Also, like Švejk, Brecht took great lengths to avoid military service and, failing that, to avoid combat. Biographer Ronald Hayman said of Brecht’s professed aim to study medicine that “he never seriously studied the subject. One advantage of registering for it was that it was the likeliest subject to delay call-up; another was that, when he eventually enlisted, he could become a medical orderly instead of being sent to the front. The only medical lectures he attended were on venereal diseases.” Brecht became a hospital orderly, but Hayman says, “He did not always report for duty.” Brecht later bragged, “Favored by fortune, I understood how to inhibit my military education, and after six months I had not even mastered the military salute.” 

Like Hašek, Brecht held heroism in low regard. In the American version of Galileo, which Brecht co-wrote, Galileo Galilei’s pupil is angry that his teacher was forced to recant his discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun. “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero,” laments the pupil, Andrea. To which Brecht has Galilei reply, “No, Andrea, unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” 

Brecht also shared Hašek’s disregard for historical verisimilitude. When Brecht’s drafts were critiqued, Ewen says, “he was absolutely indifferent when historical anachronisms or inaccurately represented local realities were pointed out to him.” Brecht’s colleague Eric Bentley said this about Becht’s Galileo: “Brecht was all wrong about the seventeenth century in general and about Galileo Galilei in particular.” 

Finally, Brecht and Hašek shared an appetite for Marxism. While many persons received the Stalin Prize, Brecht really earned it, devoting most of his oeuvre to advancing Marxist views among theater-goers. When Brecht accepted the Prize—rebranded as the Lenin Prize after Stalin’s death in 1953—at the Kremlin, he called it “the highest and most desirable of all the prizes that could be awarded today.” 

This closed the circle of avowed Bolsheviks, Stalinists, and communist regimes that established Švejk in popular culture. The imprimatur of Brecht’s Stalin Prize gave communist regimes worldwide a greenlight to promote one of his favorite novels. 

These regimes published Švejk in large numbers for their captive populations while assiduously banning most other literature. While Hašek was widely considered a traitor in Czecho-Slovakia after 1918, Švejk’s popularity quickened after a 1948 coup installed Prague’s communist regime. Classified as a “Hero of Communism,” Parrott says, Švejk became approved reading even for that country’s armed forces. Across the Soviet empire, “the novel was celebrated as a ‘proletarian’ manifesto of class struggle.” 

Laughter was not a common reaction to stories of “The Great War.” World opinion was, and remains, stunned by its enormous violence. Like a joker at a funeral, it gets its laughs due to the tense proximity of death. Hašek mocks bravery, honor, and heroism, and there is cowardice even in his choice of targets—Austria-Hungary and its army—both of which died before Švejk’s novel appeared. Yet another funeral looms over this ghoulish work since its author would die before he finished it. 

Neither autobiography nor memoir, Švejk makes most sense as a deflective tour de force to distract attention from Hašek’s dishonorable behavior in uniform, to paint all armies, all soldiers, and all wars as absurd or stupid, to make us believe that every Czecho-Slovak soldier, if not every Slav, is lazy and cowardly; to make the world laugh at comical distractions rather than recall what really transpired among Czechs and Slovaks who died on the Eastern Front and in Russia to protect or liberate their peoples.

Unaware of Hašek’s deplorable betrayals in uniform, readers have long been unaware that making armies, officers, and military discipline look ridiculous was a matter of personal self-interest for Hašek. That he drank himself to death at age thirty-nine and never finished his acclaimed “masterpiece,” should be seen as the red flags they really are.

Kevin McNamara is an Associate Scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the author of Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe (New York: Public Affairs), a history of the dramatic events that led to the founding of Czecho-Slovakia in 1918 amid war and revolution. It was translated into Czech and Slovak in 2020. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.