REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

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Remembrance in Time
those minority groups toward the state. This idea was not popular among all minority
groups. Some of them considered themselves as an eternally discriminated group,
especially in cases where they had beforehand belonged to dominating groups – for
instance Germans or Hungarians – and now had to subordinate their own interests under
the principles of a new state. They relied on ethnic principles and often had no confidence
in the good will of democratic politicians. In the interwar period, the governments in
Berlin and Budapest often misused the existence of German or Hungarian speaking
groups abroad for their revisionist goals. This gave birth to numerous conflicts previous
to World War II which in 1938 culminated in the Munich Agreement cutting out the socalled
“Sudetenland” of the Czechoslovak territory, and the Second Vienna Arbitrage
ceding parts of Southern Slovakia to Hungary.
In this paper I would like to emphasize a new perspective on one of the largest minority
groups in interwar East Central Europe, the German-speaking group in Czechoslovakia.
Out of a total number of 13.6 million citizens in 1921 (14,7 million in 1930), 3.2 million
(3.3 million) declared to be of German nationality, which meant every fifth inhabitant of
the state. 2 Numerous German Bohemians, Moravians and Silesians or Zipser Germans
were loyal citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic. They agreed with the liberties the state
legislation assured them and tried to orchestrate their lives with the conditions of that
state. No longer were they members of the dominating German-speaking group of
Cisleithania nor of the culturally important German-speaking group of Transleithania, but
they could contribute to the state’s well-being as an economically, culturally and socially
important segment of Czechoslovakia’s population. The first president of
Czechoslovakia, Tomáš G. Masaryk (1850–1937) was very much familiar with German
language and culture. He made a big effort to integrate the German minority into the
functioning of his state. 3 Though, within the framework of German revisionism on the
one hand, and growing pan-German interests on the other hand, Berlin politicians
manipulated German minority politics in neighbouring Czechoslovakia. 4 The economic
crisis after 1929 favoured the rise of a strong Nazi movement which eventually was
transformed into Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Homeland Front, after the
democratic instances in Prague had forbidden the German National Socialist Workers’
Party (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei, DNSAP) – an equivalent to the
NSDAP in the German Reich – in 1933. In the course of the 1930s, Henlein became more
and more a marionette of German foreign interests, the leader of the so-called Fifth
Column. He and his followers, who in 1938 represented about four fifths of the total
German electorate, undermined the stability of the state and coerced Czech and Slovak
2 Cf. Zdeněk Beneš / Václav Kural: Rozumět dějinám. Vývoj česko-německých vztahů na našém
území v letech 1848–1948, Praha 2002, p. 56.
3 Cf. the contributions to the volume: Češi a Němci v pojetí a politice T. G. Masaryka. Sborník z
mezinárodní konference v Praze, Edited by Masarykův ústav AV ČR, Praha 2004.
4 Cf. Ronald Smelser: The Sudeten Problem 1933–1938. Volkstumspolitik and the Formulation of
Nazi Foreign Policy, Middletown CT 1975; Rudolf Jaworski: Vorposten oder Minderheit? Der
sudetendeutsche Volkstumskampf in den Beziehungen zwischen der Weimarer Republik und
der ČSR, Stuttgart 1977.