Stories
It’s a hot July day and tractors with bulky trailers power through the village streets, the farmers eager to make the most of the fine weather and the long days of work. In the local bar-hotel-restaurant some locals take respite from the afternoon heat and beerily look to make conversation with the outsider.
This could, indeed, be any west of Ireland village in the current ‘heat wave’, but it’s Poběžovice in western Czechia, circa 20 kilometres from the Bavarian border. The locals cannot speak English and I can’t speak Czech, but many of the people of Poběžovice appear to speak German, as do I; so German it is then.
In Poběžovice, I meet the friendly woman from the tourist office who had promised to open the Coudenhove-Kalergi Castle for me. In this village estate at the end of the 19th century a Europe in miniature form was created, and ideas of a united continent were moulded that would later constitute some of the foundations for the present European Union. So, was modern Europe created in a small Czech village?
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The Coudenhove-Kalergi family were extraordinary in themselves, but Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972) undoubtedly stands out. He fashioned a trans-national movement supportive of European unity in the 1920s, wrote a best-selling political-visionary book called Paneuropa that argued for the unity of European democracies, while he also had the ear of many democratically-elected politicians from across the continent, as he looked to turn his utopia into a reality. He can realistically be seen as one of the ‘fathers’ of the European Union. He also inspired a key character in a 1940s classic Hollywood film, while in the contemporary context some of his words have been bizarrely twisted to form a far-right conspiracy theory.
A changing place in history
The village of Poběžovice is now in the very west of Czechia, but when Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi lived here at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century it was at the very western edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was more usually known by its German name Ronsperg. The Coudenhove-Kalergi family formed part of the Catholic and German-speaking aristocracy of the Habsburg Empire whom the Kilkenny essayist Hubert Butler once compared to the Anglo-Irish ruling class in Ireland; a German-speaking governing class loyal to Vienna, among a vast linguistic variety of peoples with varying and at times antagonistic loyalties. The situation in Ronsperg was different, however, as it was situated in a part of Bohemia – as western Czechia is also called – which had German-speakers in the majority.
Indeed, Ronsperg also supported a relatively large Jewish community. Following the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Poběžovice/Ronsperg became a German-speaking village in the first Czechoslovak Republic. For Adolf Hitler and the German National Socialist Party this was part of the “Sudetenland” and a lost fragment of Germany, despite the fact that the German-speakers here were essentially Austro-German Catholics who traditionally looked to Prague and Vienna rather than Berlin. The Munich Conference in 1938 gifted Hitler the Sudetenland and Ronsperg became part of the German Third Reich, with many Ronsperger indeed becoming convinced National Socialists. By 1945 the Jewish community of Poběžovice/Ronsperg had been murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust – the only trace of their former lives in the village is now the Jewish graveyard. German-speakers were expelled from Poběžovice/Ronsperg and became part of the 12 million German-speaking refugees who lost their homes in Central and Eastern Europe and were forced to carve out new lives for themselves in the follow-on states of West and East Germany. In 1945 Poběžovice/Ronsperg became a border village in communist Czechoslovakia, a short trip from the heavily fortified border with democratic and capitalist West Germany.
The Coudenhove-Kalergi Family
Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s grandfather, the Habsburg diplomat Franz Karl von Coudenhove, purchased the Poběžovice/Ronsperg estate, which contained large farming lands, in 1846. The Coudenhoves were an Austrian aristocratic family with Belgian roots, while Richard’s grandmother, Marie von Kalergi, also came from an old European aristocratic family, with roots in Crete and Poland.
She herself grew up in St. Petersburg, while her father spent most of his life in England. In recognition of the Kalergis the family now took the double-barrelled Coudenhove-Kalergi name. Richard’s father Heinrich also became a diplomat in the service of the Habsburg/Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1880s and was stationed variously in Athens, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Istanbul and latterly became Vienna’s representative in Japan. Linguistically-gifted, Heinrich learned to speak 16 languages.
In Japan Heinrich married Mitsuko Ayoama, the daughter of a local merchant and it was here that Richard and his elder brother Johan were born. Upon the death of his father in 1896, Heinrich left the Austro-Hungarian diplomatic service and brought his Japanese wife, and two sons, home to the estate in Poběžovice/Ronsperg, which he now ran on a full-time basis.
Thus, the rural Poběžovice/Ronsperg estate had acquired a new Count and a Japanese Countess. Also now at the estate was Heinrich’s devoted Armenian manservant Babik, whose life Heinrich had allegedly saved during a pogrom in Turkey; a resident English and French governesses; a Hungarian female companion for Mitsuko; a Bavarian secretary; a Czech director of the Castle; a Russian teacher; a Muslim Albanian who was there to teach Heinrich Turkish; while the Bengali Islamic scholar and pan-Islamist Abdullah Al-Mamun Sahrawardy visited and stayed for several months, learning German and reading ancient Arabic and Indian texts with Heinrich.
Heinrich also extended the castle’s library, acquiring especially books relating to Jewish life and religion. As Martyn Bond, in his 2021 biography of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi entitled provocatively Hitler’s Cosmopolitan Bastard, observes: “The Coudenhove-Kalergi Castle in Ronsperg was a cosmopolitan and intellectual oasis in the deeply provincial Bohemian countryside”. The estate was indeed a cultural Europe in miniature, but open to and deeply interested in ideas from around the world, especially Asia.
Heinrich and Mitsuko had five further children, while Heinrich dedicated himself to both his studies and to the running of the estate. He completed a long study of antisemitism, for which he received a doctorate from the University of Prague – then split into German and Czech universities – which was published in 1901. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi republished his father’s book on antisemitism in 1929, seeing it as having become even more relevant, and added an extra chapter.
Although the National Socialists would not take over in Germany until 1933, Richard’s republishing of this work could be read as a reaction to their ideas which, according to Richard, sought to acquire the working classes for the Nazi Party from the social democrats and the communists via antisemitism.
Heinrich’s book may be seen as ahead of its time with its complete debunking of race-based antisemitism, which would later feed into the reasoning behind the murder of six million Jews in Europe, and also indeed pours scorn on the illogical stupidity of ‘race’ as a scholarly category at all. Heinrich died suddenly of a heart attack in 1906 at the age of 46 and was laid to rest in the graveyard in Poběžovice/Ronsperg.
The Paneuropa Movement
With the death of father Heinrich, the family was now thrown into turmoil. Richard and his elder brother were sent to boarding school in Vienna, while Mitsuko also eventually moved to the imperial capital leaving the estate to be run by managers. Richard studied philosophy and history in Vienna and received a doctorate in 1916, as World War I gripped the continent. In 1915, to the annoyance of his mother, he married the well-known Viennese theatre actress Ida Roland, who was thirteen years his senior, becoming also step-father to her daughter. They would remain dedicated to one another, with Richard at times reliant on Ida’s practical help, not least in matters of money.
One hundred years ago in 1922, at the age of 28, Richard founded the Paneuropa movement, dedicated to the unification of the continent. In 1923 his book Paneuropa, which set out his vision for Europe, was published. Coudenhove-Kalergi called for the unification of Europe’s democracies, and for France and Germany to become reconciled and to form the bedrock of a new, peaceful continent.
His vision of European union excluded Great Britain, as it was pre-occupied with its empire, and also Russia, as Russian Bolshevism was increasingly taking a more authoritarian form, he believed, and Russia would, if given the chance, look to dominate Europe. He mentions Ireland a number of times explicitly but sees the island as coming under Britain’s influence and, thus, would not form part of Paneuropa. Europe would retain very good relations with the USA and Great Britain and look to create a positive relationship with Russia.
If possible. Europe, he believes, must become a pacifist superpower but with a strong capacity to defend itself, not least against Russia. He sees national chauvinism as the main obstacle to his vision, which cannot be fought by an abstract internationalism. Instead, via language-learning and textual translations, the national pantheon should become a European pantheon with Europeans reading each other’s literature and foundational texts and speaking each other’s languages. Coudenhove-Kalergi sees what he calls the middle-class “bourgeois parties” and the social democrats as central to European unity, while he largely shuns both the far-right and far-left.
He calls for the creation of a European customs union, while he envisions a directly elected European chamber and a chamber which would have representatives from each government of each democratically-elected nation-state. English should also be the lingua franca of Paneuropa, he argues.
While in many ways his vision seems prescient and is reflected in the contemporary European Union, it is also very much of its time and retains itself a degree of cultural chauvinism; European colonies of European nation-states would simply be incorporated into the new Paneuropa structure. While Coudenhove-Kalergi despised German National Socialism, he was more ambivalent in relation to Mussolini’s Italy, as he saw Mussolini’s movement as non-racialist. Indeed, he believed that a new – and actually democratic – Paneuropa would arise from Italy: a naive thought surely, at best, with the dictator Mussolini in power.
Paneuropa the book, translated into many languages, became a political best-seller, selling more than 100,000 copies, especially within the German-speaking world. Indeed, it offered Germany a way out of its post-World War I predicament and looked to re-centre the continent upon a fairer and peaceful Franco-German relationship. Each Paneuropa book contained a prepaid reply card, which could be sent back and allowed the reader to become an automatic member. By the late 1920s the movement had 9,000 paid-up, often very influential, members. It had a large roll-call of prominent supporters from across the continent, including Joseph Caillaux, French Finance Minister; Edvard Beneš, Foreign Minister of the Czechoslovak Republic; H.A. von Karnebeek, Dutch Foreign Minister; Paul Loebe, President of the German Parliament; Andreas Michalakopulos, Greek Foreign Minister; Paul Painleve, French Prime Minister; Karl Renner, social democrat and Austrian senator; and Count Carlo Sforza, former Italian Prime Minister. Added to this were well-known non-political supporters, such as the scientist Albert Einstein, Rudolf Goldschied, Chairman of the Austrian Peace Movement, and Gerhart Hauptmann, the most famous German writer of the time.
The Paneuropa movement, based in Vienna, also began a journal and organised a number of congresses, where Beethoven’s Ode to Joy was played for the first time as a symbol of European unity. At this stage, in the German-speaking world, there were a number of European federalist organisations, often conservative and Christian-dominated, but Coudenhove-Kalergi managed to outflank them all and to establish his organisation as the best-known and most influential. Coudenhove-Kalergi continued to write and published many more articles and books arguing for a peaceful and united Europe.
German National Socialism and Paneuropa
The Nazis despised Coudenhove-Kalergi and he reciprocated this feeling. As early as 1928 the National Socialist press labelled the Paneuropa movement “treasonous” and Coudenhove-Kalergi himself as a Mischling or ‘half-caste’. Adolf Hitler, in unpublished pages from Mein Kampf, called the Austro-Japanese aristocrat a “cosmopolitan bastard”: Paneuropa was undoubtedly the opposite of the Nazi idea of a “community of blood”, looking to ‘dilute’ nationality in a trans-national structure.
When the National Socialists took over in Germany in 1933, the Paneuropa journal was banned, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s books were among those publicly burned in Berlin on 10 May, the bank accounts of the Paneuropa movement in Germany were frozen and the movement itself was dissolved within the borders of Hitler’s Reich. When the Nazis took over Austria and entered Vienna, to cheering crowds, in 1938, the Gestapo were directly sent to pick up Richard and Ida – Ida was also Jewish as well as now married to a dissident – but Coudenhove-Kalergi and his wife had left minutes before by car for Switzerland, travelling via Slovakia and Italy.
In 1940 Richard and Ida arrived in the USA, via Lisbon, where they stayed for the duration of the war, with Richard teaching at New York University and continuing to argue for a united Europe. In 1942 the Hollywood classic Casablanca was released, which contained the role of an anti-Nazi, Czechoslovak opposition figure Viktor Laszlo which, according to Martyn Bond, “was said to be modelled” on Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. Certainly, the actor Paul Henreid – an Austrian performer with Jewish heritage who had also fled to the US who plays Laszlo – knew Richard and his Viennese actress wife well, while certain biographical parallels may also be viewed (even if the character of Laszlo is not really fully sketched).
Post 1945
After World War II, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi returned to Europe and resumed his lobbying work on behalf of a united continent. Richard’s elder brother Johan had taken over the running of the Poběžovice/Ronsperg estate but was now, in 1945, imprisoned in nearby Domažlice as an enemy ‘German’, charged with collaboration. Johan, more usually called Hansi, had led an eccentric existence on the family estate with his Hungarian wife Lily Steinschneider; the second woman in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to become a pilot and who apparently landed aeroplanes on the plains surrounding Poběžovice/Ronsperg.
Hansi spent the dwindling estate money on eccentric curiosities, such as an Egyptian mummy which he took with him on trips, an over-sized tiled oven in his own image and a pink and yellow automobile emblazoned with the Coudenhove-Kalergi family crest. Politically naive, he had also ‘flirted’ for a time with the local German National Socialists, even though his wife Lilly, who was Jewish, had fled with their daughter Marie to safety in 1938. Richard used his political influence to help get Hansi released, but the estate in Poběžovice/Ronsperg was lost to the family forever and Hansi finished his days as a poverty-stricken aristocrat in nearby Regensburg, in Bavaria.
While Richard’s Paneuropa movement managed to outflank other European federalist movements in the 1920s, he was now largely sidelined himself as other lobby groupings retained greater influence upon the construction of the nascent European institutions. Richard still retained influence, not least on French President Charles de Gaulle with whom he remained in regular contact. Indeed, although living chiefly now in the rural Swiss home he had bought with Ida in the 1920s, after Richard’s Czechoslovak citizenship ran out, he became a French citizen. Richard, who had continued to publish widely in German, French and English, died in 1972, leaving behind a large amount of debt but a wealth of political ideas.
The “Kalergi-Plan” conspiracy
During ‘anti-Corona’ demonstrations in Germany in 2021, a number of protestors referred to the “Kalergi Plan” on placards. This was a reference to a far-right conspiracy theory in which, unbelievably, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi plays a central role. This conspiracy theory was initiated by an Austrian Neo-Nazi and convicted Holocaust-denier Gerd Honsik in a 2005 book.
Honsik takes three ideas from the life and work of Coudenhove-Kalergi and crafts from them a bizarre and illogical narrative. He brings together citations from a 1927 text by Coudenhove-Kalergi in which the Austro-Japanese writer argues against the idea of Völker or nations and for wider ethnic-mixing; the fact that Coudenhove-Kalergi was extremely philosemitic and saw western European Jews as a type of intellectual and professional aristocracy; and his arguments in favour of a trans-national European institution.
From these assorted fragments Honsik creates a conspiracy theory based on the idea of an ancient ‘Kalergy Plan’ to replace Europeans with other peoples, which is to be enacted by the European Union and, apparently, Jewish elites. The Southern Poverty Law Center in the USA, which charts far-right influences, sees the Kalergi-Plan conspiracy theory as “clearly a European white Nationalist narrative, which takes Kalergi’s texts out of context, in order to view Europe’s migration politics as a treacherous conspiracy against an apparently white ‘race’”. Thus, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, even in death, continues to be a hate figure for Nazis and their sympathisers.
Poběžovice: Europe in Miniature Form
Having read about Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, I wanted to investigate the traces left of his youthful Europe-in-miniature-form for myself. Thus, I travelled to Poběžovice by train from Leipzig via Nuremburg. At Domažlice a small local train, dinkying from side to side, snakes through luscious grain fields and forests and drops people off at lonely, well-kept Czech villages. It is, I think, the kind of service Ireland could still have if the extensive network of rural railway lines hadn’t been neglected and dismantled in the 1950s and 1960s. The Coudenhove-Kalergi Castle was looted in 1945 and a border guard brigade of the Czechoslovak army was based here until 1962. It then lay empty and in 1989 became the property of the village of Poběžovice. The castle is now in a dangerous state of disrepair, with beams holding some roofs from falling in, floors close to collapse and nesting birds flying in and out of open windows. My guide, in stumbling German for which she constantly apologises, details the use of each room: the Library, the Renaissance Dance hall, the Card Room.
It is hard to connect this broken shell of a building with the cosmopolitan and open-minded aristocratic atmosphere that reigned here for a period in the late 19th and early 20th century. I try to imagine Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi writing and researching his book on antisemitism in what was once the Castle library; Heinrich teaching his boys and girls Russian and Hungarian; Mitsuko speaking Japanese to her seven children; and ultimately Heinrich falling dead in the castle grounds to be found by his Armenian servant Babik, Richard looking on in horror as life departs his father’s body.
My guide tells me that the village is holding a festival in honour of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi at the end of July, with a number of events planned to take place in the park beside the castle, which also contains a Japanese Buddhist garden in honour of Mitsuko Coudenhove-Kalergi. The village has obviously been doing its best to honour the family’s memory with what looks like meagre resources and seems genuinely proud of its extraordinary, landed family: their cosmopolitan-European connection.
The next day, in the cool early morning and before breakfast, I trek through golden grain fields to the outskirts of Poběžovice where the village graveyard is to be found. All of the older graves are inscribed in German, the newer graves in Czech. There is also a bilingual monument erected by earlier German-speaking Poběžovice residents commemorating those who died distant from their home village and celebrating contemporary Czech-German reconciliation.
Before finally going to the hotel for breakfast, I troop towards the Jewish graveyard at the other end of the village. It has been renovated by a local grouping who wanted to stop it from falling into further disrepair, in cooperation with relatives of Holocaust survivors with local roots. I later tuck into my Turkish coffee and scrambled eggs. It is clear that the village of Poběžovice itself, marked by historical murder and banishment, power struggles, reconciliation and important acts of public memory, really is as European as it comes. It is now also a peaceful idyll with a crumbling castle that remains central to the history of the European idea; if the village of Poběžovice has trouble maintaining the castle, which can surely be classed as a monument of Europe-wide intellectual significance, then the European Union, in whatever indirect guise, should surely intervene and help. The Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko has written of how the Ukraine War “also shows Europe’s strength – Europe as an idea: suddenly you realise this idea motivates people enormously. And suddenly Russia shows it is so afraid of this idea that it starts a bloody war not to let it come anywhere close”.
He sees Europe’s central meaning as “opposition to tyranny and autocracy”. Maybe, just maybe, the European idea, understood in this manner as the ideational framework of a type of cosmopolitan democracy and anti-authoritarianism, has never been as important as it is now, as war rages in Ukraine. The monuments connected with this idea must also be maintained, communicated and engaged with critically by as many people as possible. The European Union needs to maintain its own heritage, including this rundown castle in the sleepily-pretty Czech village of Poběžovice.
