REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Tobias WEGER: The Munich Agreement of 1938 Seen Through the Eyes of Mohandas … 439
politicians to fulfil more and more unrealistic demands. This problem rose to an
international affair, the so-called “Sudeten crisis”, which kept most European powers
breathless. The culmination of this development is well known: The British and French
governments, both defenders of “appeasement” towards Nazi Germany, accepted Hitler’s
claim to annex the Czech border areas, the so-called “Sudetenland”, into the German
Reich. The Munich Agreement signed in the night of September 29 th 1938 at the NSDAP
headquarter has ever since been considered as a symbol of the capitulation of democratic
powers in the face of outrageous claims of a totalitarian system.
The problem of the Munich Agreement has mainly been analyzed as a bilateral Czech-
German problem, whereas the international dimension of this issue has been rather
neglected. When Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) returned to
London after signing the Munich Agreement, he compared his action to the impact given
by his predecessor Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) at the Berlin Balkan Conference of
1878 and said the famous phrase: “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a
British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe
it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I
recommend you to go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” 5
This politically naïve – and in a diplomatic sense even sarcastic – statement was openly
criticized by many contemporary British journalists, politicians and political advisors,
even within Chamberlain’s Conservative Party. The concern of Winston Churchill (1874–
1968) in autumn 1938 is well known. Churchill understood very well that every
additional concession to Adolf Hitler was nothing else than a further step towards war. 6
There were also critical reactions to Neville Chamberlain’s policy in a country far away
from Europe which at the same time was struggling for freedom from British colonial
domination: India. In a newspaper article published in October 1938, the leading spiritual
and intellectual personality of the Indian independence movement, Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) gave a clear and firm statement:
„England and France […] have quailed before the combined violence of
Germany and Italy. […] Europe has sold her soul for the sake of seven day’s
earthly existence. The peace gained at Munich is a triumph of violence; it is
also its defeat.” 7
There was another interesting voice from India which reacted directly to the Munich
Agreement. The Bengal writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was one of Gandhi’s
close friends. In 1913 Tagore had received the Nobel Price for Literature as the first non-
European author, and had been a visitor to Czechoslovakia in June 1921 and again in
5
Quoted after the entry “peace for our time”, in: Safire’s Political Dictionary. Edited by William
Safire, Oxford 4 2008, p. 529.
6
Cf. Martin Gilbert: Winston S. Churchill. Vol. V: Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939, London 1977, p.
921–1012.
7
Quoted after Sankar Ghose: Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi 1991, p. 276.