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

bourgeoisie in the West have held these views for forty years now. A small house with a garden makesa worker the actual head of a family, worthy of the name; he becomes moral and sensible, he feels tied to a place and has an influence on his relatives. At the same time it is thought that a worker who is deprived of communal accommodation, such as barracks shared with other families, will turn his back on collective demands and syndicalism.
    The little houses are egalitarian and modernist. Five-yard-high (and thus small) red brick cubes, a style with no roots in tradition. People call them
batovky
, the same word they use for the shoes. On the ground floor, the family has 193 square feet for a living room, a bathroom and a kitchenette; upstairs, there is another 193 square feet for the bedroom. Thank God there are small gardens.
    (“It’s tragic living here,” Jiřina Pokorná of Bratři Sousedíků Street—wife of an electrician trained at the Bata school—will say in sixty-seven years’ time. She is seventy now. “I’m going to die soon, as you can probably tell by looking at me, and all my life I’ve never had a proper kitchen, because this nook in the front room, sixteen square feet—that’s not a kitchen, is it?”
    “Why is it so small?” I ask.
    “They did everything to make sure life didn’t happen at home!”
    In sixty-seven years, Jiřina Pokorná will be sitting outside her little red house in the garden, drinking beer quite legally.)
    The houses are so close together that the residents can’t help keeping an eye on each other, like it or not.
    On top of that, the
batovky
on Padělky II Street are identical to the ones on Padělky IX, for example. A time-traveler from the early twenty-first century would think one and thesame street was automatically reproducing itself, like in a computer game.
THE END OF 1935: THE PROPHET
    “Ah, a self-duplicating town,” sighs a delighted guest who visits Zlín. He is the “prophet of twentieth-century architecture,” designer of some inhuman “machines for living,” and his name is Le Corbusier. He was president of the jury for the competition in Zlín and Jan will ask him for a plan for the whole town too. Le Corbusier has just designed the Centrosoyuz building in Moscow, and in a few years he will be entrusted with the design for the UN building in New York.
    Some time later, Jan Bata will boast to him of an idea on an even bigger scale: “I want to build copies of Zlín all over the world!”
    Because of character differences, their cooperation will never come about, and the comprehensive urban planning project will be devised by two Czechs, František Gahura and Vladimír Karfík. Karfík has spent a year working for Le Corbusier, and another year working for Frank Lloyd Wright in America. Zlín will become famous as the world’s first functionalist town.
LET’S GO BACK TO MAY 1935: A MONOPOLY
    The social department has its spies who inform on lovers. As soon as they notice a new relationship, they report the couple. The company recommends that they get married and have children.
    The manager of the personnel department, Dr. Gerbec, says: “Children are the leashes we hold their daddies by.”
    “Bata has a monopoly on human life,” thunder the red trade unions.
    “The capitalist backs all the ruling and non-ruling parties in Czechoslovakia,” writes the communist newspaper,
Rudé právo
.
    Indeed, in Zlín at least, there are Bata people running as candidates for all the political parties in the elections to the district council. The landowners give third place to the manager of the Bata factory in Otrokovice, the Social Democrats give a senior Bata official first place, the People’s Party gives a junior Bata official third place, the nationalists give the manager of Bata’s shoe finishing operations first place, and the fascists give the manager of Bata’s workshops first place.
1936: NOT A STEP
    This year’s shoe advertisement for all of