This web page introduces the reader to Czech history and informs about present-day social activities that address the historical legacy of the post-war expulsion of German ethnic minorities.
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I wrote this outline in 1997, as a historical introduction to the book that I had planned to write on the basis of my Czech life stories project. The knowledge it conveys is taken from the following secondary sources:
Today's Czech Republic consists of two historic territories – Bohemia (or Czechia) in the west and Moravia in the east. Bohemia is a topographic bowl, hilly borders enclosing a fertile lowland. The river Elbe (Labe in Czech) drains the bowl and makes a narrow breach in the natural borders as it flows north-westwards through the German Saxonies to Hamburg and the North Sea. Moravia is by contrast drained south- eastwards, her rivers flowing to the Danube, and her lowlands providing a wide opening from Lower Austria and the Hungarian plane. During Roman times, these parts of the barbaric northern abroad were inhabited at first by Celts (during the last four centuries BC) and later by a succession of Germanic tribes. One of the Celtic tribes, the Bojs, gave the Romans a reason to name these parts Bohemia; it is doubtful, however, that the territory the name then designated was defined with any precision. The Germanic tribes that replaced the Celts can be credited with coining another relevant place name - Moravia (Mähren in German, meaning marches). Again, however, a precise territorial definition of Moravia would emerge several hundred years later, during the eleventh century.
Slavic tribes arrived in the sixth century, after a migratory epic that probably originated in the Dnieper basin, north of the Black Sea. In the ninth century one of their chiefs achieved territorial control to a degree where a Byzantine writer later felt moved to mention a Great Moravian Empire in his records. Byzantium played a significant role in Moravian affairs during the 860s, when two of its monks, Cyril and Methodius, set up a Christian mission at the invitation of a Moravian prince. They translated the Bible and liturgy from Greek into Slavonic, having devised a special phonetic alphabet for the purpose. The Moravian power, however, lasted hardly a hundred years. It crumbled under pressure from the Magyars, the recently arrived masters of the Hungarian plane, at the beginning of the tenth century. In any case, it is not known with any certainty what its territorial extent was at its zenith.
Bohemia and Moravia became well defined principalities during the rise of the Premyslid dynasty. These rulers took care to accept patronage from Frankish kings. They let Rome set up a bishopric in Prague under the Archbishop of Meinz in the tenth century and expelled any remaining Eastern monks, with their special Slavonic alphabet, in the next. That made their lands a part of the Holy Roman Empire. In the twelfth century, their loyalty to successive Holy Roman Emperors earned them an advancement from the rank of princes to that of kings. By that time, the Premyslids' dynastic hold on Moravia as well as Bohemia was such that the Moravian margraviate was recognised by the Holy Roman Empire as belonging to the Czech crown lands.
The establishment of the Premyslid state was not accompanied by any economic boom. The country always had prosperous agriculture, but Bohemia in particular was topographically too isolated from the main carrier of long-distance trade, the Danube, to have much chance of becoming a bustling economic power. In the thirteenth century, however, the mining of silver caused an economic upturn which made the Premyslids rich. They extended their domains well beyond the core lands, became Electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, and eventually contestants for the imperial throne. That, however, swelled the ranks of powerful rivals and enemies. One ambitious Premyslid king died in battle, his young successor by an assassin's hand. All of a sudden, the dynasty was at its end. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, after a lot of complications, the kingdom's nobles elected a powerful Luxembourg to take the crown.
The second Luxembourg on the Czech throne gave the kingdom its golden age. Charles IV. (reigned 1346-1378) was a Holy Roman Emperor who made Bohemia his home and strove to advance the kingdom into a power of first-rate importance. He got the Pope to promote the Prague diocese into an archbishopric; supported this important church-political move by establishing a university; enlarged the capital by founding Prague New Town; commissioned a number of magnificent building projects; and revised imperial rules to give the King of Bohemia the foremost secular rank among the seven imperial Electors.
Charles's statecraft proved much less lasting a legacy than his great construction projects. By the end of his son's prolonged but inept reign, the country was plunged into a civil war. It all started with the writings of John Wyclif, an Oxford theologian and a critic of Church affairs. They had an inspirational impact on some of the Prague University faculty including Jan Hus. He became the university's rector with the king's help, but continued to preach against Church corruption even after the king's withdrawal of support left him exposed to papal displeasure. In 1415 Hus went to face the music at a Church General Council session at Constanz, where he was confirmed a heretic and burnt at stake. His martyrdom gave rise to a powerful movement back home. Hussite priests practised a modified liturgy with a chalice as its symbol, in which they were supported by the nobles as well as the poor. The nobles perceived the treatment meted out to Hus as a threat to their autonomy from imperial power, at a time when the issue of succession to the Czech throne loomed again. The poor were inspired by teachings that railed against Church wealth and privilege. The Hussites forced vicars who didn't serve the chalice-type liturgy out of their parishes while papal loyalists tried to force the opposite. In 1419 Hussite protest marchers massacred and defenestrated the Catholic councillors of Prague's New Town. The event coincided with the king's death and a struggle for succession. Sigismund of Luxembourg, who already was the Holy Roman Emperor, raised a crusade army to quell the anti-papal rebellion and secure his own succession claim at the same time. The Hussites, however, proved excellent in defensive battles and kept control of the country for another fifteen years. It took a papal offer which drove a wedge between their moderate and radical wings to end their often triumphant defiance. The moderates defeated the radicals in battle and negotiated a peace which confirmed Sigismund on the Czech throne in return for papal toleration of the chalice-type (utraquist) liturgy.
Sigismund, however, died within a year and it could be said that no king, whether a Luxembourg, a Podiebrad, a Jagiellon or a Habsburg, achieved much dominance over the nobles during almost 200 years following. Although the aristocracy always included papal loyalists, the majority were Hussites and, from the mid-sixteenth century, Lutheran or Calvinist Protestants. Neither the political coincidences that disabled the kings from asserting themselves nor the Hussite nonconformist legacy brought the country much fortune, however. The discovery of the Americas made it even more remote from the world's main trade routes than before, and its silver much less valuable. The Hussite revolt gave the kingdom a bad reputation with the popes, which tended to isolate it from European diplomacy. The rumbustious nobles' freedoms did not generate laws and policies of sufficient power to counteract these factors of decline. If there was a late medieval period of positive distinction, the credit for it should go to the Ottoman Empire. Vienna's vulnerability to its advance made a Habsburg king, Rudolph II, emulate Charles IV in making Prague his home. What Charles had done for the kingdom's gothic architecture, Rudolph did for renaissance. His court was a great patron of all the renaissance sciences and arts.
In 1618 Protestant nobles' displeasure at alleged violations of religious freedoms by certain Catholic landlords escalated into a confrontation with King Mathias. They marched from the university's assembly hall to the Castle, forced their entry into the kings' officials' chambers and, in a conscious emulation of Hussite precedents, threw three of them out of a window. They, however, survived the fifty-foot fall without a major harm, thanks to guardian angels' timely intervention according to some, or to landing in soft earth (a dung heap indeed) according to others. This revolt was not going to match Hussite triumphs. After several indecisive battles between the nobles' and king's troops, Mathias died and Ferdinand II claimed the Czech crown which had been, after all, promised to him by the nobles' diet only two years earlier. Now, however, the nobles were determined not to have Ferdinand as their king, for he was fast gathering a reputation for Catholic zealotry. They invited Frederick V of the Palatinate to the throne, the Calvinist ruler of several principalities, imperial Elector and leader of the Evangelical Union. However, in addition to being the more legitimate claimant by dynastic succession rules, Ferdinand II proved superior in raising effective support among the Empire's and Europe's rulers. Frederick V failed to get the Evangelical Union princes to invest in his Bohemian adventure. The army he and the Czech Protestant rebels raised in the event lasted only an hour when it met the combined Spanish and Catholic League enemy at White Mountain near Prague, on 8 November 1620.
The battle of White Mountain started a thirty-year Europe-wide war between Protestant and Catholic states. In Bohemia, however, the victorious Catholic imposed severe and unequivocal counter-reformation measures with immediate effect. Twenty-seven members of the rebellious Protestant directorate were executed - three feudal lords, seven knights and seventeen urban patricians. Twelve of their heads remained on public display, hanging in metal baskets off the tower guarding the Old Town entry to Charles' Bridge; it took a short-lived conquest of the city by a Saxon army ten years later to take down the grizzly reminder of who was boss. Over 900 people were sentenced to property confiscation, so that some three-quarters of noble property became available to the king for redistribution.[Urban 1991, p.106] The Czech aristocracy was thus decimated and a new one, in part consisting of the king's friends and Catholic notables from abroad, was created instead. Rules concerning the Bohemian and Moravian diets were re-written so that Catholic clergy became a dominant force while urban patricians became badly under-represented. In addition, the diets were limited in their powers to initiate legislation, and they lost their right to elect the king. Modified succession rules committed the crown to the Habsburg dynasty. The university, still Hussite in 1620, was given over to Jesuits. Throughout Bohemia and Moravia, Protestant nobles and urbanites were given a six-month notice to convert to Catholicism or emigrate. Between one-fifth and one-quarter left the country for good. That, however, was not the only component in overall population loss. The thirty-year war was taking its toll in famines and the diseases of poverty, because the productive classes were heavily taxed to finance the war effort. When the war ended in 1648, by a peace treaty that guaranteed Protestant states throughout Europe the right to remain so but brought no element of toleration into the Habsburg lands themselves, the total population of Bohemia and Moravia was perhaps one-quarter or one-third smaller than in 1620. It would take the rest of the century to recover that loss.
The demographic reduction caused labour-supply concerns to the aristocracy, which they sought to solve by putting their farming tenants into a deepening serfdom. By 1680, the landlords revoked so many ancient privileges from their subjects and imposed so many new demesne obligations that farmers' rebellions prompted the king to limit the demesne to three days per week maximum by law. The enserfment drive weakened as population recovered at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Another innovation that Ferdinand II's White Mountain triumph brought concerned language policy. While Czech had been the sole official language in the secular business of the crown lands regardless of the king's own mother tongue, Ferdinand II instituted German as the second official language, of equivalent status with Czech. There was thus no necessity for the new cosmopolitan aristocracy and their senior servants to learn the local vernacular when the king's mother tongue would do. At the same time, the centralisation of powers in Vienna created increasing government-career opportunities in the Habsburg metropolis; the incentives for ambitious Czech nobles and urbanites to make sure of a good German education were getting stronger. Czech literacy was in existence at least from the tenth century, and literature written for secular entertainment as well as religious edification developed in the thirteenth. Czech literate culture developed alongside German in Bohemia and Moravia, the two languages jointly and gradually eroding the monopoly Latin once had as the educated medium. Czech came into use in official documents during the fourteenth century. In the next century, the Hussite movement boosted the volume of writing and spread the use of written Czech from landed nobles and state officials to hitherto primarily German-writing urban patricians. In the sixteenth century, however, Lutheran and Calvinist writings increased the use of German literacy in Czech nonconformist circles. Now, the promotion of German into an equal state language would set Czech literacy into a decline which only the rise of nationalism almost two centuries later would reverse.
Not that any literature, German or Czech, enjoyed much flowering during the counter-reformation. The Jesuits were in control of what was made available to read. There was plenty in all the languages, but not much that was not Catholic instruction and propaganda. The situation was less negative in architecture and allied visual arts and crafts, and in music. In these spheres, the counter-reformation aesthetic of the baroque created a huge legacy of exuberant decorativeness. This was a triumphalist Catholic flowering for sure, designed to oppress Protestant simplicity-yearning souls by filling the world with buxom angels, garish colours and gold, statues of saints, and twirley-phrased clarion calls. But the non-literate arts were not so cramped by prescribed literal truths, and the boom they enjoyed produced many imaginative works of lasting value.
Modernity entered the Habsburg lands via enlightened absolutism. Maria Theresa (reigned 1740-80) and Josef II (1780-90) were the two monarchs who initiated reforms inspired by the Enlightenment. Not that the new era could start without embroilment in very old-fashioned wars. Maria Theresa's succession to the Habsburg throne was challenged by other monarchs. The Bavarian king, for example, entered Bohemia where he got the diet to elect him. This time, however, the noble estate got away with their treachery when the queen's forces finally secured the crown for her. Reformist action itself likewise started with an old-fashioned event - the appointment of the monarch's personal physician. He was a Dutchman of a broad and modern education who became her close advisor on both policy-making and staffing matters. A series of strategic appointments quickly packed the court and the central offices of state with cameralist lawyers and other bearers of the dawning scientific age. They bowed to political reality in accepting that the Hungarian half of the Habsburg monarchy would have to be left alone, in the hands of its autonomy-loving aristocracy. The reforms concentrated on the `German lands', that is, the Austrian principalities and the Czech crown lands.
Administration was centralised, so that all residents of the non-Hungarian lands became subject to essentially the same laws and policies. Reforms of the legal system did away with landlords' juridical powers over their tenants, and with time-honoured police practices such as the torturing of suspects to extract confessions; even the death penalty was abolished. Serfdom was not entirely abolished, in that tenants' demesne obligations remained, although the law put further limits on them; but it was reduced to its economic aspect, the landlords losing their powers to limit their tenants' personal freedoms. Jesuitical orders and certain contemplative orders were abolished, and ecclesiastical administration was reformed with the support of modern minded factions within the Church. A unified system of state schooling with carefully prescribed syllabi and standards was set up. Schooling was made compulsory for all children from age 6 to 12, with state `main' schools and grammar schools being available in towns to provide education up to the ages of 16 and 17. Universities were secularised; ecclesiastical orders and indeed Catholics in general lost their monopoly on teaching appointments, and German (not only Latin) was allowed to be used in lectures. Catholicism remained the state's official religion, but other Christian faiths became permitted, and the worst discriminatory laws against Jews were removed.[N.B.]
After a famine year which demonstrated the dangers of agricultural reliance on the traditional wheat and rye, the government instituted an array of policies which successfully promoted modern four-field rotation and livestock farming. Other economic policies included the abolition of internal border excise and tolls, the unification of currencies and measuring units, the abolition of craft guild monopolies, tax reforms which shifted burdens from producers to rentiers, and the promotion of investment in manufacture.
The reformist momentum did not survive the energetic monarch, the French revolution and Napoleonic wars reinforcing his successors' conservative predilections. An absolutist monarchy of a conservative hue, however, was bound to fall into disrepute with the growing educated classes. In 1848 another revolutionary bout in France triggered off uprisings throughout both the Habsburg monarchy and German states. The Austrian Emperor (as he was called since the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire during the Napoleonic wars) abdicated in favour of a young successor, Franz Josef I (reigned 1848-1916). He carried out a number of reforms without delay, including the final abolition of serfdom, but insurrectionary troubles in Hungary, the Balkans and Italy put a hold on a transition to constitutional monarchy for another dozen years. The search for a viable constitution started in 1861, with limited franchise elections to individual countries' diets and to Imperial Council. It was a tortuous process that ultimately proved unsuccessful, because clashing nationalist aspirations made political agreement very difficult.
Nationalisms became a dominant ideological force throughout Europe at the beginning of the century. The rise was due to three interrelated factors. Firstly, on the intellectual and aesthetic plane, Enlightenment's austere rationalism was duly followed by its dialectical opposite - romanticism. Mixed with democratic aspirations, romanticism celebrated an intuition of vital historical forces to be drawn from folkloric genius and communal roots. Secondly, on a more mundane political plane, democratic aspirations gave importance to the ability of intellectual élites and political leaders to communicate with `their' people; shared culture, language and historical memory now seemed necessary for a progressive polity. And thirdly, Napoleonic wars gave such ideas a crusading expression; where battlefields previously hosted dynastic conflicts, they now hosted a march of nations. Nationalisms were interactive. The rise of German nationalism, which had a political unification on its practical agenda (German Europe still consisted of some thirty adjacent states), inevitably stimulated emulation and rivalry in other ethnic groups.
During the century's second decade a number of young men of Slavic extraction became enthused by the romantic idea while studying in German universities. Slavic philology became their intellectual passion, holding as it seemed a key to the linguistic traces of a Slavic past and spirit. Pan-Slavism, however, was difficult to translate into a tangible political programme when Slavs lived in countries as different from one another as Russia, Serbia and Bohemia. By the mid-century, Czech nationalism was defined by a preoccupation with the Czechs' historical situation of sharing a geopolitical space with Germans. For the first time in their history, the Czechs were now faced with extinction as a nation because they read, wrote and spoke German if they were educated, and they laced their Czech with German expressions if they were not. Their forebears' tongue, in other words, had not developed to keep up with the times. In the rationalist spirit of Enlightenment that drove the setting up of a state education system in the previous century, the relative decline in the use of the Czech language would have been a small price to pay for making everyone literate in German, the language of science and forty universities. In the romantic spirit of national `revival', on the other hand, Germanisation would be a tragedy because it would sever a people from its roots and cause its unique genius to wither. The nationalists set about updating the language. A German-Czech dictionary was compiled in which every modern concept or artefact was given a Slavic-root equivalent. Books of correct grammar were written to create standard Czech with no traces of German influence in idiomatic imagery or turn of phrase.[N.B.] A sixteenth-century Hussite translation of the Bible was often as not used for adjudication of linguistic purity.
The next task was to prove that Czech was not an inferior medium for modern knowledge and culture, that its recent decline was the result of political oppression. The nationalists set about writing in Czech, having written about it in German. Literary production was endowed with a great missionary purpose. Reportage, polemics, poetry, cook books, a grand encyclopaedia, fiction, books of etiquette - they were all celebrated not just for what they offered in particular but also for the proof they supplied that Czech was a language of culture. The National Theatre produced Mozart's Don Giovanni on the hundredth anniversary of its Prague premiere - with a Czech libretto to show, as Czech press reviews duly noted, that the language was fine for operatic arias, too. Historical writing was naturally very important, as were polemics about the meaning of Czech history. The nationalists took pride in tales of a cultured and glorious past. Unfortunately, however, the especially impressive and recently found early renaissance manuscripts, which helpfully chronicled the Premyslids' pre-Christian glories, turned out on a closer scrutiny to be forgeries. Some nationalists did not regard the closer scrutiny as an act of high treason, but they were a small and embattled minority among those who did.
At the political level, the Czech nationalists were united on one point by the time of the elections of 1861: they wanted the Habsburg monarchy to become a federation of historic states rather than of ethnic groups; they wanted the Czech crown lands restored as a sovereign state that voluntarily concedes a part of its sovereignty to the federal institutions in Vienna. That, however, was exactly what the representatives of the German population in Bohemia and Moravia - roughly one-third of the total - did not want.[N.B.] They thought it harking back to a distant past when most progress in fact occurred since the previous century, when enlightened absolutism almost merged the country with Austria. And, they did not like the idea of being a German minority in a country ruled by Czech nationalists. If there had to be a federal rather than centralised state, it better be on the basis of territories whose boundaries are drawn so that each is ethnically homogeneous. Both sides were adamant and there was no compromise to be found between those entrenched positions.
For a while, the Czechs boycotted the diet and Imperial Council, making the government's acceptance of their federal vision a precondition of participation. Eventually, however, they took their seats and used every opportunity to wring concessions from the imperial government. Language policy was the strategic focus. From the 1880s, Charles' University and the technical university were divided into Czech and German parts, and there was a great expansion in the number of schools in which Czech was the main language of instruction. By the end of the century, the number of students in these establishments outnumbered those in German ones by two to one, reflecting the demographic ratio. The Czechs also got the government to change the rules so that it became necessary for most officials and clerks working for the state anywhere on Czech territory to be fluent in both languages. This would have a great discriminatory effect on government appointments, since few Germans knew enough Czech to conduct administration in it, and the government withdrew the edict after a German outcry. The Czech politicians, however, made a point of using their influence to get a Czech appointed to every government service post that became available. It was a zero-sum game; Czech politicians initiated moves and Czech German politicians opposed them. The clashes were not confined to the semi-parliamentary chambers and government lobby rooms. Nationalist brawls were commonplace in the streets of Vienna (one-third of the city's population was Czech) and Prague during the last years of the century.
In Prague the Czech nation-building (`national revival' in the nationalist language) played its part in stone-building, too, during the great construction boom that added Neo-Renaissance and Art Nouveau to the city's great collection of architectural styles. The National Theatre and the Rudolfinum concert hall on the right embankment, the National Museum at the top end of Wenceslas Square and the Municipal House on the site of a former royal court palace were all built in monumental scale and dominant positions to impress the idea of a great cultured nation on the city scape. The Czech Germans were less zealous in organising construction projects for such a purpose, the New German Theatre (now State Opera), built in a Neo-Classical style, being the sole example. They already had, however, their communal meeting point in the large Café Continental (renamed Slavonic House in 1945).
The great construction boom was due to a very successful industrialisation policy. During Franz Josef's reign, the Czech lands became one of the most industrialised regions in Europe, with a dense railway network and a comprehensive production range from coal mining and steel fabrication to car making and textiles. Austria's traditional diplomatic know-how helped to secure good export markets for manufactured goods in Russia, Turkey and former Ottoman lands, in addition to the internal Austro-Hungarian markets. The economic development was accomplished without any problems or atrophy to agriculture, and without any major urbanisation pains. In a compact and densely populated country, where one village was a stone's throw from the next, and where a majority of the villagers were landless, joining an industry meant hopping on a commuter train as often as migrating to join a city slum. Urban population grew, especially in Prague and several other relatively large towns, but not at the expense of rural residents' numbers, which kept at a steady level throughout.
Industrialisation naturally produced a strong labour movement. When, in 1907, electoral law progressed from a very restricted and indirect franchise, which gave the vote only to a small privileged minority, to a simpler system which gave the vote to every male aged over 24, the labour movement was able to make an impact on official politics. Whereas the nationalist parties, especially the so called Young Czechs, had a clear dominance among Czech voters for decades prior to 1907, the Social Democratic Party turned out second to none in the votes it polled among Czech and German voters alike, with 38 per cent of the total votes cast. The SDP was generally successful in its campaigning for workers' rights, with the majority of industrial workers earning a reasonable living for an eight-hour working day by the early 1900s.
By that time, the country seemed to be in a good shape. Economically it was more prosperous than ever before in relative terms, i.e., by comparison with the rest of Europe. Railways had nullified the backwater condition in which it had been throughout the millennium of river-born trade. It was not the richest, but it was now, in per capita terms, in the comfortably off middle class of European economies. In regard to mass education, it was one of the best, with illiteracy rates below 5 per cent for Czech speakers and below 7 per cent for German speakers. [Urban 1991, p. 237.] At the élite end of the education system, the German part of Charles' University preserved its reputation among German universities (young Albert Einstein was on the staff for a year), while the Czech part was undoubtedly a thriving centre of intellectual life. Prague had become a city with excellent cultural facilities, and a centre of creative production in all the arts. As in Vienna, German-speaking intellectual and artistic élite had been strengthened by the creative energy of a Jewish generation that chose a secular identity. (Franz Kafka is an obvious example, there were many more.) In addition, Czech nationalism had brought about a strong and wide commitment to education and culture. And, happily, specifically nationalist concerns were losing their grip by the turn of the century, the young creative generation preferring to express a more universal human spirit in the aesthetics of modernism. Nationalist brawls had peaked, and although the Czech and German nationalist parties still talked irreconcilable opposites, the advent of cross-national parties of socialist and Christian hues perhaps gave those who yearned for less ethnic-bound politics a hope.
The nationalist movement had never campaigned for outright independence, regarding a federal version of the Habsburg state a necessary security umbrella for small nations of the geo-political area flanked by the two giants, Germany and Russia. This time- honoured consensus broke after a group of nationalist politicians, led by T. G. Masaryk, chose western exile to lobby diplomats and governments. Masaryk decided that the war was an ideological conflict between outdated autocracy and progressive liberal democracy, and that the Austrian monarchy was historically too wedded to the former to be truly reformable. The allies were initially not inclined to think in terms of destroying the Habsburg empire, but their war aims were vague and feelings were hardening against the Austro-German axis especially in France, the traditional rival of German states for European domination. The US President, too, was receptive to Masaryk's ideological vision of what the Great War was about, and to the man himself. Masaryk was a cogent proponent of liberal humanist values, and his progressivism bore unmistakable traces of cross-Atlantic influence. He freely acknowledged the influence of his wife, a highly educated American of a Protestant German stock, and a campaigner for women's rights. Added to his earlier personal record of standing up to nationalist excess in the dispute over the `ancient' chronicle forgeries, his was a reassuring face of Czech nationalism.
Masaryk's American lecture tours were also important in persuading the large Slovak community there that the Czechs' and Slovaks' political future lay in their unity. That idea had been on the agenda during the Pan-Slavic phase, but fell into disuse when the Czechs decided to focus on recovering the historic Czech crown lands as an autonomous state within a Habsburg federation. Slovaks always lived outside these boundaries, their lands (known as Upper Hungary) having been an integral part of the Hungarian kingdom throughout the millennium of its existence. In American emigration settings, however, the similarity between the two languages seemed more important than the historical division. The settlers' communities, important in raising finance for the nationalist cause as well as in exerting influence on American politicians, encouraged Slovak leaders to accept new talk about Slovaks being `a branch of the Czech nation', and Masaryk's leadership with it.
The Czechoslovak state was, in a sense, born on Russian soil as well as in the meeting rooms of Versailles. Tens of thousands Czech and Slovak troops were encamped in Russia as Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. Masaryk lobbied the Russian government that they be re-armed to fight against Austria-Hungary under an independent Czechoslovak flag. The tsarist authorities insisted that any foreign legionnaires would have to fight under Russian command, but the revolution of February 1917, which Masaryk incidentally saw as a proof of his interpretation of what the Great War was about, open his way to a successful negotiation. The Czechoslovak Legion was rearmed and ready when the October revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power; their policy, however, was to negotiate a separate peace with the Axis powers. For the Legion, the only way of joining the Great War on the Allied side was on the western front. That, however, required traversing the breadth of Russia to the Pacific port of Vladivostok, which was in Allied hands, and getting involved in the Russian civil war in the process. The Legion thus obliged the Allies by fighting on their side against the Bolsheviks as well as the Axis powers, and inspired the Czech nationalist cause with new pride and confidence. Home-based Czech nationalists now accepted the exiles' goal of an independent republic. They formed a National Committee in Prague to steer the revolutionary cause. Slovak representatives were included in this state-forming body, but no German ones.
The pattern of Czech and German settlement in Bohemia and Moravia was such that Germans were in a clear majority in the hilly border regions, the Sudeten. If the borders of the new republic were drawn to maximise ethnic homogeneity, the Czechs would get the low middle of the topographic bowl, giving the German state(s) surrounding it the sole command of the high ground. Hence the Czech nationalist commitment to the historic crownland borders - they were indeed historic because the wooded ridges always afforded an excellent natural obstacle to military invasion. Masaryk was able to persuade the Allies that the new republic should have its natural borders despite the Sudeten Germans' calls for their rights of national self-determination. In addition, he persuaded them that the boundaries should extend eastwards to include the Slovak Upper Hungary. The Czechoslovak Republic proclaimed in autumn 1918 in fact became a state with a one-third German minority in Bohemia and Moravia; a Polish minority in northern Moravia; significant Hungarian and Ruthenian minorities in Slovakia; and the Slovak people who had yet to digest the news that they were `a branch of the Czech nation'. [N.B.]
As Habsburg Austria's advance towards a constitutional reform was troubled by the Czech Question, so Czechoslovakia's politics were troubled by the German Question. It started even before the First Republic's constitution could be put in place, with the use of force against Sudeten groups' attempts to declare their political autonomy. When the dust settled and a democratic structure was set up, it did not include a federal element such as could have compensated the Germans for the fact that they were a minority. The parliamentary political pattern that emerged was one where German politicians acted in unison to protest perceived national oppression, whilst Czech parliamentary parties were divided by colours of the left-right spectrum.
The German grievances focused primarily on two issues - official language and land reforms. The language law did not put any limits on schools with German as the language of instruction, or indeed on any other German-language institutions, but it made Czech firmly the main language of government business, requiring that all civil servants, even those employed in district government offices within the Sudeten, must pass proficiency exams in the Czech language. The land reforms were ostensibly about `social justice'. One-third of the country's land area was owned by 150 families of the former Habsburg aristocracy, but even the remaining two-thirds were owned in an unequal pattern, with absentee landlords on the one hand and many under-resourced working farms on the other. The new land laws gave leaseholding farmers the right to convert their leases to freeholds on good terms, and it set up a high powered Land Office to review the ownership of all landed estates larger than 250 hectares. About one-half of the reviewed land was found new owners. The German politicians claimed that the process was by no means ethnic-blind, benefiting mainly Czech applicants for land purchase and aiming to achieve at least some Czech colonisation of the Sudeten.[N.B.]
The Sudeten political leaders' claims of German suffering inflicted by the Slavic nation state were taken up by Hitler, and the nationalist frenzy he managed to whip up in his Third Reich duly fed back across the border. A Nazi party gained a mass following in the Sudeten, and its parliamentary politicians gave up all pretence of wanting to make Czechoslovakia's young democracy work. The Great Depression, which hit the country late but very hard, and which coincided with tales of a marvellous economic boom in Stalin's Russia, naturally fuelled the Czechoslovak Communist Party's efforts. Parliament and government lurched from one political crisis to the next, but the First Republic remained functioning nevertheless - the only one of the newly independent states not to have succumbed to authoritarian temptations. In 1938, however, Britain and France did a deal with Germany whereby they abrogated their security guarantees and in effect joined Hitler in an ultimatum demanding the Sudeten for the Third Reich. President Beneš bowed to the Munich Agreement. Germany took the Sudeten immediately and the rest of the country six months later. Slovakia overthrew `the Czech yoke' by setting up her own little state under German sponsorship, while Bohemia and Moravia became a German Protectorate.
As in other countries that came under German occupation, the war left an uncertain legacy for the nation - should it take pride in the men and women who took risks to preserve human dignity from Nazi degradation, or feel shame about those who collaborated, whether that be in the spirit of meekness, opportunism, or zealotry? All the responses from heroic resistance to active collaboration exist in documentary evidence, but a careful balance sheet of the evidence is a job of historical scholarship still to be done.
As regards the victim count, the war years left the country without her Jews. Her Romanies, too, ended in a systematic genocide. In addition, there were the Germans who were drafted to the war and did not survive, and also those who became concentration camp prisoners for being active in anti-fascist organisations. The Czechs, too, were thinned out somewhat, with pre-war Sokol activists, [N.B.] left-wing party members and army officer corps being especially vulnerable to Nazi terror; and, by no means all the young men and women who were forcibly drafted to Germany's contingent of foreign workers survived to tell their tale. Virtually every family has a relation that was a victim.
On the other hand, every Czech locality had its known active collaborators, and there are archival documents that tell a tale of mass cowardice. A film footage of Wenceslas Square shows tens of thousands gathered there, to demonstrate their fervent loyalty to the Third Reich after the assassination in 1942 of R. Heydrich, the protectorate's governor; there is no evidence that this demonstration was staged by the authorities. That was when Nazi power must have seemed invincible to many.
Another event, that occurred after the Soviet Army took Berlin and just days before the inevitable German capitulation, is more baffling: from 5 May to 9 May 1945, an armed uprising against the Third Reich took place in Prague.
The war aftermath was a time of leftward movement in public opinion everywhere in Europe. In Czechoslovakia, the reasons were particularly strong. Firstly, socialist parties had enjoyed wide support in the First Republic; including the Communist Party which had been not only large but also remarkably unriven by the split between Stalin and Trotsky. Secondly, it was general knowledge that the country fell into the Soviet sphere of influence; many people accepted it stoically, others welcomed it because the Munich Agreement still rankled. Attitudes to the Soviet Union were on the whole positive, the rather mixed experiences with Soviet troops' behaviour notwithstanding. The horrors of Stalin's regime were still unknown and most people viewed the future in an optimistic frame of mind. Those who knew or suspected that the geopolitical shift towards Moscow would soon prove awful news were a small minority. The General Election of 1946 put a socialist and communist coalition into power, with a communist Prime Minister. The government nationalised heavy industries. It was a popular measure and not unique in Europe; the British Labour Government was doing it, too.
The `ending of the German Question' was a much more momentous historical event. In summer 1945 President Beneš issued decrees on reviewing the citizenship of Czech Germans and Slovak Hungarians. Those found guilty of disloyal behaviour would be dispossessed and expelled from the republic. Ethnic cleansing was not Beneš's own invention. The Soviet Army expelled the long-settled German population from East Prussia in the previous year, and another mass expulsion was in progress after the shift of Poland's western border westwards. The Czechoslovak campaign started in January 1946. Only 10,000 Germans were allowed to keep their Czechoslovak citizenship and homes. 3 million were dispossessed and interned in transit camps prior to moving to resettlement camps in Germany. 30,000 died in the process according to Czech historians, 250,000 according to German ones. Bohemia and Moravia lost one-third of their population and the Sudeten were virtually emptied of human habitation to await the arrival of new residents. The re-colonisation would never prove a success.
In 1947 the parliament voted for the republic's participation in Marshall Plan, the generous injection of dollars that would soon prove a help in reviving western European economy. The decision, however, had to be revoked after a word from Moscow. The republic's sovereignty and democracy were fast turning out a fiction, the iron curtain a reality. In February 1948 Prime Minister Gottwald got his Communist Party and workers' militia to organise mass demonstrations against the non-communist ministers in his government and `bourgeois' politicians in general. President Beneš could have denied legitimacy to the communist coup if he had refused to accept the resignations tendered by the non-communist ministers. But he accepted them and the communists got sole possession of the government, which enabled them to reduce the republic's democratic institutions into a facade of a communist totalitarian state. Industry was put under comprehensive nationalisation orders and the whole gamut of ways and institutions that Stalin had invented for Soviet Russia was put in place, sometimes with the help of resident Soviet advisors. Agitprop, show trials with communist leaders, numerous executions, mass terror, brutal treatment of political prisoners, farm collectivisation - the 1950s had it all. The attrition rate was not as high as in Russia, `the small Czech conditions' (a favourite Czech phrase) lacking the vast frozen spaces in which thousands could be lost to their deaths simply by bureaucratic mismanagement. Most Czechs, however, knew well-founded fear during the period, just as they had done under the Protectorate; the vast majority made sure of refraining from any action that might provoke. The regime surpassed any other in East Europe in its faithful emulation of the Soviet teacher. Gottwald dying of his terminal illness mere three weeks after Stalin died of his was an aptly symbolic coincidence.
Having achieved excellence in Stalinist emulation, the Czech communist leaders were slow to join the de-Stalinisation bandwagon that rolled elsewhere from 1956. A monstrous monument to Stalin, the biggest that was ever built anywhere, was not blown from its prime Prague embankment perch until 1962. By that time, however, a rapid seachange was occurring in the minds of the many intellectuals who had been young and resolutely anti-bourgeois in 1948. Revelations about Stalin's crimes certainly had their effect, but also a cumulative disillusionment with the regime theory and practice, and an awakened sense of guilt. Doctrines were gently questioned, clichés suspended, humane values rediscovered. Cultural life from film-making and literary criticism to cabaret and pop flowered. Marxist intellectuals got interested in Kafka, phenomenology, and a dialogue with Christian theologians. Inside the Communist Party, a reformist alliance grew. In January 1968 a new politburo announced its intention to reform the party and its relations with society. Outside the party channels, new freedoms of assembly and expression were taken up by students and former political prisoners as well as cultural élites, to create a broad public forum that watched with interest the party's reformist progress and spoke its minds. The reforming Communist Party was in fact gaining membership and popularity, its promise of `socialism with a human face' getting a wide response. That, however, was at the expense of losing its (totalitarian) grip on society, a consideration that had the decisive weight with Soviet party leaders. In August neighbouring Warsaw Pact forces invaded under a `proletarian internationalism' banner. A period of national unity in unarmed resistance, glorious in its ingenuity but all too brief, ended when Dubcek, the party's chief since January, returned from an involuntary sojourn in Moscow with the broken-voiced news that he capitulated. Pockets of public protest continued for a while, most notably among students who had some excellent leaders in addition to idealistic energy. But the general mood trend was a feeling that the Soviet power was invincible as well as unscrupulous. Many [how many???] emigrated before opportunities of travel to the west, which had been widened since the mid-1960s, became reduced to a carefully controlled exclusive privilege by 1970.
`Normalisation' was the term the regime coined for its efforts to secure dull conformity. The party, state bureaucracy and cultural institutions were purged; `enemy persons' were identified, imprisoned in some cases and subjected to secret police controls in the rest; books were withdrawn from shops and libraries. In the economy, market-minded reforms were abandoned, the regime staking its hopes on computer-assisted systems of centralised management. Welfare and living standards, however, were by no means neglected goals in the scale of priorities. Huge estates of high-rise flats ringed the towns, and smaller versions grew even in the countryside, to satisfy mass demand for subsidised-rent family apartments. Agriculture, too, was a recipient of large investment programmes, as was the manufacture of the whole range of consumer goods from television sets and fridges to cars. And, last but not least, the regime made it possible, by a combination of formal provision and a closed eye to informal trade with materials, for families to rent plots of land in the countryside and build their own recreational huts there. The Czech countryside's wooded riversides and slopes became peppered with colonies of these private family retreats, each hut or chalet (some of them quite grand) bearing a testimony to years of dogged hunt for materials and ingenious DIY. `Normalisation' in fact meant privatisation - the channelling of human energy into the cultivation of family consumption enclaves.
The dissident moral élite lived a more communal life by contrast, dedicated to the cultivation of an archipelago of publics which met to enjoy uncensored culture and a free exchange of intellectual ideas. The preservation of sensitivity to ethical principle in a communist state that demanded spinelessness from its citizens was a prime goal. Its pursuit extended beyond cultural evenings and intellectual seminars to organising communal leisure activities and summer camps for children, for example. This social archipelago combined religious and secular currents of thought, and it managed to maintain regular contact with émigré-organised support groups in the west. Its leading activists tended to be people who had emerged into prominence just prior or during 1968. In addition, rock and folk music grew to create its hypocrisy-lampooning underground scene. The regime put one of the rock bands on trial although it just signed the Helsinki Agreement with its human rights clause. The dissidents responded with a petition articulating a public commitment to civil rights, Charter 77. Its 3,500 signatories were a small minority of the population, but the signature-collecting gave dissidence more of a unifying organisational framework and an internationally recognised face.
True to form, the Czech communist regime was slow to join in the perestroika spirit brought about by Gorbachev's advent to Kremlin in 1985. Something of a reformist force eventually crystallised around the Prime Minister while the party politburo kept reformist moves blocked. Both factions sought Soviet support but neither got it, since Gorbachev decided that it was not his business to interfere. The student march called for 17 November 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of a student protest against the Nazi regime, occurred after revolutionary events in the neighbouring East Germany left the Czech communist state in a perilous international isolation.
End.
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Like in other nations created by the nineteenth-century `national revivals', the facts and interpretations of the past are subject to intensely politicised conflicts of opinion. Below is an abbreviated list of the above-outlined historical periods and events that are matters of dispute among today's scholars and politicians.
One side in the disputes tends to be constituted by the nationalist line that started with the historian and politician of the first half of the nineteenth century, F. Palacký (1798-1876), was continued by the First Republic's founder and first President, T. G. Masaryk (1850-1937), and in the main upheld by the communist regime. [N.B.] This is referred to in the discussion below as NL, the nationalist line. The break with communism in 1989 occasioned sceptical questioning of NL from liberal as well as Catholic standpoints. These are labelled below as NSQ, the new sceptics' questioning of NL.
Pre-history
The NL puts a positive emphasis on the Great Moravian Empire - not only because its
existence showed early Slavic ability to organise a state, but because it suggested a
historic connection between Czechs and Slovaks - an important consideration when a
Czechoslovak Republic suddenly came on the agenda in 1917. NSQ points out that the
evidence concerning the Empire is thin indeed, and none shows it to have been durable
beyond three or four generations.
Charles IV's golden age
NL emphasises the use of Czech literacy and claims that the king was being sensitive to
Czech national feeling when he made proficiency in the Czech language a necessary
condition for granting licences to foreign craftsmen and artists. NSQ sees the language
requirement as a mere protectionist measure against foreign competition, insisted upon
by the local guilds. The king in fact made a point of inviting additional settlers from
German lands to take part in the silver-mining boom. As regards Czech literacy, there
was little originality in its contents - the stories were a variation on those written in
Latin and German. The king's Czech patriotism related to the territory, not the Czech
ethnic group in particular.
The Hussites
NL places the Hussites at the centre of their understanding of the meaning of Czech
history. The Czech nation rose against the corrupt Catholic Church, and its ingenuity in
warfare and commitment to the truth (`truth wins' was a Hussite slogan) defeated
German powers that were superior in conventional military terms. The Hussites were
Europe's first Protestant movement, anticipating Luther and Calvin by a hundred years.
They were great promoters of literacy and education. And, the radical Hussites
anticipated progressive egalitarian values in their wealth-sharing encampments.
NSQ points out that although the majority of Hussites were Czech, there were Czech Catholic loyalists in the country as well as German Hussites. It was a religious movement, not a national one. Besides, it is problematic to attribute to it all the progressive aspects historians see in the Protestant Reformation (the rise of individual conscience through literate reflection on the Bible). The Hussite belief was focused on liturgy (the chalice); its reaction to Catholic corruption was more a backward search for pristine orthodoxy than a rational inquiry into the meaning of biblical texts. Anti-Semitism, for example, was certainly no less virulent during the period than at other times. The intellectual power of Hussite writings was not compelling; it failed to win converts abroad, despite efforts to spread the chalice creed, and it did not sustain a momentum beyond the initial two decades. The Hussites certainly prepared a receptive ground in Bohemia and Moravia for the next century's Protestantism; the latter, however, increased the use of German literacy in the country, relative to Czech. As regards the socially egalitarian element, the radical Hussite (Taborite) encampments were neither the first nor the last religious community to have preached poverty and practised wealth-sharing.
The White Mountain and Counter-reformation
NL views the White Mountain defeat as a terrible disaster. The nation lost its
aristocracy and its educated élite, its spirit was broken in a forcible re-Catholisation, its
kingdom lost its autonomy from the Habsburg dynasty, Germanisation was set into
motion.
NSQ does not deny the hardships of the thirty-year war. But, although the redistribution of land created a more cosmopolitan aristocracy, the beneficiaries did include Czechs. The politics of land redistribution was religious and dynastic, not national. And, people did not necessarily found their conversion to Catholicism heart breaking; the Catholicised people of Prague put up a spirited defence against a Swedish army, although they might have welcomed the prospect of Protestantism's return. As regards languages and literacy, Counter-Reformation meant above all re-Latinisation (of educated élites), not Germanisation. The Jesuits were happy to use Czech literacy and oral culture for spreading their teachings. The loss of political independence was not necessarily bad news for everyone. The post-Hussite aristocracy-dominated kingdom had not been thriving. After the war, the trend towards integration with Austria arguably brought improvements in the way the country was governed. Nobles and patricians were able to seek positions in centralised government on merit - regardless of ethnic origin.
Czech national revival
As the word `revival' suggests, the NL argues that ethnic Czechs have shared a national
self-consciousness at least since the middle ages. The nation was forged by Premyslid
statecraft and an early advent of Czech literacy, and it developed its progressive
character through the Hussite movement. It was overpowered by allied Habsburg and
papal aggression but, after 250 years of darkness, it found itself again.
The NSQ argues that national self-consciousness (not only Czech) was a nineteenth-century creation. Before then, people were naturally aware of language differences, and ceteris paribus, probably preferred the company of those who spoke like them to those they found hard to understand. Crucially, however, ethnic awareness neither determined an overriding identity nor claimed suprapersonal loyalty - only religion could do that and, during Enlightenment, Reason. Otherwise, loyalty was due to persons - one's family, landlord and monarch. The nation was created when a self-appointed cultural élite created itself and used the political opportunities that were opening up to make its own cultural products and assessments the standard fare of compulsory mass education.
The First Republic
Masaryk and the First Republic currently command wide consensus as a Good Thing.
Catholics, however, can be sometimes heard demurring his infatuation with the
Hussites, and his anti-Church politics. Liberals can be sometimes heard regretting the
First Republic's establishment of political clientelism in the economy (political party
patronage over banks, the redistribution of land, the promotion of industrial cartels).
Masaryk's Atlantic airs notwithstanding, the First Republic was no different from the
interwar Austrian Republic in reinforcing rather than moderating Habsburg corporatist
heritage.
The expulsion of the German minority
This has been the bitterest dispute. Should the Czech Republic make an official
apology to the victims of the ethnic cleansing? The nationalist view, which commands
the popular support, is that no official acknowledgement of any wrongdoing is
necessary. Any atrocities were the acts of individuals rather than state policy. Besides,
Sudeten Germans did bear a collective guilt for the break up of the First Republic and
its subsequent incorporation into the Third Reich. They gave their vote to fascist
politicians who abused their parliamentary rights to cause constitutional crises; [N.B.]
invited Hitler to get involved in the country's affairs; and, in so doing, made it easier
for the allies to betray Czechoslovakia in Munich. Theirs was a corporate action against
the First Republic, and Beneš issued his post-war decrees to make sure that the new
Czechoslovakia did not have to suffer from German nationalism again. Although the
war itself was over, the process of settlement was still going on and the expulsion was a
part of it. The decrees had the approval of Allied powers.
A minority liberal opinion argues that the Czech Republic must officially acknowledge that Beneš's decrees reflected a presumption of collective guilt. Without an official distancing from them, the decrees remain on the statute book to contradict the new constitution as well as European legal principles concerning human rights. Furthermore, it is a moral imperative that an official apology is made for atrocities that were committed in the course of implementing the decrees, on civilians, after peace broke out. Sudeten Landsmannschaft's demand that the victims be compensated makes an unequivocal official acknowledgement and apology very difficult politically, but the legal and moral principle should prevail. Without it, the state's legitimacy remains unsound in its basis.
End.
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In 18 months from May 1945, 3 million ethnic Germans were expelled from their homes in what is now the Czech Republic. That was one-third of the population. The Sudeten borderlands were emptied of their people. Driving through the former Sudeten today, the traveller may still get the eerie feeling of a once lively country of craftsmen and artisans, that now comes to life only at weekends and holidays. In other Sudeten places, the main impression is of environmental devastation: the effect of communist industrial development that, with the settled population removed, could be carried out in cavalier disregard for pollution. Outside the Sudeten, in the central parts of the country, there were a number of towns in addition, which likewise lost substantial established communities.
The ethnic cleansing brought immediate material benefits to a high proportion of the remaining Czech population. Many people were able to purchase all manner of goods and property for knock down prices, which the expellees had been forced to sell or simply leave behind.
It is common among Czechs to dismiss uneasy conscience by claiming that the expulsion was a byproduct of war settlement between the great powers. The Benes decrees certainly had a full support of the allied powers. However, it is not the case that they were just a follow-on from Potsdam agreements. As Martin Brown argues on the basis of British Foreign Office archives, Benes's Czechoslovak Government in (London) exile started work on developing a population transfer policy in 1942, for which it won "acceptance in principle" from the British Government by 1944. Just as it had done during the First World War, the political leadership of the Czech nation worked in exile to get the backing of the eventual war victors for its vision of the Czech nation state; a vision which, ever since Palacky's national-revival days, had been heavily coloured by a preoccupation with "the German Question". During the First World War, Masaryk and Benes got the allied powers to back a process of nation-state creation in which the German ethnic minority was allowed no representation. During the Second World War, Benes got the allied powers to back a policy of resolving "the German Question" by expelling the ethnic minority from the Czechoslovak state. The expulsion is primarily the product of Czech government policy. The victorious allied powers approved it and gave it international legitimacy. The Czechs initiated it as well as implemented it.
If the history of the expulsion has bequeathed a morally awkward legacy to the Czech nation, grappling with the legacy has been made very difficult by the politics of the expellees' organisations in Germany and Austria. Martin Brown and Eva Hahn (2001) argue that the policies of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft in particular have often appeared to be oriented more to turning the historical clock all the way back to the creation of the Czech state in 1918 than to supporting the expellees' and their descendants' interest in a relationship with their ancestral Sudeten homelands. One stratagem in this policy, however, has been to demonise the expulsion by a bizarre exaggeration of its victim count. The creative statistics of Landsmannschaft propagandists claim that a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans lost their lives as a direct result of the expulsion, a sum that is about 13 times higher than the number of deaths for which there is documentary evidence and 8 times higher than the estimate produced by a joint German-Czech governmental Commission of Historians in 1996. Unfortunately, the Landsmannschaft's figure has been widely accepted in western Germany. When Czechoslovakia became communist and the Cold War started, the expulsion came to be presented as a communist act in the western version of events and Landsmannschaft's interest in demonising the Czechs became one with western allies' interest in demonising the communists. Incongruously in a country that was otherwise so scrupulous in exorcising its Nazi past, the Landsmannschaft became an important player in West German politics, especially in the large and prosperous state of Bavaria. Its voice is one which, in claiming the Sudeten Germans to have been the victim of a nasty Czech nationalism, denies legitimacy to the Czech state. Consequently, in the Czech Republic, attempts to make a moral issue of the expulsion tend to be regarded as akin to unpatriotic treachery.
But there is a morally dubious historical legacy to grapple with. The Czechs were not nearly as bloodthirsty and genocidal as the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft tries to claim, but that does not make the expulsion an act to be proud of. It was a large-scale ethnic cleansing driven by political opportunism and anti-German nationalism. It was brutal and bloody in its early spontaneous stage, while at its later stage, from January 1946, its nastiness was organised, methodical and industrial-scale, reminiscent of the vanquished Third Reich's administration.
This negative legacy cannot be resolved by acts of what the Czechs call "high politics" alone. Resolution requires grass-roots participation: a movement of reflection in individuals' hearts and of citizens' reconciliatory initiatives. Without such a movement, democratic politics and Czech-German relations will continue to be burdened by, on the one hand, a collective identity of German expellees' descendants steeped in victimhood and, on the Czech side, a national identity shaped by false myths along the lines of "we are small and powerless but righteous", and by fears of German revenge. High politics plays a role in setting institutional frameworks in which reconciliatory initiatives by citizens can get off the ground and have an effect in local communities. But it is at the grass-roots level that the reconciliatory work has to get done.
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This section is dedicated to real contemporary cases where groups of citizens have done a piece of reconciliatory work vis-a-vis the Sudeten Legacy. May the information given here serve the dual purpose of (a) furthering our knowledge of Czech history and society and (b) helping the reconciliatory work to spread.
The picture on the right shows a poster that appeared in and around Hermanice in the Czech Republic and Oybin in Germany, in September 2004. The two places are in one another's vicinity, as the drawing in the poster indicates. The bilingual Czech-German poster advertised a show, Out of a Mountain Storm, performed by an amateur dance and theatre group, Trupa Drzew, which is a Polish-spelled name that could be translated into English as the Woody Troupe. The Polish name (which is instantly understandable by Czechs) is not an out-of-place affectation, although the actor-dancers were Czech and their supporting technical team German. The border point where both Germany and the Czech Republic meet today's (post-War II) Poland is hardly 20km away. The dance-play was performed one Friday evening in Hermanice and the next evening in Oybin, in the languages of the respective locations.
The show was, in the words of one of the choreographers, 'a series of scenes about migration':
The scenes represent variations on the theme of searching for acceptable life-space, making it one's own and settling down in it, and then having to leave it, either willingly or under pressure and involuntarily. It is such a broad metaphor for cyclical life that everyone could find their own story in it. It confronts ideal images with the actual conditions of a place to which a mysterious mixture of chance events has brought us.
The content and style encouraged the audience to generate a plurality of interpretations and viewpoints. Its purpose was to entertain and also to stimulate reminiscence and reflection on the locality - its places, people and history. The actor-dancers passed on what they learned in their hearts during the year-long process of creating the show, when they interviewed local people as well as visitors for their life stories and stimulated numerous conversations about the locality. This is how one of them explains his involvement:
I enjoy movement, that's how it all began. But also, it's that I have lived in the Sudeten and will go on living here. When I speak with the original inhabitants and they show me where they used to keep the sheep, horses and goats, where they did their weaving in the winter and where they hewed a trough in stone, I had to respond to what I heard. Accepting an identity in a new place is always full of learning that moves you.
The Woody Troupe's work of stimulating local reminiscence and gathering material for their show was helped along by practical action. The Czech performance took place in a decommissioned church that had long been closed and left to decay. They negotiated access to it with the local council, a free electricity supply for it with a neighbouring farmer, and they cleaned it out and made it into a suitable venue. After the show, the local council undertook to keep the church open as a cultural amenity. Thus not only the show itself but the process of its preparation had a tangible impact on the locality.
The project also contributed to the children's home in the nearby village of Krompach. In return for being allowed to rehearse there, the Woody Troupe paid an eminent professional choreographer to provide dance classes for the children, in addition to helping to create the show.
The project was supported by grants from a local citizens's association, Janske Kameny - Johannisstein (6000 Kc, or 200 Euro) and the EU-sponsored Czech-German Fund (20000 Kc, or 660 Euro). The Woody Troupe are invited to do further shows in Liberec and Varnsdorf (in the Czech Republic), and across the border again in Oybin, where they will take part in the celebrations of the town's 750th anniversary.
Click here to write comments or to get in touch if you know of other grass-roots actions aimed at reconciling the Sudeteden legacy.