Czech Refugees in Austria 1968–1985

Czech Refugees in Austria 1968–1985 Ondřej Haváč INTRODUCTION Troops of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia on a warm August night in 1968 to stop a process later called the Prague Spring, which was supposed to reform the Communist regime in the country and give it a ‘human face’. The very next night on 22nd August, Zuzana Brejchová, my later narrator and film director, was lying in her bed in a flat in Prague and was reading. Suddenly she heard a gun firing, the window in her room was broken and bullets buried deep into the wall. She hid herself under the bed and, when the shooting stopped, she managed to run away to her parents. All of them survived but it was the last straw. “Well, my father looked around the flat, which was shot to pieces […] and said: We are leaving! We are not staying here any longer!”1 The whole family fled the country the next day. They were one of many Czech and Slovak families that left Czechoslovakia heading to the West in order to lead a better life abroad. Many of them settled in the Austrian capital Vienna. This paper deals with the Czech immigrants in Austria and its capital from 1968 to the mid-1980s and points out the problems they had to face during the process of integration into Austrian society. This article will focus on the following questions: do they feel themselves to be ‘insiders’ after 40 years of living in Austria? How has the integration process changed their perception of their national identity? Do they still consider themselves to be Czechs? NATIONS, MINORITIES AND THEIR IDENTITY To answer the above mentioned questions, it is first of all necessary to clarify the terms identity, nation, and integration. This section presents a theoretical framework of these concepts which form a key part of my study. I have omitted ‘religious identity’ or the religious part of one’s identity (for instance, the consequences of a Czech becoming a Muslim for one’s national consciousness) in this paper. As this paper focuses on the Czech minority abroad in the late 1960s and 1970s, the collected data showed there were other elements (such as language, culture, or politics) which formed the narrators’ national consciousness and these are analysed in this paper. There exist many definitions of ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’, and many social and 1 Interview with Zuzana Brejchová, Vienna, 9 September 2011. Private Archive of the Author. OPEN ACCESS ONdřEJ HAváč 83 OPEN ACCESS political scientists and historians have tried to identify a common essence of all nations. Many of the authors who dealt with these concepts were born in the Czech lands.2 For example Miroslav Hroch, in his book Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, in which he deals with the process of nation formations, defines the term nation as ‘a large social group characterized by a combination of several kinds of relation (economic, territorial, political, religious, linguistic and so on)’.3 He also states that national identity was a new type of group identity which provided its members with new certainties and with a new system of values which corresponded to the modern age.4 Hroch does not define the term national identity further, but he appears to have borrowed the concept from the ethnographer Anthony D. Smith.5 According to Smith, the fundamental features of national identity are: 1) an historic territory, or homeland, 2) common myths and historical memories, 3) a common, mass public culture, 4) common legal rights and duties for all members, and 5) a common economy with territorial mobility for members.6 His concept of national identity is based on existence of different ethnics which evolve into nations bounded by the above described features of identity. The concept of national identity, however, remains contested. Some scholars claim the concept of identity is something every group has or ought to have, and that it is at the core of every human being. In other words — there objectively exists a ‘true’ identity in every person and every group.7 Others propose that identity is constructed or negotiated and thus fluid, multiple, and subjective. In this paper, I am following the criticism of the term identity by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper in their influential article Beyond Identity. They point out that nowadays, the concept of identity and its usage in human sciences “bears a multivalent even contradictory theoretical burden” and they argued “Identity tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity)”.8 They advise to substitute the ambiguous term with multiple terms (which would not be as overburdened as identity). Therefore, I do not use the term ‘identity’ in the analysis of the collected data, but instead Cooper and Brubaker’s concepts of ‘identification’, ‘categorization’, and ‘self-understanding’ are employed in the study of the various contexts of Czech refugees’ behaviour.9 2 See H. KOHN, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of Origins and Background, New York 1944; K. W. DEUTSCH, Nationalism and Its Alternatives, New York 1969; F. SEIBT, Deutschland und die Tschechen: Geschichte einer Nachbarschaft in der Mitte Europas, Munich 1974. 3 M. HROCH, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller Nations, New York 2000, p. 4. 4 Ibidem, p. 14. 5 M. HROCH, Národy nejsou dílem náhody, Praha 2009; M. HROCH, Pohledy na národ a nacionalismus, Praha 2003. 6 A. D. SMITH, National Identity, London 1991, p. 14. 7 See, for example, the famous essay: Do Nations have Navels?, in: E. GELLNER, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford 1983. 8 R. BRUBAKER — F. COOPER, Beyond “Identity”, in: Theory and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2000, p. 1. 9 “As a processual, active term derived from a verb ‛identification’ lacks the reifying connotations of ‛identity’. It invites us to specify the agents that do the identifying. […] Identification of oneself and of others — is intrinsic to social life.” BRUBAKER — COOPER, p. 14. 84 PRAGUE PAPERS ON THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 1/2016 OPEN ACCESS I take a closer look at their collective solidarity and self-understanding as well as the role of the Austrian state which, in Brubaker’s words, as ‘the modern state has been one of the most important agents of identification and categorization’.10 METHODOLOGY At the beginning of my field work, the research question asks why Czechs, who came to Austria before the fall of the Iron Curtain, are considered to be successfully integrated into Austrian society and how this is linked to their lack of national pride. As mentioned above, the subjects of my research were Czechs who had settled down in Vienna in the period between 1968 and 1985. This almost twenty-year period delimited by the Prague Spring at the beginning and by the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, and the inauguration of his reform policy, at the end, allowed me to include not only the immigration wave of 1968 but also signatories of Charter 7711 who were forced to leave Czechoslovakia some 10 years later. Moreover, there were significant changes in the Austrian immigration policy during this period, which had to be taken into account. This paper is mainly based on data gathered during two periods of field work in Vienna which were conducted in September 2011 and 2013. I recorded twenty-one interviews with people who fled Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion in 1968, as well as with signatories of Charter 77 and their children who either came to Vienna with their parents or were born there. I used the oral history method of data collection and started my ‘Viennese snowball’ 12 in my home Department of History in Brno, which has ties to Vienna’s institutions (University of Vienna) and Czech minority associations (for instance to Bilingvní reálné gymnázium Školského spolku Komenský [the 10 Brubaker and Cooper described the role of state as follows: “In the ordinary ebb and flow of social life, people identify and categorize others, just as identify and categorize themselves. But there is another key type of external identification that has no counterpart in the domain of selfidentification: the formalized, codified, objectified systems of categorization developed by powerful, authoritative institutions”. Ibidem, p.15. 11 Charter 77 was an informal civic initiative in Czechoslovakia that associated various members of the Czechoslovak opposition. It criticised the Czechoslovak government for failing to implement human rights which it had agreed to observe, especially the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which took place in Helsinki in 1975. More in V. PREČAN (Ed.), Charta 77 (1977–1989): Od morální k demokratické revoluci, Praha 1990. 12 Snowball sampling (or chain sampling) is a method used in sociology and other social sciences to gather data which would be difficult to sample in another way. The researcher asks the initial subject for assistance and for identifying people with similar interests (or who belong to the same group or same milieu). For more on snowball sampling and about Oral History in the Czech Republic in general, see M. VANĚK — P. MÜCKE — H. PELIKÁNOVÁ, Naslouchat hlasům paměti: Teoretické a praktické aspekty orální historie, Praha 2007, p. 90. For literature in English about qualitative research, see, S. NAGY HESSE-BIBER — P. LEAVY, The Practice of Qualitative Research, London 2006. ONdřEJ HAváč 85 OPEN ACCESS Czech Bilingual Grammar School Komensky] ).13 At the end of my first field research, I had fifteen interviews with various members of the Czech minority, nine of the interviews were recorded and transcribed. I also conducted a survey by questionnaire at the Czech Bilingual Grammar School Komensky among seventeen-year-old students to gather data about the second generation of Czech newcomers to Vienna. The questionnaire was devised in cooperation with Vera Kapeller14 and our questions aimed to understand the students’ background and their knowledge of the Czech Republic, its culture, and its political situation. During the second field research, in which I intended to record interviews with the same narrators, I got in touch with other members of the Czech community in Vienna who came from different social milieus (i.e. workers, Czech Catholics, artists). This expanded sample broadened my view and made me aware of slight nuances expressed in their self-understanding. In total, my corpus consists of twenty-one recorded interviews with fifteen different narrators. However, despite my satisfaction with the recordings, I did not want to rely solely on narrative resources. To expand my source base, I visited the most important Czech minority associations and relevant Austrian Institutions: the Czech sport club Sokol, the Kulturní klub Čechů a Slováků v Rakousku (The Cultural Club of Czechs and Slovaks in Austria), the Czech minority newspaper Vídeňské svobodné listy, and the archive of the Research Centre for the History of Minorities, as well as the Austriam National Library, Bruno Kreisky Archive, and the Vienna University Library.15 Thanks to the second field research I could employ ‘data triangulation’16 and validate some of my previous findings. THE PRAGUE SPRING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES I will firstly briefly present the situation in Czechoslovakia in 1968, as the events of that year influenced both the Czechs and Slovaks who stayed at home, as well as the ones who fled, for the next two decades. When Alexander Dubček replaced Antonín Novotný as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) on 5 January 1968, no one expected the scale of the changes that would follow. Along with Dubček’s election, reformists within the Party gained power and started to 13 I obtained my first contact from the Head of Department of History for the Czech historian Jana Starek, who works for Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and who was a co-founder of the Research Centre for the History of Minorities. 14 Vera Kapeller (née Mayer), is the author of many articles about the Czech minority in Vien na. See, for example, V. MAYER, Integrační procesy na příkladě etnických menšin ve Vídni, in: Český lid, Vol. 88, No. 2, 2001, pp. 148–163. 15 For instance, the Culture Club of Czechs and Slovaks in Austria (Kulturní klub Čechů a Slováků v Rakousku) was an association founded by Czech refugees who came after the Soviet invasion and could not get along with the old Czech generation living in Vienna which was represented by the Czech minority newspapers Vídeňské svobodné listy or its Communist counterpart Vídeňské menšinové listy. 16 For more on the method of triangulation, see, for instance, A. BYRMAN, Triangulation, in: Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods, http://www.referenceworld.com/sage/socialscience/triangulation.pdf, [cit. 2014–12–10]. 86 PRAGUE PAPERS ON THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 1/2016 OPEN ACCESS enact reforms which later came to be known as the Prague Spring. The most important reforms were incorporated in the so-called Action Program which was adopted on 5 April 1968 by the Central Committee of the CPC. The Program condemned the previous Party line and Stalinist practices. The Communist Party as well as the country’s economy was to be democratized, which meant less central planning and the development of a limited private sector. Human rights were to be guaranteed, culture was to be protected from Party interference, and censorship was limited. Therelationship between Czechs and Slovaks was to be adjusted through federalization. Since the very beginning of the reform movement in Czechoslovakia, other Communist parties in the Eastern Bloc watched the process with increasing suspicion The Soviets tried, in a series of negotiations, to limit or rather stop the reforms. The last common meeting took place in Bratislava on 3 August 1968, where the leaders of six associated socialist countries, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia, signed the Bratislava Declaration. The Soviet Union expressed its intention to intervene in any Warsaw Pact country if a ‘bourgeois’ system was ever to be established. After the Bratislava conference, the leadership of Soviet Union had already decided to solve the problem of ‘socialism with human face’ by military intervention. At 11pm on 20 August 1968, the troops of five member states of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia. Even though an armed confrontation was avoided and Alexander Dubček called upon his people not to resist, during the attack of the Warsaw Pact armies, 72 Czechs and Slovaks were killed, 266 severely wounded and another 436 were injured.17 The occupation turned out to be a military success, but on the other hand it was tremendous ideological setback. It showed how difficult it was to reform a totalitarian regime without the approval of Moscow. The leaders of the Prague Spring were, shortly after the arrival of the Soviet troops, kidnapped and taken to Moscow where they were forced to sign the so-called Moscow Protocol. The document confirmed, among other things, the ‘temporary stay’ of occupation forces in Czechoslovakia, which lasted for the next 20 years until the Velvet Revolution. The protocol was the beginning of the end of all following liberal Communists’ attempts to continue with the programme of ‘socialism with a human face’. But people in Czechoslovakia and abroad were poorly informed about what was happening. The kidnapped leaders were allowed to return back to the country where, at Ruzyně Airport, they were welcomed and glorified like heroes by the whole nation. They promised to preserve the reforms and continue the liberalization. People believed them. The pro-reform leaders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia enjoyed a mass support which they had never had before. But it did not last for long. Gradually, a conservative wing in the CPC gained the upper hand and its leader, Gustáv Husák, fully supported by the Soviets, slowly grabbed power. Reformists were deprived of their high posts and later on they, together with thousands of others who did not agree with the occupation (called ‘fraternal help’), were denied Communist Party membership. Alexander Dubček had to step down as General Secretary on 17 April 1969 and was replaced by Gustáv Husák. A massive party purge began at the 17 K. WILLIAMS, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics 1968–1970, Cambridge 1997, p. 158. ONdřEJ HAváč 87 OPEN ACCESS end of the year and it influenced almost half a million people. Many of them lost their jobs and were excluded from any participation in public life. Normalization, an era of restoration of conditions predating the Prague Spring, had begun. At this time, many people who fled the country right after the Soviet invasion decided not to come back. As the narrator Milan Ráček noted during our interview: “The chances were evident in the year 1968. And suddenly it was to be over. People were keen on that social move and suddenly it was all over. We were bitterly disappointed!”18 CZECH AND SLOVAK REFUGEES IN AUSTRIA The Soviet invasion, which interrupted the process of political liberalization, caused the biggest wave of emigration from Czechoslovakia in the country’s history. Thousands of people were heading to the West. They found their first shelter in Austria thanks to the Austrian Embassy in Prague, which granted hundreds of visas every day. It was due to the devoted effort of the ambassador Rudolf Kirschsläger, who ordered to issue the visas despite of reverse instructions coming from the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs led by Kurt Waldheim. Within the first months after the invasion almost 162,000 refugees came to the country.19 Out of this number some 66,000 were people who were returning from abroad, mostly from their holidays in Yugoslavia and the news of the Soviet invasion caught them on the way. Suddenly the streets of Vienna were full of cars with Czechoslovak licence plates, the Czech and Slovak language sounded from Viennese shops and restaurants and one could see small Czechoslovak flags waving everywhere. The Austrian state managed to control this sudden wave of refugees only thanks to the participation of all of society. The government, together with various NGOs (e.g. Vienna Charity, the Austrian Red Cross, etc.), as well as many families and various individuals immediately gave a helping hand to the newcomers. Even the divided Czech minority in Vienna worked as one after many years of animosity.20 They collected money, clothes, and other necessary things, handed out information bulletins, translated news and announcements of the Austrian government related to the situation of refugees, offered food and accommodation, the newsroom of Vídeňské menšinové listy served as a meeting point for many who decided to start new life in Austria. Not only the Czech minority but the Austrian society as a whole opened their country. Support came from abroad too. Vital work was done by the United Nations Refugee Agency, the International Red Cross, and the Catholic Church.21 18 Interview with Milan Ráček, Sitzendorf/Schmida, 14 September 2011. Private Archive of the Author. 19 See J. STAREK, Česká menšina a československý exil po roce 1968 ve Vídni, in: H. BASLER et al. (Ed.), Vídeňští Češi 1945–2005: K dějinám národnostní menšiny, Wien 2006, p. 302. 20 See P. HALLAMA, Der Siegreiche Februar 1948 und die Anfänge des Kalten Krieges unter den Tschechen in Wien, in: R. WONISCH (Ed.), Tschechen in Wien: Zwischen nationaler Selbstbehauptung und Assimilation, Wien 2010, pp. 155–181. 21 For example, the Pope Paul VI sent $10,000. See J. STAREK, Nach dem Prager Frühling, in: T. KNOZ, Tschechen und Österreicher: Gemeinsame Geschichte, gemeninsame Zukunft, Brno 2006, p. 201. 88 PRAGUE PAPERS ON THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 1/2016 OPEN ACCESS The government also eased the situation for refugees significantly. Everything were granted temporary residency by the Austrian Ministry of Interior and those who applied and fulfilled the conditions of the Geneva Conventions received political asylum in Austria. But, surprisingly, only a few of the refugees applied for political asylum straight after their arrival, due to the confusing situation in Czechoslovakia described above. No one knew how things would evolve. Vladimir Kusin described the strategy of Czechoslovak refugees staying in Western countries in the first months after the invasion as a ‘wait and see tendency’.22 Everyone waited to see how the situation in their homeland would turn out. Many of them wanted to return. “Only after April 1969, in the remaining part of the year, under the impact of sweeping changes in the leading bodies of the party and the state, rank-and-file purges announced for 1970 and re-ideologised content and tone of the Czechoslovak media, were the decisions to remain in exile made en masse.”23 INTEGRATION AND INCORPORATION OF CZECH REFUGEES “I must say the Austrians turned out to be very generous. After four years [of living in Austria] they started giving citizenship to everyone who applied. So I had Austrian citizenship after four and a half years”.24 In order to analyse the integration of Czech refugees into Austrian society, I am building on the theoretical framework of four authors. Richard Alba and Victor Nee have set up general criteria of successful integration; Leo Lucassen has compared Poles and Turks in the German Ruhr Area, and finally I draw on Jeffrey C. Alexander’s concepts of solidary and incorporation. Many of my findings also relate to the conclusions made by Karl Brousek and later by Margitta Urbanek in her doctoral thesis.25 Out of 162,000 Czechoslovak refugees in Austria, the majority returned back to Czechoslovakia (in many cases just to emigrate later on) when the situation calmed down, and others continued their journey to the other Western countries, mostly to the USA, Canada, Australia, or the UK. Around 12,000 people applied for political asylum in Austria.26 The start was difficult for most of them. They did not understand 22 V. KUSIN, From Dubcek to Charter 77: A Study of ‘Normalization’ in Czechoslovakia 1968–1978, Edinburgh 1978, p. 170. 23 Ibidem, p. 172. 24 Interview with Zdena Kaspar, Vienna, 7. September 2011. Private Archive of the Author. 25 R. ALBA — V. NEE, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration, Cambridge 2003; L. LUCASSEN — D. FELDMAN — J. OLTMER (Eds.), Paths of Integration: Migrants in Western Europe (1880–2004), Amsterdam 2006; J. C. ALEXANDER, Theorizing the “Modes of Incorporation”: Assimilation, Hyphenation, and Multiculturalism as Varieties of Civil Participation, in: Sociological Theory, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2001, pp. 237–249; M. URBANEK, Tschechische Fluchtund Arbeitsmigranten in Österreich, Ph.D. thesis, Vienna 2009, http://othes.univie.ac.at/7216/, [cit. 2014–12–10]. One of the most influential books about Czech integration into Austrian society was written by K. BROUSEK, Wien und seine Tschechen: Integration und Assimilation einer Minderheit im 20. Jahrhundert, Munchen 1980. Vera Mayer followed up his conclusion in various articles, e.g. MAYER, pp. 148–163. 26 These figures are presented in V. VALEŠ, Vídeňští Češi včera a dnes, Praha 2004, p. 121. ONdřEJ HAváč 89 OPEN ACCESS German, they had to leave their parents and friends behind the Iron Curtain with little or no hope of seeing them again. Moreover, in some cases, they had to drop relatively well paid jobs and make a step into an uncertain future. Some refugees did not manage to cope with the new situation and returned back to Czechoslovakia, which was fuel for Communist propaganda. Despite of the problems they had to face at the beginning, the vast majority of these ‘Czechoslovak immigrants’27 started adjusting themselves to the new circumstances. According Alba and Nee, an ethnic group is well integrated into (American) society, if its members have 1) reached a socio-economic status comparable to the majority, 2) obtained the second language, 3) were not ‘spatially concentrated’ (in other words they did not live in ghettoes), and 4) had a high percentage of intermarriages.28 If we apply these criteria to Czechs living in Austria nowadays, we find out that most of these ‘Wiener Tschechen’ have reached the standards of the Austrian majority. This may seem like a hasty conclusion; I will elaborate the situation of Czechs in Vienna further following the example of Lucassen’s description of Polish immigration to Germany. POLICY OF AUSTRIAN STATE AS A POWERFUL PULL-FACTOR The period from 1968 to 1985 favoured refugees’ integration into Austrian society. Thanks to the state’s liberal and open policy towards newcomers which helped them to settle down, the refugees started slowly to identify with their new home. As mentioned above, it seemed the refugees were welcomed from the very first step they made beyond the Iron Curtain. They were granted temporary residency by the Austrian Ministry of Interior as soon as they crossed the border and if they fulfilled the conditions given by the Geneva Conventions, they got political asylum. It is true that some of them ended in the refugee camp (Bundesbetreuungsstelle für Asylwerber) Traiskirchen, but it was only a temporary stay and the living conditions of Czechs, though not perfect, were much better than of those who left the country after the Communist coup in 1948. Moreover, after only four years of living in Austria they could apply for naturalization. The situation of signatories of Charter 77 was even better because former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky offered political asylum to all persecuted dissidents who were willing to leave Czechoslovakia. It meant when they arrived at the main station in Vienna, the Czech social democrat Přemysl Janýr, appointed by government, was waiting to assist newcomers with all necessary paperwork, and brought them to their new flat where they could temporarily stay. Bruno Aigner, the spokesman of recent Austrian president Heinz Fischer, who cooperated with Přemysl Janýr in an effort to smoothly integrate Charter signatories, told me in our interview: “It would be much more difficult today. It was not so difficult because also the bureaucracy in Austria was 27 It is estimated that the ratio of Czechs to Slovaks was 3:1, which meant there were some 8,000 Czechs and a little bit less than 3,000 Slovaks. 28 See more ALBA — NEE. 90 PRAGUE PAPERS ON THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 1/2016 OPEN ACCESS guided by the thinking of Bruno Kreisky — we have to help the people of Czechoslovakia.”29 Many of my narrators shared this experience—even though they did not speak the language, did not know anyone and had nothing or very little at the beginning—the state made them feel welcome. There were approximately 400 Czech dissidents and their family members coming to Austria.30 Moreover, in 1976, the Austrian government passed the Austrian Ethnic Groups Act (Volksgruppengesetz), which declared Czechs and Slovaks in Vienna as an ‘autochthonous Austrian ethnic group’ which, together with Hungarians, Croats, Slovenians, and Roma in Austria, was to be supported not only financially. Czechs in Vienna also got the right to establish their own Minority advisory boards to the Chancellor’s office. Due to animosity within the Czech minority, which is presented later in this paper, the foundation of the board took an incredible seventeen years. If we look at the presented information through Alexander’s concepts of solidarity, recognition, and incorporation, we see that straight after the Soviet invasion, there was a strong sense of solidarity felt by the core group (the Austrian majority) towards the newcomers and this, together with the high motivation of refugees themselves,31 helped to incorporate most of them into the ‘main stream’. LABOUR MARKET, SCHOOLING, AND SOCIAL MOBILITY According to records of the Czechoslovak State Security Service, 70% of all the people who fled were under the age of 35. They were mostly students or young families with one or two children, had higher education and were experts in their professions.32 There was a great number of what we would today call ‘white-collar workers’: managers, engineers, scientists, and many previous leaders of the suppressed Prague Spring. In combination with the Austrian economic boom and demand for labour, it was quite easy for newcomers to find a job even though some did not speak the language at all. As Gustav Libal stated: “My father went to an employment office and they sent him straight to work. Just imagine! He went to work to introduce himself for the first time and they kept him there. Today, if you say this story to someone who has been searching for work for two years. […] We weren’t a month in Austria and I had already attended school and my whole family [his father, mother, and brother, note of the author] had jobs.”33 29 Interview with Bruno Aigner. Vienna, 20 September 2013. Private Archive of the Author. 30 More information about signatories of Charter 77 in I. MEDEK, Chartisté v Rakousku, in: BASLER, pp 323–324. 31 When we analyse the reasons of their willingness to integrate, we have to look closer at the motives why they were fleeing the country — the so called ‘push factors’. According to Vladimir Kusin the motives for emigration among the people who were deciding whether to leave or not consisted of three basic factors: 1) disgust over the forcible termination of the reformist experiment; 2) fear of the turn which future events in Czechoslovakia could take, 3) and the vision of material betterment for themselves and their children. Later he also adds that a great majority would probably fall into a category embracing all three motives. See KUSIN, p. 171. 32 VALEŠ, p. 57. 33 Interview with Gustav Líbal, Vienna, 22 September 2011. Private Archive of the Author. ONdřEJ HAváč 97 OPEN ACCESS identity and integration. I applied Cooper and Brubaker’s concepts of ‘identification’ and ‘self-understanding’ to analyse deeper the various contexts of Czech refugees’ behaviour and to answer a research question, why it was more difficult for Czech refugees to integrate into existing Czech minority associations in Austria than into Austrian majority itself. KEYWORDS The Prague Spring; Charter 77; Czech Exile in Austria; the Czech Minority in Vienna; Integration; National Identity; Oral History; Identification; Self-understanding; Incorporation Ondřej Haváč ǀ Department of History, Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Masaryk University, Arna Nováka 1, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic, ha[email protected].cz