In these dispiriting days, as the winds of political combat blow strong and cold, one’s ardor to educate the young, engage with our peers, and make scholarship relevant can easily end in despair. Learning how others have weathered storms of controversy and conflict, however, might revive one’s spirits. This is especially true if these “storms” included major wars, revolutions, treason, exile, espionage, death sentences, poisonings, and a family whose members suffered death, imprisonment, and mental and physical breakdowns. Professor Tomas G. Masaryk experienced all of this, and more.
A Charles University philosophy professor with four children, an American wife, and an impressive c.v.when the Great War broke out in 1914, Masaryk grew increasingly angry when his former students began dying for an Austro-Hungarian regime that saw them as second-class subjects. He feared the Habsburg dynasty and its minions would
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