Academic iconoclast

pp. 1-18

in: Harald G. Skilling, T. G. Masaryk, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1994

Abstract

The arrival of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk in Prague in 1882 was charged with significance for modern Czech history and was to cause an upheaval in the history of the nation. Jan Herben, his devoted admirer and one of his biographers, wrote in 1898 that the decade of the 1880s was a time of a "revolution in ideas in Czech life; new strivings and new yearnings were born; new fractions and tendencies were formed". This ferment developed in and from the Czech university, which had been created by the partition of the Charles-Ferdinand University into Czech and German parts.¹ Professor Masaryk, newly arrived at the Czech university in its first year as a separate institution, stirred up controversy almost immediately by his teaching and by his day-to-day actions. He soon made the university a platform for an effort to influence the Czech intelligentsia and to reform Czech life in all its aspects, educationally , culturally and politically.