From the Biographical Narratives of Czech Germans: Language Biographies in the Family of Mr and Mrs S.

Jiří Nekvapil (Prague)

0. The article proceeds from the linguistic, social and political situation that has developed on the territory of the Czech Republic over the course of the 20th century. The biographical accounts given by people of German extraction who live in the Czech Republic form the empirical starting point. The article focuses on how they construct their language biographies. Of particular interest is how they acquired the Czech language (especially after 1945) - namely which factors in the acquisition of Czech they view as important and what their reported acquisition strategies are like. Similarly, the paper takes notice of how the German language has been preserved in the older generations of Czech Germans and the ways in which the younger generations of Czech Germans acquire German. It appears that in the construction of a language biography the relevant factor is the interactional setup of the research situation. The paper analyzes in detail the language biographies of the members of Mr and Mrs S.’s family, in particular the biography provided by Mr S. and partly also that of his wife. On the basis of their accounts, the reconstruction is made of the basic features of their parents’, children’s and grandchildren’s language biographies, i.e. those of members of three other generations. Thus the situation of one family may be used to illustrate the linguo-ethnic processes that have taken place in the Czech Republic throughout most of the 20th century.

In order to give the reader a deeper understanding of the individual (language) biographies of contemporary Czech Germans, it will be useful to mention some essential historical and demographic data. The Czechs and Germans have coexisted quite extensively on the territory of the present Czech Republic roughly since the 12th and 13th centuries. At that time a so-called German colonization of the yet uninhabited woodland and marshy areas was under way, initiated by the Czech rulers. In 1526 the Hapsburgs came into the Czech throne . In 1620 they suppressed the rebellion of the Czech noblemen. The event was followed by forced recatholicization of the country and increased Germanization which led to the dominance of German in the administrative and educational spheres. The period from the end of the 18th century until the sixties of the 19th century was marked by a process traditionally called the Czech National Revival. The revival was oriented towards greater cultural and political independence within the Hapsburg monarchy and from the very beginning it was also seen as the renaissance of the Czech language in the sense of its extended use for various social functions and its purification from the German language influence. The political ambitions of the Czechs were fulfilled in 1918 when an independent Czechoslovak Republic (Czechoslovakia) came into being as one of the successor states of the defunct Hapsburg monarchy. The motley ethnic composition of the Czechoslovak Republic was the source of frequent tensions during its existence and greatly contributed to its demise, twice in all. The tension was due especially to the relations between Czechs and Germans, Czechs and Slovaks and finally Slovaks and Hungarians. In 1938, as a result of the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia had to cede vast border areas (Sudetenland) to Nazi Germany in which the German population constituted a decided majority. In 1939 the rest of the country was occupied by Germany. The end of World War II brought the re-creation of the Czechoslovak Republic (which remained in existence until 1993 when the independent Czech Republic and the independent Slovak Republic came into being). The ethnic composition of the present Czech Republic changed radically especially after the transfer of the autochthonous German population from the borderland regions (more than 2.5 million people), which took place between 1946 and 1947 on the basis of the agreements made by the victorious powers. Demographic sources mention that in the middle of 1945 there were 2,809,000 German inhabitants living on the territory of the present Czech Republic (26.3 %). In the middle of 1947 the figure was only 180,000 (2.1 %). In the last 1991 population census 48,556 inhabitants, i.e. 0.5 % of all residents of the present Czech Republic, reported their nationality to be German (for more details see Nekvapil, 1995; Nekvapil, 1997; Nekvapil/Neustupný, 1998).

A language biography is a biographical account in which the narrator makes the language, or rather languages, the topic of his narrative - in particular the issue of how the language was acquired and how it was used. A language biography is one of the aspects of an individual’s biography, along with his professional biography, for example. Language (as well as profession) may be an important component in the construction of the ‘general’ biography of an individual, for example a good command, or conversely insufficient knowledge, of a language may be presented by the respondent as a relevant factor in choosing a partner in life. The focus of attention in this study is, on the one hand, the biographical accounts provided by the narrators themselves (language autobiography), on the other hand the language biographies of their closest relatives. The language biographies of these latter individuals are reconstructed from the accounts given by narrators presenting their autobiographies. The rationale is that language autobiographies often contain, as their natural component, the language biography of the whole family. Analysis of family language biographies is, of course, quite important for the investigation of some of the dynamic aspects of language situations.

The last statement directly relates to the problem of the cognitive potential of biographical accounts. The question is what kinds of information the analysis of (language) biographical accounts may provide, what kinds of findings we may obtain. In correspondence with the three approaches towards biographical accounts, it is possible to differentiate three types of findings (see Konopásek, 1996); the respondents’ accounts provide information regarding,

The type of findings in which the researcher is interested (or the way he states it) depends on his epistemological starting points and on his research objectives. The two may be interrelated. To give up programmatically on the first and second types of findings, i.e. to ignore the study of the ‘life reality’and that of the ‘subject reality’, may, for example, mean that the researcher will merely study narrative genres.

This study concentrates on findings particularly from the second and third spheres. That is, I am not interested only in what kind of experience the respondents had with the acquisition and use of the languages, but also how they formulate this experience and whether there exist some typical modes of presentation. Furthermore, I am interested in what language experience the respondents are capable of verbalizing at all, etc. (see Franceschini, in press; Fünfschilling, 1998). In some cases I also adopt an epistemologically naive attitude characteristic of the first approach and accept a given piece of information trustfully as a ‘real-life’ fact (for instance, when the respondent mentions that he began to study Czech at school in 1938).

I was referred to Mr and Mrs S. by Mr B. (himself a Czech German) from a nearby village. I went to see them the very same day. They agreed to tell me their story and two hours later the actual interview began (the recording took 90 minutes, resulting in 2028 lines of transcript). The research goal was to elicit their biographies as Germans living in the Czech Republic. Right at the first meeting and then at the beginning of the interview they were told that this was a sociological study of Germans in the Czech Republic. See also further specification:

E: ... and so it is about the life of, eh, German, the German population which somehow has=

S:=stayed behind [( )]

One remarkable feature is the conclusion of Mr S.’s continuous life story in the first interview (see l. 154-159):

S.: ... that’s about the whole story of our life. of my life. well like my wife said, in forty-six or so she was ev- evicted, (.) she doesn’t want to speak, she’s told me that.

E: well, no

T: [rather]

S: [because] her Czech is still not all that fluent. right

T: quite so.

It is obvious that Mr S. has a problem keeping his personal and the family biography separate. It is also worth mentioning that he quite automatically assumes the role of his wife’s biographer and once he gives reasons for assuming this communicative role he becomes her ‘spokesman’ as well (in Goffman’s sense, 1981). These factors will have to be taken into account when Mrs S.’s language biography will be reconstructed (see Section 5 below).

After this exchange (i.e. after lines 154-159) the interviewer offered Mrs S. the possibility of speaking German. This offer was given in both Czech and German. From then on, she spoke German. However, she soon left the biographical topic (l. 167-178) and spoke about the restoration of property to Czech Germans after the change in the social regime in 1989. The interviewer then tried to return the talk back to biographical issues and at the same time he changed the language code. From that moment on (l. 232), the whole interview was conducted in Czech.

At this point it should be mentioned that language is the focus of this study as the subject of narration. It is irrelevant whether the respondents speak Czech well or German well during the interview, or which variety of Czech or German they use, and also whether and how they reflect this in the interview (see above her Czech is still not all that fluent). Essentially, these linguistic aspects are unrelated to the notion of ‘language biography’ as the product of narration (in contrast to this see Meng, 1995). On the other hand, the choice of language code may be a constitutive component of the language biography, especially if the choice is closely related to the interviewer’s ethnicity (see already above).

The way in which Mrs S. learned her Czech was not mentioned in the first interview even once, while Mr S. mentions twice how he learned his Czech: the first time after a sequence in which he reported that the local council officials offered him a position representing the German minority. According to Mr S. their argument was that he speaks both Czech and German. Mr S. accepted the offer and held the office for sixteen years (i.e., until 1974). In this connection he says: but quite simply (...) I’ve got no Czech schooling. none whatsoever. I’m self-taught in Czech (l. 594)

Somewhat later he formulates his theory of successful foreign language teaching using his method of learning Czech as an example:

S: ... now look, the fact that I learned Czech, I moved only among Czechs. there was nothing else I could do but learn the language.

E: hmm

S: well and I was lucky, for I always bumped into people, who were willing to help me.

E: hmm

S: when I asked, [when I say something,]

T: [now you have to re]member too.=

S:=when I say something wrong, correct me,

E: hmm

S: and the same goes for grammar too. when I began to write in Czech, I was working in the mine and there we had boys, down from South Bohemia or some such place,

E: [hmm]

S: [so we] became friends and Peter in particular, you know,

E: hmm

S: any time when I began to write [Czech],

E: [hmm]

S: he’d say write something, and I’ll correct it for you, and so I did. well, at first he explained this and that and then he says, you know what, to hell with you, you’re you’re pretty good now, us having Czech schooling, unlike you, but we make mistakes the same as you do.

Sequentially, this passage is part of the presentation of the family language biography, or rather, the presentation of the language biographies of the family members. Note what precedes the passage. First Mr S. spoke about the language education of his sons (l. 601-627), then on the interviewer’s initiative he moved on to the generation of his grandchildren and, commenting on the communication with his granddaughter, he said:

S: we ((i.e. Mr and Mrs S.)) speak German, we tell her something in German, she goes, and does the thing perfectly, but speaks only Czech at us.

E: hmm

S: speaks Czech at us, ‘cos she know we speak Czech, so she makes no effort somehow. just recently we was in Germany, and she had a friend there and right away things were different.

Mr S. referred to this sequence a bit later on in l. 690 when he qualified the communicative competence of his sons’ wives: our daughters-in-law understand but they don’t speak either (i.e., they understand German but do not speak German).

The essential element of this theory is the impossibility of using L1. In other words, it is necessary for the individual to find himself in communicative situations where it is impossible to switch from L2 to L1 (I moved only among Czechs. there was nothing else I could do but learn the language). This actually corresponds to Mr S.’s previous statement I’ve got no Czech schooling. none whatsoever. I’m self-taught in Czech for language teaching at school in principle does make it possible to switch from L2 to L1 and often even relies on it. The following utterances of Mr S. (l. 702ff) deal explicitly only with his successful learning of Czech. In essence, Mr S. sees this process as the result of the mutual interaction of external and internal factors. On the one hand, there is the omnipresence of the ‘helpers’, L2 speakers, their willingness to help in the learning of L2, their outgoing activities (write something, and I’ll correct it for you, and so I did). On the other hand, Mr S. also presents his own activities as relevant to the process of acquiring Czech - note that it is he himself who asks for help in learning some of the features of Czech. Naturally, it is interesting to know what type of assistance he required. Mr S. identifies help with correction, both in the spoken language (when I say something wrong, correct me) and in the written language (mistakes). What Mr S. means by grammar (l. 708) is not clear from the utterance.

The basic element in Mr S.’s theory of foreign language learning, namely the impossibility of using L1, grows out of the specific situation of the Czech Germans after World War II (see more on this below).

The research aim of the second interview was the elicitation of the language biography of Mr S. The second interview was arranged by telephone two days in advance. I reminded him who I was and then, according to the subsequent field notes, the following sequence took place:

E: this time I would like to know, how you learned Czech.

S: that’s very simple. I learned it myself.

E: but I’d like you to tell me more about it.

At the beginning of the visit Mr S. said that it was going to be short. He meant by this the subject of the interview which I mentioned to him in our telephone conversation. He repeated this immediately before the tape recorder was switched on (the recording took 45 minutes, i.e. 1020 lines of transcript).

The transcript of the initial part of the interview (l. 1-89) will be now presented in full. At the very outset the interviewer mentions the tape recording of the first interview and comments on Mr S.’s excellent knowledge of Czech. This strategic compliment is one of the last impulses used to elicit Mr S.’s language biography. Notice that Mr S. tells the story with hardly any prompting and that he clearly marks off the beginning and the end of his narration. Hence his narration may give us a certain idea of how such ‘language biographies’ are produced as a narrative genre.

E: fine ((laughter)) I’d I’d I would like to know, eh, that when I listened to that to that recording with you, that, you know your Czech was absolutely marvellous, =

S.=well=

E:=so the question simply, simply suggests itself. like how, (.) how did it come about. (.) in your case.=

S:=I tell everybody, eh (.) I am self-taught. (.) in Czech.

E: hmm,

S: and yet I’ve got no Czech schooling at all, (..) yeah [I know] how to pronounce and everything (.)

E: [hmm]

S: in general well,

E: hmm,

S: but I can’t explain cases

E hmm, [hmm] [hmm]

S: [like] ‘cos I have no schooling. that’s sim[ply that] I never learned how. but I know exactly how to say it but=

E:=hmm.

S: (.) I don’t know which case exactly this one or that one is. you know.

E: hmm,

S: a great many people comes over here asking me to teach them German,

E: hmm,=

S:= yeah (.) and again those cases are my weak spot.

E: hmm,= [hmm,]

S: =yeah, [so] I simply can’t, (.) say what’s what and that’s. (.) and how I taught myself. well. (.) in thirty-eight, (..) we started at school with, e:h (.) two classes a week of Czech. (.) the teacher himself had no Czech. right, (.) he knew (.) he knew only from books things like lamp pump gum tulip,=

E:=hmm,=

S:=and there were pictures alongside, and so in this way (.) this was how we started. (.) then (..) in thirty- thirty-eight when (.) he occupied, (..)

E:hmm=

S:=Hitler, didn’t he, (.) Sudetenland,

E: hmm,

S: so Czech was out. (.) stands to reason, (.) and until forty-five nothing. (.)

E: [hmm hmm]

S: [and there I] stood, (.) just (..) knew just a little bit. (.) but the rest I had to learn. (.) I went to the country, (.) the farmers, and in this way, (.)

E: hmm,

S: then I obt- got a job, (.) in forty-seven with a bloke by the name of Dejmek in Kamenice, (.)

he was in the concentration camp, but e:h

E: hmm,

S: that’s not to say that he e:h would [say] anything against me,

E: [hmm,]

S: or lemme put this like, (.) he had (.) four kids, (.)

E: (hmm,)=

S: =well and they just helped me to improve (.) my Czech. I always asked, and was glad when they obliged me, (.) when they corrected me, (.) well and when there was something I didn’t know I went to ask, then little by little I began to read too, (.)

E: hmm, [hmm,]

S: yeah, [some] papers some literature and so on, (.) this way I got better, then I had to go to the Czech army as well, (.)

E: hmm,

S: yeah (.) there I served, (..) as (..) one of the unreliables=

E: = hmm=

S: =in the despised AATC, ((Army Auxiliary Technical Corps)) =

E := hmm, ((laughter))=

S: =yeah, (.) began to work in mines,

E: hmm,=

S: =those in Ostrava, was in Orlová (.) [in the] Žofinka and Zápotocký collieries (.) well and

E: [hmm,]

S: after the army (.) I signed the contract (.) just when they vetted me then however, (.) only because I did, (.) sign for three years, (.)

E: hmm,

S: the temporary job, (.) in the mine.

E: hmm, hmm,

S: well and [then I went to]

T: [I don’t know] eh-eh-eh is that our? (.) tea, but what it’s goin’ to do I don’t know.

E: hmm. (.) [fine] well

T: [look] at it. it don’t colour much.

E: oh thanks.=

S : =there I was lucky to join a good workgang, again boys eh from around České Budějovice, (.) from South Bohemia, (..) yeah, (.) and they (.) spelling simply I began to write something too, (.)

E: hmm,=

S: =always gave it to them, one mate, (.) Peter (.) Pytelka by name (.)

E: hmm, [thanks]

S: I gave to [him,] saying Peter. (.) have a look, (.) correct the mistakes for me, will ye,

E: hmm,=

S: =well he simply done it somehow, and says, look (.) man (.) after some time he says. (.) we’ve got Czech schooling, we (.) knows it too but (.) but we do make a mistake here and there just as well=never mind the mistakes. you just go on writing. (.) and so I began- and even today I’m not a hundred per cent sure I won’t make a mistake. (.)

E: hmm, hmm=

S: =so I just got e:h even better there. (..) well and within those three years I was there, (.)

E: [hmm]

S: [so] it went just fine, (.) and then when I finished there, I started here in Lhotka, (.)

E: hmm,

S: me and my wife went to work=got married in the meantime, (.)

E: hmm,

S: and settled down in Lhotka until we retired. (.)

E: hmm, hmm,

S: well, that’s just it (.) it’s as simple as that and (.)

E: hmm, hmm,=

S:= yeah. fine

We shall now discuss some other aspects of the above account. We can see that Mr S. presents the subject of language in close connection with his ‘general’ biography. Towards the end, his narration contains even some typical general biographic features which are completely irrelevant to the topic, i.e. language, and Mr S. does not even present them as such (me and my wife went to work, got married in the meantime, and settled down in Lhotka until we retired).

Consistent with the first interview, Mr S. begins his language biography with the self-categorizing statement I tell everybody, eh (.) I am self-taught. (.) in Czech. Then he goes on saying: and I’ve got no Czech schooling at all. This basically establishes the fact that he can speak Czech but is incapable of linguistic analysis. Mr S. formulates this in the following way: I know how to pronounce and everything (.) in general well but I can’t explain cases. What, exactly, he means by the cases mentioned several times and the difficulties with them is not clear (the same applies to his use of grammar in the first interview ). We may only speculate that he has in mind the rich inflectional system of Czech which foreigners commonly find difficult or some of the frequent spelling phenomena correlating in Czech with specific cases (see his mention of how he learned to write Czech) or the different valency of the Czech and the German verbs, etc. In correspondence with the self-categorization I am self-taught in Czech Mr S. presents his first steps in learning Czech as marginal: his first teacher of Czech did not speak it, and confined himself basically to teaching vocabulary (later on in l. 171 Mr S. says: any kind of sentence formation or something like that was out of question. nothing but words). Then great historical events encroached on his language biography. On the one hand, they were responsible for the stagnation of the elements of Czech he had learned (so Czech was out. (.) stands to reason, (.) and until forty-five nothing). On the other hand, they resulted in his finding himself, immediately after World War II and the years to folow, in many types of purely Czech environments in which his L1 was not spoken (see, for example, then I had to go to the Czech army as well). Mr S. sums up his (language) biographical situation of that time in a statement: I knew just a little bit. (.) but the rest I had to learn. The way in which Mr S. presents his learning of Czech after 1945 is consistent (and in part almost identical) with his account during the first interview. He only supplements the list of factors which he regards as relevant by mentioning his newspaper and literature reading.

In general it may be concluded that to Mr S., his successful mastering of Czech appears to be transparent and easy to understand. It is a ‘simple’ process: it’s as simple as that is how he finishes his continuous narration. That’s very simple is his reaction on the telephone when he is asked to speak into a tape recorder microphone about how he learned Czech. After all, there is not much to tell - that will be short was his warning which preceded the actual interview.

Now we shall focus on how Mr S. responds to some of the interviewer’s additional questions after the continuous narrative. In answering the question of whether he had had some experience with Czech in the family, Mr S. reported that his brother was on an exchange in a Czech-speaking environment (a swap as they used to call it once) and, similarly, that one Czech boy was in their family to learn German. At this point Mr S. added: and so after hearing it around a bit of Czech did rub off on me. (..) somehow. He made a similar assessment of the influence of the fact that the German school he went to was for one or two years attended by Czech boys for the purpose of learning German. Mr S. comments on this: well, now and then a word or two got picked up, but it’s all gone in the meantime. Notice that Mr S. presents this method of learning Czech as something in which he had no status of agent, as something to which he was passively exposed. This method of mastering Czech, characteristic of the formation of ‘marginal language competence’ (Franceschini, in press) is in contrast with Mr S.’s active approach after 1945. At the same time it does not contradict his claim that he is a self-taught speaker of Czech. As a matter of fact, this corresponds with his other claim: my dad too spoke it (i.e. Czech) only in part. Mr S. spoke of the negligible role of his father in his learning of Czech even in the first interview: mother did not speak Czech at all. father knew a couple of words. It follows from this that only German was spoken at home.

As we have seen in the first interview (l. 154-159) narration presents a problem for Mrs S. It is due to her Czech being worse than Mr S.’s Czech (it is particularly evident in her pronunciation and morphology). That is why Mr S. speaks more frequently while Mrs S. does not produce lengthy sequences. In terms of communicativeness, Mr S. is also far more cooperative - this was even apparent in the passages of the first interview that were conducted in German. The interviewer accepted these facts in the course of the first interview and included them in the subsequent investigation. The formulation of the research task of the second and the third interview concerned only Mr S. and the interviews were arranged with him. Also, it should be mentioned that sometimes Mrs S. was not present during the recording of the interviews (see the passage with tea being served in the second interview). Because of these circumstances, the language biography of Mrs S. also had to be reconstructed from the account given by Mr S.

Mrs S. entered the second interview after the interviewer’s first additional question in which he was checking the year when Mr S. began to learn Czech at school. Both husband and wife agreed that their first encounter with Czech at school was in 1937, 1938 (l. 94-106). It may be added that the same memories of their childhood are made possible by the fact that both come from the same region (from nearby villages) and that Mr S. is only two years older than Mrs S. (they did not, however, attend the same school). Immediately afterwards Mrs S. mentions an almost identical language experience to that which had already appeared in the language biography of Mr S. She says: what I know from school is just lamp pump gum null (l. 109). Also other points in the analyzed interview indicate that up to 1945 the language biography of Mrs S. was very much the same as that of her husband. After 1945, however, there is one differentiating factor in their language biographies: different conditions for the learning of Czech. This can be an explanation of why Mrs S.’s linguistic competence in Czech is lower than her husband’s. Mr S. comments on this along the lines of his theory of successful foreign language learning as follows:

E. hmm hmm (...) and what about your wife. (..)

S: my wife is a similar case, (.) only she had more (.) possibilities here (.) among the German folks (.) to speak German. (.) she was not forced to have to learn Czech like this. (.) see in this house (.) there was a lot of (.) mostly Germans, (.) transferred, (.), yeah, into this house and they worked in Lhotka (.) in the factory.

E: hmm hmm

S: so she simply didn’t need that much. (.) in the shop while doing some shopping and all that (.) she managed that all right later on. yeah, (.) but the beginnings were not good either. and she still ( ) even today.

E: well

S: you can hear it yourself when she speaks,=

E: =hmm=

S: =that she just isn’t so (.) fluent.

In brief, after 1945 Mrs S. did not live in an all-Czech environment; she had enough opportunity to speak her mother tongue and that was why she did not learn to speak Czech as well as Mr S.

Mr S. places his own language biography in a network of many social links. Naturally, his autobiography is integrated into the family language biography. Even Mrs S., narratively less active, contributes to its construction. In terms of contents, a characteristic feature of the language biography of Mr and Mrs S.’s family is, in particular, the language education of the children and grandchildren (see above). From a formal point of view, the narrator’s use of plural forms is symptomatic for the construction of a family biography (the narrator refers to himself as ‘we’), although it need not always be the case.

It should be remembered that Mr S. was born in 1926, Mrs S. in 1928. Their first son Horst was born in 1953 and the second son Kurt in 1959. The first thing to notice is that both their sons were given German first names that have no Czech forms (as is basically the case with such German names as Hans, Ernst with the Czech equivalents Jan, Arnošt, etc.).

Mr S. presents the language education of his children as something which the family discussed and which was planned. Husband and wife considered their own linguistic competence in Czech and their own experience in learning foreign languages (see Mr S.’s theory mentioned above). They also took into account the linguistic competence of Mrs S.’s mother who often minded their children (grandmother’s Czech was almost non-existent).

S: =we were (.) when eh the children came, (.) the first-born was Horst, (..) so we were telling ourselves, well (.) eh to teach him bad (.) Czech. (.) that would be a bad thing.

E: hmm

S: he’d better speak proper German, ‘cos he’ll learn Czech among (.) children (.) in no time at all.

E: hmm

S: and that’s what happened. (..) there was this (.) kindergarten teacher, (.) I went to see her when (.) he was old enough to go to the kindergarten, and (.) I said. (.) look here. (.) that’s the way it is with him, he doesn’t speak Czech too well yet, (.) and she says Mr Siegl don’t you worry, (.) I’ll teach him and so she did (.)

Mr and Mrs S. spoke German to each other and they still do. They have always used German when speaking to their sons. However, the family has used and still uses two varieties of German. Mr and Mrs S. have always spoken a dialect between themselves but they use standard German when speaking to their sons. This was a strategy common in other families of Czech Germans. The reason for this was the non-existence of German schools after 1945 - standard German thus could be handed down to the next generation of Czech Germans as a valued cultural legacy only in a family environment.

The sons of Mr and Mrs S., Horst and Kurt, have actively learned standard German which after 1989 (a year of a radical social change in the country) made it possible for them to become representatives of foreign companies in the Czech Republic. They have a passive knowledge of the local German dialect, the basic means of communication of their parents. Both of them speak excellent Czech. Both have married Czech girls. Their wives have only a passive knowledge of German. In Horst’s and Kurt’s families the language of communication is Czech. Their children’s mother tongue is Czech. For their children, German, like English, is a ‘foreign language’ which they study at school, in a regional town where both families live. When the sons come to visit their parents in the village of K., Mr and Mrs S. try to change this situation. Mr S. formulates it in the following way: our grandsons well, (.) we try to teach them German too (l. 306).

The third interview was conducted completely in German. It was arranged over the telephone by a German student of Slavic studies who was in Prague on a half-year study visit. She arranged the interview for the purposes of her work on a sociological project. On the telephone, as the general subject of the study, she first gave ethnic minorities in the Czech Republic and then immediately specified it as the issue of language: the topic is eh primarily language for instance how things were going in your life. She recorded a 40-minute interview on the tape recorder (totalling 1070 lines of transcript).

Right at the beginning of the interview Mr S. tried to find out the purpose of the interview: you probably feared that we didn’t speak correct German, didn’t you? The interviewer resolutely denied this and in answer to what it was all about she said: it would be nice if you could tell me how you live with both languages, what it was like when you were a child and then at work. how and where, for example, you learned Czech and when you spoke German.

The following course of the whole interview is largely similar to that of the first and second interviews. Also in this interview Mr S. continuously retells the required story (l. 74-269) and distinctly marks off its beginning and end (beginning: so the basic elements of my Czech were (.), end: well that was largely eh roughly everything about how I learned Czech). Mr S. presents his language biography in very much the same way as in the previous interviews: it contains the same social environments, the same people appear in it, doing the same activities. It is possible to find here the same or very similar quotes from the utterances made by these people, and also the activities of Mr S. himself are greatly reiterated here. There are not great differences in the comments and assessments included in Mr S.’s narrative, either. Formally, Mr S.’s German wording is often reminiscent of his Czech formulations in the first and the second interview. To the factors which affected his acquisition of Czech, Mr S. added only his interpreting activities. He was asked to function as an interpreter during the exchanges of workers (freundschaftsaustausch) between the company where he worked and a company in East Germany (in Zittau).

However, there is one thing which is characteristic of the third interview. Although Mr S. speaks mostly about his learning of Czech in the third interview (see the introductory and final sentence of his continuous narration) but this time he makes it obvious to a great extent that his successful mastering of Czech was not at the expense of German, unlike in the case of many other Czech Germans. Why he did not do this in the first or the second interview may, in my view, be explained by two circumstances which affected the tenor of the whole interview. First, the interviewer, in discussing the subject of the interview, mentioned that she was interested in both languages (see above). - Mr S., as it were, fulfilled this task in those utterances which predominantly had the form of a narrative: it was only in 1948 that me and my wife met, and then we did not hesitate to eh speak German. Nevertheless, the specificity of the subject of the interview alone is hardly enough to explain the stocktaking nature of some of the utterances: ... and I have never forgotten German nor will I ever forget it. The second thing which influenced the course of the interview is, I believe, the fact that the interviewer was an ethnic German, living in Germany and coming from Germany. Mr S. knows this well and in many places makes an effort to demonstrate his relatedness to the ethnic group which the interviewer in a given communicative situation represents. Characteristic in this connection is the following bon mot which Mrs S. introduced to support her husband: sometimes when they ((i.e. Czechs)) hear us speak German together, they ask ‘do you also speak German?’ and my husband answers, ‘no I also speak Czech.’ (wie manchmal wenn sie ((i.e. Czechs)) uns zusammen sprechen hö ren deutsch, fangen sie an ‘du kannst auch deutsch?’ dann fä ngt der mann an, ‘nee ich kann auch tschechisch.’). Mrs S. documents by this bon mot what was already suggested above: Mr S. has mastered Czech to perfection but remains (Czech) German.

The course of the interview was influenced not only by some of the basic features of the interviewer’s ‘general’ biography (see above), but also by her language biography. In the second half of the interview the interviewer described how she had studied Czech and thereby elicited further aspects of Mr S.’s language biography.

It was impossible in this paper to deal exhaustively with all interpretationally relevant aspects of the (language) biographies of Mr and Mrs S. The things which were left aside include, for instance, the fact that Mr S. is originally a farmer, that at the age of seventeen he was conscripted into the German army and that as a German soldier he came to Hungary where he learned a bit of Hungarian. Likewise it was omitted that in the early fifties Mr S. as a Czechoslovak citizen had to serve in the Czechoslovak army where he began to learn Russian. Of similar interpretational relevance is the fact that after he left the colliery he spent the following 34 years (until his retirement) working in a textile mill in eastern Bohemia (together with his wife) and the fact that his father was a village cobbler, etc., etc.

Mr S.’s interviews can be used to demonstrate that the account of one’s language is firmly embedded in the ‘general’ biography of an individual. We noticed that in order to make his language-biography narration coherent Mr S. even resorts to the use of the typical structural elements of a ‘general’ life story. That does not mean, though, that language biographies do not have their own specific features. They can be discovered even in Mr S.’s accounts. The way Mr S. presents his language biography, however, is not characteristic only for Czech Germans. The same structural elements, ‘patterns of language-biography narrative’, can be found in narratives dealing with German-Italian language contact in Switzerland (Fünfschilling, mimeo). To give one example: we noticed that Mr S. often mentions people, native speakers of Czech who were quite willing to help him with his learning of Czech (in the third interview he even stresses that they were good people). This language-biographical pattern is often encountered in the narratives recorded in Switzerland (Franceschini, 1998).

Clearly, it will be the task of the following research to find out to what extent language-biography accounts are a universal narrative genre. At the same time, however, it is important to realize that the same patterns are used in the context of various social conditions and therefore may carry considerably different sociological information. It should be remembered that what Mr S. actually does is to single out his good people from the great number of those Czech people and institutions who took part in the discrimination of the Czech Germans after World War II. Note also that the starting point of Mr S.’s theory of the successful learning of foreign languages is the post-war situation of the Czech Germans in Czechoslovakia, namely the impossibility of using their mother tongue in a number of communicative spheres.

The language-biography narratives under review are closely related to the political development that has taken place on the territory of the present Czech Republic, primarily in its linguo-ethnic dimension. We noticed that the linguo-ethnic development which Mr and Mrs S.’s family passed through was unusually dynamic - its essence can be summed up in one sentence: Mr and Mrs S. programmatically resisted the assimilation pressure from the majority Czech society, but the generation of their grandchildren has already succumbed to it in full. The research conducted so far suggests that this development was in many respects typical of the Czech Germans (see Nekvapil, 2000).

This study focused on the ‘language management’ mainly at the level of an individual and the family (on the levels of language management see Neustupný, mimeo). We were able to see that the family represents a specific level which may, to a considerable degree, remain independent of the language management enforced by government institutions. This independence, however, is never absolute, or permanent.

The language biographies analyzed in this study are arranged in two basic ways characteristic of family biographies. The first is the arrangement according to the principle of successiveness (parents - children, grandparents - grandchildren), the second is based on the principle of parallelism (husband - wife, brothers and sisters). We were able to see that the greatest number of differential elements occurred in the language biographies along the grandparents - grandchildren axis and the least number in the sibling - sibling one. It is not possible to deduce from this, however, that parallel arrangement is a predictor of more homogeneous biographies. A relatively large number of differential elements occurred also in the language biographies of the husband - wife pair (it was evident that the measure of differentiation depended on generation membership).

This study also touches on another type of biography constellation which rarely comes within the scope of specialists’ attention in empirical research, namely the interviewer - narrator (respondent) pair. We noticed how the interviewer’s biography influenced the biographical account provided by the respondent. This influence was made clear in the third interview but the basic features of the biography of the first interviewer, an ethnic Czech, member of an ethnic majority, etc., was no doubt of relevance in the first and second interviews as well. On the other hand, it is not possible to claim that the ethnicity of the interviewers influenced the language-biography narratives in any essential way. Mr S.’s accounts in all three interviews showed a great degree of similarity and consistence.

It may therefore be concluded that the summary effects of passage of time, presentation of the research objectives and the ethnicity of the interviewers (plus the related fact of the language of interview) were of only limited force.

I am grateful to Zdeněk Konopásek, Nicole Richter, Tamah Sherman, and Josef Štochl for their helpful comments at various stages in the development of this paper.

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