German Education in the Czech lands – Brno, Komenského square – JAMU
Fact of the Czech figure „The difficult search for multiethnic coexistence”
Part of the „The emancipation of minorities” topic
At Komenského Square in Brno rise stone witnesses to the once lively presence of Germans in the Czech lands. The buildings of the German State Gymnasium continuously standing since the 16th century (today the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts) and the German Technical University (today Masaryk University) represent German education, which by the early 20th century had formed a dense network of educational institutions at all levels. At the highest level, alongside the technical school in Brno, also the German University and German Technical University were located in Prague.
From the mid-19th century, however, education became a battleground for intense national disputes, with the solution found in dividing schools into German and Czech institutions. This led to the 1882 division of the Prague University, which was primarily an expression of the Czech population’s emancipation. In Brno, gymnasiums were divided into German and Slavic (later Czech) in the final third of the 19th century, and similar divisions occurred at lower levels of education as well.
A commemorative plaque at the entrance to the former German Classical Gymnasium reminds us that the later Czechoslovak President Tomáš Masaryk attended the school in his youth – before the national division of the educational system. After World War I, the gymnasium proudly claimed Masaryk as an alumnus and even incorporated his name into its title. However, during the occupation of the Czech lands by Nazi Germany, the Brno gymnasium, like other German schools, quickly adapted to Nazi ideology and became one of the symbols of the occupiers’ policy of Germanization. Following the defeat of Nazism in 1945, all German schools were closed by decree of the President of the Republic, marking the end of the long and complex tradition of symbiotic coexistence between Czech and German education.
