The Czechs versus the Slovaks: Bilateral Relations, 1944–1948

After the new Czechoslovak Republic emerged in 1918, the relations between Czechoslovakia and Slovakia immediately became one of the crucial domestic problems it had to cope with. The success of the new Republic largely depended on whether the issue of bilateral relations would become a stabilizing factor or not. Czech politicians, however, followed the pre-war Czechoslovakian concepts even after the war. By the end of World War II, problems about the reunification of Bohemia and Moravia with Slovakia reemerged, as the issue of the legal settlement of relations between the Czechs and the Slovaks was raised. There was a continuation of centralism immediately after 1948, justified ideologically by the ‘necessity to struggle against bourgeois nationalism’. Nationally oriented Communists, such as Gustáv Husák, Vladimir Clementis, or Ladislav Novomeský, were accused of plotting to separate Slovakia from the Republic.

Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks: Some Mutual Perceptions, 1900–1950

This chapter examines the ways in which Czechs and Slovaks interacted between 1900 and 1950 with Hungarians, both with the Magyars incorporated against their will inside the new state and with those in the reconstituted kingless kingdom of Hungary. The main themes are how perceptions were created and perpetuated, and how these related to the changing reality of ethnic relations. In this three-sided pattern of connections, the Slovaks long remained comparatively subordinate, reckoned ‘neutral’ — or innocent — by both the other parties. Even the status of the Magyar minority within Czechoslovakia, largely unreconciled to the new dispensation, apart from certain exceptions such as the young Sarló movement, only furnished a pretext for the more squarely antagonistic contest between Czechs and Hungarians which rested on, and consciously invoked, historical and contemporary prejudices.

Economic Nationalism in the Sudetenland, 1918–1938

Industrialisation had created a segmented social structure among Germans in north and west Bohemia. The most important industrial sectors in the Sudetenland exhibited a bimodal distribution of firms, with a large number of small producers and a few large producers, each of which employed roughly an equal proportion of workers. Economic nationalism among German Bohemians was motivated primarily by the need to defend their status against Czech competition. This chapter explores how the advent of Czechoslovakia affected the long-standing economic competition between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia, which had a major ideological dimension. Already before 1918, it had yielded protectionist associations on both sides. The Czech ones now went on the offensive, pressing for national values to be implemented in the economic domain, especially through nostrification of those of the country's assets held in ‘foreign’ hands and through preference to Czech suppliers in such sectors as military contracts. Their formerly dominant German equivalents were forced onto the defensive, while the Czechoslovak government tried to manoeuvre between the two.

Ambivalent Capitalists: The Roots of Fascist Ideology among Bohemian Nobles, 1880–1938

Although fascism has often been considered a plebeian, even radically egalitarian ideology, many of its outspoken proponents were members of the old European elite: nobles, clericalists and representatives of the haute bourgeoisie. Historians of Nazi Germany have puzzled over the affinity of German conservatives such as Paul von Hindenburg and Franz von Papen to Adolf Hitler's National Socialist version of fascism. A small but extremely wealthy noble elite struggled to maintain its long-standing social, economic and political influence in Bohemia. By the late nineteenth century, the Bohemian nobility was a self-consciously traditional social group with a decidedly modern economic relationship to agrarian and industrial capitalism. This chapter examines the response of the Bohemian aristocracy to the new state of Czechoslovakia. This restricted caste of cosmopolitan latifundist families was more German than Czech in sentiment, and further alienated by land reform. The aristocrats entertained divergent assessments of Nazism and responded in different ways to the crisis of the state by 1938.

Introduction

The formation of Czechoslovakia introduced a remarkable novelty into the heart of the European continent after World War I. It was an unexpected creation and a completely new state, whereas its neighbours as successors to the Habsburg Monarchy either carried historic names and connections (Austria, Hungary, Poland), or were reincarnations of existing sovereign realms (Yugoslavia), or both (Rumania). Moreover, Czechoslovakia seemed uniquely to embody the ideals of the post-war settlement, as a polity with strongly western, democratic, and participatory elements. Yet Czechoslovakia was a historical construct, deeply rooted in earlier developments. It constitutes classic terrain for a study of the ‘nationalist and fascist Europe’ which emerged after 1918. This book deals with the history of Czechoslovakia and discusses Czech nationalism, along with the Czechs' relationship with Slovaks and Germans, Britain's policy towards Czechoslovakia, and gender and citizenship in the first Czechoslovak Republic.

The Sokol and Czech Nationalism, 1918–1948

Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia and son of the country's first president, pointed out just before his death in March 1948 that the gymnastics festival organised by the Sokol gymnastic movement was an opportunity for Czechoslovakia to show off its post-war socialist reforms that had ‘aroused considerable global interest’. The Sokol was not only a gymnastics organization; it was also an outlet for the expression of Czech national identity. Judging by Masaryk's comments, the Sokol appeared to be supportive of the Czech Weltanschauung of socialism that had emerged after the Red Army had liberated Czechoslovakia from Nazi rule in May 1945. This chapter argues that the Sokol had a split personality, one part based on socialist-thinking Jindřich Fügner's concept, the other on that of the nationalist-minded MiroslavTyrš. In addition to its pursuit of ethnic nationalism, this chapter examines the Sokol's ethnic policy, relationship with Slovakia, and support of the Communists.

‘A Leap into Ice-Cold Water’: The Manoeuvres of the Henlein Movement in Czechoslovakia, 1933–1938

The democratic bastion of Czechoslovakia, which was accused of treating its minorities much better than other east European states, was allegedly destroyed in the 1930s through the machinations of the Nazi Henlein movement the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP) — which acted from the start as a ‘Trojan horse’ for Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. If we turn to consider the Henlein movement of the 1930s, we can start by challenging one widespread myth in much of the historiography: that the movement would not have arisen but for the economic crisis and Hitler's accession to power in Germany. This chapter examines the divergent views of whether Konrad Henlein and his SdP genuinely sought concessions from the government which might have kept them loyal to Czechoslovakia, or else from the beginning in the pocket of the Nazis across the border in the Reich. In its struggle at home and abroad for some breakthrough after 1935, the Henlein leadership was never aiming at minority rights of a kind envisaged by the Czech authorities.

The Literary Representation of the Czechoslovak ‘Legions’ in Russia

This chapter focuses on the role of the legionaries in creating the state of Czechoslovakia. It shows how the legionaries and their activities, while often romanticised, dramatised and vulgarised, were awkwardly harnessed to the needs of the new establishment. They could be cast in the mould of earlier Czech heroics, especially those of the Hussite warriors; they regularly served as avengers of the great defeat on the White Mountain in 1620. Yet their deeds proved hard to reconcile with the peaceable and democratic traditions which many Czechs also prided themselves upon. The legionaries, especially those in Russia, were, according to the propaganda, meant to be pictures of moral idealism and a foundation stone in the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic. Indeed, the legions had made the liberation of the Czechoslovaks from Austria-Hungary possible. This chapter looks at some of the motifs of legionary literature, paying particular attention to the works of Josef Kopta and Rudolf Medek. It examines the portrayal of Jews, for the works of Medek and Kopta provide an exemplary crop of Czech inter-war anti-Semitism.

The New ‘Woman Question’: Gender, Nation, and Citizenship in the First Czechoslovak Republic

This chapter discusses the question of women's citizenship in the new Czechoslovakia and how the ‘Woman Question’ evolved after 1918. The strong women's movement from pre-war days was largely satisfied by the 1918 ‘revolution’: Czech feminism fitted closely with Masarykian notions of democracy. The events of October 1918 fundamentally changed the debate over women's rights in the Bohemian lands. Within weeks, many Czechs had acknowledged that both men and women would be politically active in the new Czechoslovak Republic, treating universal suffrage as a given of the new political climate. Czech feminism linked an unswerving belief in gender equality with an equally unshakeable faith in liberal democracy, not only as the guarantor of women's rights, but as the essence of the Czech nation. This philosophy had many roots, but was perhaps most closely tied to the work of Tomáš Masaryk.

Britain and Munich Reconsidered: A Personal Historical Journey

This chapter reflects on the connection between Czechoslovakia and Britain by commenting on the Munich agreement. It takes two exemplars from personal experience: the author's tutor A. J. P. Taylor and his own work as author of the first British account of Munich. Taylor realized that ‘Munich’ was the last time in which Europe seemed the centre of the world. The ‘Big Four’ — Britain, France, Italy, and Germany — genuinely supposed that the peace and security of the world depended on them. Today, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, each of them securely but separately integrated, though not without some continuing issues of ethnicity, may be looking with considerable incomprehension at a complicated Britain which has to wrestle with problems of racial equality, cultural space, religious pluralism, and linguistic diversity that are arguably of even greater complexity than existed in inter-war Czechoslovakia.