Bata does not appear in it, but everyone is convinced it is a savage attack on “Batism.”
    Jan Bata sues Turek, and the court orders the destruction of all unsold copies of the novel. Two hundred gendarmerieposts conduct searches in all the bookstores in the country. (Turek claims Bata’s storekeepers do what the gendarmes say because he has such a privileged position in the country.)
    Plenty of periodicals defend the book. Then Bata withdraws its advertising from them;
Právo lidu
, for example, gets it back when it follows a positive review with a new, negative one.
    The Shoe Machine
will be reissued twenty years later when the regime changes. Then Turek will find more than eighty reports informing on him in Bata’s Zlín archive. Bata was clearly trying to corner him. Later on, Turek will write that he was visited by Bata representatives who declared that if he did not give up work on his next book about Batism, he would be forced to commit suicide.
1935: BATOVKY
    Jan is fascinated by numbering. For instance, the streets are called Zálešná I, Zálešná II, Zálešná III and so on up to Zálešná XII. There are more Podvesná streets than any other, seventeen in all.
    Bata announces an international architectural competition for a house for the worker’s family to live in. Almost three hundred architects enter. The winner is Erich Svedlund, a Swede. One house for two families. They will only have to work two hours to earn the weekly rent.
    “The worker with his own home undergoes a complete transformation,” Jan tells his managers.
    The enlightened