Putting back on airs and graces

It was inevitable that the watchdogs of etiquette should eventually take on the mobile telephone. After all, this electronic communication device has become so all-pervasive in our day-to-day lives that there is almost no getting away from it. You can’t help overhearing friendly chitchat or domestic squabbles – and most of all the ubiquitous exchange of banalities. So anyone who has experienced that often enough – on the Prague tram, for instance – will concur wholeheartedly with author Ladislav Spacek when he lays down the golden rule of cell phone etiquette: “Above all, do not disturb!”

Ladislav Spacek is the sort that for decades had fallen out of favour in the Czech Republic and other Central and Eastern European countries and is only now coming back into his own. The 60-year-old aesthete, who used to teach the history of the Czech language at Karls University in Prague and later worked as a TV newscaster, is renowned in his country as an expert in propriety and social decorum – and now teaches etiquette instead of Czech.

Back in the days of Communism, that was a debarred discipline. How were proletarian bureaucrats and Stasi [secret police] “block leaders” supposed to take a shine to social graces that evolved out of the customs of medieval chivalry and crystallised at the court of Louis XIV in Versailles? After decades of isolation, Ladislav Spacek points out, the ex-Communist countries have now returned to the fold of Atlantic European civilisation. And business people, politicians and diplomats bemoan Communism’s “devastating influence” on manners as a handicap that hinders international exchange.

As a matter of fact, unseemliness still predominates in many an everyday situation in Central and Eastern Europe. Political disputes are a fortiori beset with excessive hostilities and incivilities. On the other hand, on any tram in Prague you are more likely to find young people voluntarily proffering their seat to an older passenger than, say, in Munich or Hamburg. And one of the most popular politicos in the Czech Republic is still the remigrant Prince Karel Schwarzenberg, who unabashedly celebrates traditional etiquette, not even shrinking from kissing milady’s hand, which in the Czech Republic, unlike Poland, is basically passé.

So some rudimentary remnants of old customs are still in evidence. To whit, after belonging to the Habsburg monarchy for centuries, the Czechs have retained the Austro-Hungarian reverence for titles: yes, Mr Engineer, Mrs Magister [i.e. MA/MS], Mr Editor. Other social niceties have gone by the board. Mr Preceptor Spacek has noticed that, while eating, for instance, many an errant Czech points his silverware up into the air rather than down towards his plate. In restaurants and culinary art in general, as any connoisseur will confirm, Communism has inflicted utter devastation. “People have simply unlearnt all that.”

Havel in a jumper

So Spacek provides remedial tuition. For his politesse pointers, the etiquette expert has no need to fall back on Habsburg handshakes, let alone the prescriptions of German Baron Adolph Knigge [18th-century author of On Human Relations, commonly regarded as a guide to manners]; he simply sticks to his own national traditions. Shortly after Czechoslovakia was established in 1918, writer, translator and Czech Olympic Committee founder Jiri Stanislav Guth-Jarkovsky, in his capacity as master of ceremonies to president Tomas G. Masaryk, turned the old imperial protocol into a new republican code of comportment. He is venerated by cultivated Czechs to this day, and it goes without saying that he is a role model for Ladislav Spacek, too.

But the lord of the rules also draws on his own experience, gathered at official functions in over 50 different countries as president Vaclav Havel’s press secretary for 13 years. At the outset, Havel would sometimes show up at the Prague castle in a sweater and he’d occasionally steal away to the bar, but in time he became a perfect gentleman.