good soldier and his comrades have been dragooned into the
army of a ramshackle, multi-ethnic empire that inspires little in
the way of loyalty or patriotism among its Czech subjects. These
conscripts have only the dimmest understanding of their side’s
actual war aims, a condition, the book slyly suggests, shared by
their clueless superiors.
The ruling Habsburg dynasty is foreign, as is its upper ech-
elon of aristocrats and generals. Constant threats of draconian
punishment keep the rank and file in line. The war itself is
an endless series of drills, maneuvers, and marches toward
a vaguely defined front. (Švejk never actually fires a shot.)
Even the book’s abrupt ending, a consequence of the author’s
untimely death, adds to the sense that the conflict will simply
go on forever.
Although the novel’s themes are deadly serious, its tone is
unfailingly comic. This likely reflects the lived experience of
the author, a wandering ne’er-do-well and itinerant journalist
whose own capacity for troublemaking may have inspired his
hero’s more outrageous exploits. But the book’s humor is also a
product of Hašek’s era.
It may sound absurd to say someone who lived through the
collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the First World
War was lucky, especially considering Hašek’s unhappy end
(he died of alcoholism in 1923). Consider, though, the plight of
his successors, fictional or otherwise. A latter-day Švejk would
have witnessed the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis,
the industrial-scale horrors of World War II, and the Red Army’s
imposition at gunpoint of Soviet-style totalitarianism. It is dif-
ficult to imagine a character like Švejk surviving such circum-
stances, much less retaining his good-humored equanimity.
While Švejk’s approach to most officers is antagonistic, obse-
quious, or slyly mocking, his relationship to his immediate
superior, the put-upon Lieutenant Lukáš, is downright affec-
tionate. And it is striking how often Švejk gets away with his
mischief-making. In one scene, a secret policeman tries to get
the as-yet-undrafted Švejk to confess his disloyal sentiments by
feigning interest in Švejk’s fraudulent canine-selling operation.
The cop ends up eaten by the very dogs he purchases during
the sting.
Švejk’s encounters with the secret police and the military
bureaucracy anticipate the horrors of Nazi and Soviet totali-
tarianism, yes, but the soft-edged absurdity of these episodes—
even the eaten-by-dogs part reads as funny—seems almost
quaint by comparison. Fortunately for Švejk, the machinery of
social control had yet to be refined to its mid-century apex of
cruelty and efficiency.
Still, through Švejk’s unflappability and the book’s humor-
ous tone, a prescient and occasionally frightening look at the
machinery of social control is legible. Toward the novel’s start, a
luckless innkeeper is arrested by the secret police for admitting
he took down a portrait of the emperor because it was covered
in fly shit. This, his unhappy wife later explains, was prima facie
evidence of disloyalty to the dynasty.
The soft authoritarianism of the Habsburgs was certainly
preferable to their Nazi and Soviet successors, but kernels of
totalitarianism were already evident. And if the repeated and
enthusiastic application of enemas to goad reluctant conscripts
to the front seems over the top, consider that a similar technique
was used by the Central Intelligence Agency in our own endless
war on terror.BURN-IT-ALL-TO-THE-GROUND ANARCHISM
WHILE THE NOVEL’S anti-war content and anti-authoritarian tone
will ring sweetly to an American libertarian, Hašek was himself
a left-wing anarchist, not a small-government liberal. His per-
sonal outlook was undoubtedly shaped by the political realities
of Central Europe in the early 20th century, realities that help60 OCTOBER 2018