Honorary Citizens
It is natural that specific groups and communities of people reward those individuals who have made a particular contribution to the good of the group or community. This gratitude may take a material form or may be expressed in the form of some kind of honour. In the days when the people of a given town were under the rule of feudal lords and later, administrative authorities, the assessment and rewarding of the good works was the privilege of the rulers or their officers. In the case of several mayors of Cieszyn, for instance, their acts of public service, which benefited the town and at the same time the ruling powers, were rewarded with noble titles.
The later administrative authorities, too, made use of various honorary ways of rewarding acts of great service to the town and its people. Thus, in 1809, Father Leopold Jan Szersznik, the headmaster of the Cieszyn gymnasium, was rewarded with the title of honorary Cieszyn rector and the right to wear a crucifix on a gold chain for his public service and for having founded the museum and public library. In 1815 Father Józef Paduch, at that time a vicar in Cieszyn, received a gold medal for his great sacrifice and service in military field hospitals during the most recent war.
But it was the Springtime of Nations and the imperial decree of 17 March 1849, the “Temporary statute of municipalities”, recognising municipalities as specific legal entities which changed the situation. From then on, in the countries making up the Austrian Monarchy, and therefore in Cieszyn Silesia also, municipalities were permitted to express their gratitude to those who had contributed by their service to the development of the community by awarding them the title of “honorary citizen”. The authorities in Cieszyn, only a few months after the above decree had been announced, first made use of this privilege, bestowing the title of honorary citizen on Herman Pokorny the outgoing commissioner, who was leaving Cieszyn to assume a more senior position. In the following ten years that followed that honour was awarded twice more, on these occasions to men of the cloth; the headmaster of the gymnasium, Josef Kraus; and Józef Paduch.
Meaningful change in municipal self-government only really took place after the political changes in the years 1859-61 and after the introduction of the local government system under the so-called February Decree of 26 February 1861. Those affected by the decree were fully aware of its significance, including members of Cieszyn local authority elected according to the decree’s principles. Two weeks before the first anniversary of the February Decree’s ratification at a sitting of the communal Council on 14 February 1862, the deputy mayor, councillor Josef Schramm, who was running the meeting, put forward a proposal (no doubt agreed beforehand with Mayor Demel) that the anniversary should be celebrated formally by conferring the title of honorary citizen on several individuals who had performed acts of great service to the state. He mentioned minister von Schmerling; president of the House of Representatives and district starosta Johann von Larisch; former governor of Moravia, Josef von Kalchberg and “fighter for Austria’s greatness” Dr. Carl Giskra. It was resolved to confer the title on the main author of the decree, von Schmerling.
It was only in the following year that official regulations were announced defining from then on the basis on which the title of honorary citizen could be conferred in Austrian Silesia. These were the “Municipalities Act” of 5 March 1862 and the Statute of the Silesia Sejm in Opava of 15 November 1863 which implemented the commune regulations and the electoral law in the communes for Austrian Silesia. In this act there were the basic regulations concerning the functioning of local government in the towns and countryside. The commune regulations for Austrian Silesia stated in paragraph 8 that communes could give honorary citizenship to individuals who had particularly earned it and were Austrian citizens. Honorary citizens possessed all the rights of members of a commune, without their duties (paragraph 9), and the authority to confer this honour rested with the commune’s Council (paragraph 33, point 2).
The towns in Austrian Silesia which gained the position of statutory towns, e.g. Opava, Bielsko, Frýdek, more precisely defined the rights and responsibilities of honorary citizens in their Statutes. Cieszyn did not possess its own statute and the practice of awarding the title of honorary citizen was based on general criteria, in other words the above mention “Communes Act”. It was thus conferred on the basis of a resolution of the commune Council, as a proposal by the Executive Board, but more often by individual councillors. In the case of individuals from outside Cieszyn it was always linked to a particular event or reason, while in the case of local people most often the title of honorary citizen was awarded for work for the good of the town over a long period of time. Resolutions in such cases were almost always passed unanimously, and in only one case, that of Father Jerzy Prutek, after a heated discussion was the resolution passed with a majority of only two votes. Sometimes the potential candidate was asked beforehand if they intended to accept the honour.
The resolution concerning the awarding of the title of honorary citizenship of Cieszyn was of course registered in the minutes and then confirmed by the issue of a special diploma. It was sent to the recipient of the title and in addition to information about the awarding of the title and general thanks for their service to the town it contained detailed information about the most important achievements underlying the award. The wording of the diploma was at first extremely grandiloquent, and special writers were employed to write them. Paul Lamatsch von Warnemunde, a local government servant but also an amateur historian and poet who enjoyed wide respect at that time, was asked to compose the text of the diploma for Count Schmerling. The Council set up a special commission consisting of three doctors of law; Alfred Rosner, Roman Schuster and Leopold Drößler, along with the printer Karl Prochaska and Anton Peter (who incidentally toiled away at their job for almost two years) to compose the text for the diploma conferring honorary citizenship on Mayor Johann Demel. In later years the text of the diplomas evolved towards standard simplified, bureaucratic wording. Diplomas being awarded to VIPs were in addition elaborately decorated, for example the one for Count Schmerling was prepared by the artist, Edward Świerkiewicz, and the clerk, J. Kożusznik.
The actual presentation of the diplomas was the crowning moment of the whole procedure of conferring the title of honorary citizen of Cieszyn. Recipients who were Cieszyn residents were awarded them at the next sitting of the Town Council or the next important event in the town’s calendar. A special deputation was made up of members of the Council and the Executive Board, headed by the mayor or deputy mayor to award diplomas to people from outside Cieszyn. This deputation would visit the recipient and award the diploma on an appointed date and time.
That was, in the main, the procedure of conferring honorary citizenship on an individual, but in particular cases extra features were added. In the case of Mayor Demel in 1882, the Town Council voted to affix a neon sign on his house with the wording “Hoch dem verdienstvollen Menne”. This decision was linked to the fact that Demel was being awarded with the title of honorary citizen at the time of the opening of the gasworks, in which undertaking he had played a crucial role. In the evening of the 30th September the town orchestra played a serenade outside Demel’s house, and representatives of the Town Council led by the senior member Dr Schuster came to honour him. At the same time the Town Council reiterated and passed an earlier resolution of 1866 according to which a portrait in oils of Mayor Demel was to be hung in the Council Chamber. The deputy mayor, Johann Hoschek was charged with commissioning the painting from a Viennese portrait painter. Demel’s portrait, by an academic painter and commune councillor in Vienna, J. M. Aigner, was hung in the Council Chamber in the Town Hall on 1 May 1884 and approved by the Town Council at its next sitting on 11 May 1884. It later became the tradition to commission portraits of other honorary citizens of Cieszyn. They were exhibited in the room beyond the Council Chamber, where they could still be seen before the Second World War.
Awarding the title of honorary citizen to Cieszyn residents or individuals from outside became a way that the town’s representatives could express their appreciation for the exceptional service to the town and its community by those individuals. However it obliged those representatives to take a long-term interest in the people so awarded. This was manifested in various ways; telegrams and cards were sent on special occasions and holidays, and on the anniversaries celebrated by the honorary citizens. Their deaths were announced at the first possible meeting of the Council, when a minute’s silence was observed, and an official delegation from the town’s authorities attended their funerals. On two occasions the town covered the cost of the funerals of honorary citizens of Cieszyn, the funerals of Father Jerzy Prutek and Mayor Johann Demel. During the funeral procession the deceased’s diploma of honorary citizenship was carried aloft, as one of their worthy distinctions. Ownership of the title was also mentioned in the town’s address directories.
On the other hand the award of honorary citizenship encouraged the recipients to further good works in aid of the local community, most often in the form of financial contributions. Jerzy Prutek offered further grants to help Cieszyn’s young people with their education, for which he received another diploma with thanks from the town’s authorities.
In the ninety years covering the period 1849-1939 there were over thirty confirmed examples of individuals being awarded the title of honorary citizen of Cieszyn. On average such a resolution was passed every few years, so not particularly frequently. In fact Mayor Rudolf Halfar referred to this fact in 1937 as a principle worth adhering to. In general, two categories of people were honoured in this way. Firstly non-residents who were awarded the title with respect to their position, and with the possible benefit for the town in mind. Then there were those from Cieszyn or the locality who had contributed to the development of the town in specific ways. This may have been in the fields of education or charity, because of some form of investment, or by virtue of a long period of work for local government. There were considerably more belonging to the latter category. In one case, that of Count Larisch, the title was conferred within the context of a wider campaign organised by all the towns of Cieszyn Silesia. Towards the end of Austrian rule, and particularly during the First World War, the decision to give the title was undoubtedly driven by political considerations.
It ought to be added that in 1994 Cieszyn Town Council, on the strength of resolution LXI/445/94 dated 28 April 1994, returned to the former tradition and re-asserted the title of “Honorary citizen of Cieszyn”. This time around it was to be awarded to those people, “who with regard to their life’s achievements and their link with Cieszyn have brought fame and honour on the town”. The first person to be awarded the title in this way (and on the same day as the resolution was passed) was Professor Richard Pipes, born in Cieszyn in 1923, a historian, a member of the faculty at Harvard University and an advisor to President Ronald Reagan on Russia and Central Europe; and American-Soviet relations. On 26 September 1996 the Town Council voted to award the title of honorary citizen to Dr Jerzy Rucki, born in the village of Jaworzynka, resident in Lucerne, Switzerland, founder of the ethnographical Museum Na Grapie in Jaworzynka and initiator of the partnership programme between Cieszyn and Lucerne.
A full version of this article appeared in the publication 500 lat Ratusza i Rynku w Cieszynie 1496-1996, edited by I. Panic and M. Makowski, Cieszyn 1996, pp. 83-110.