the nationality of all inhabitants of the czech provinces and ...

Chapter I Historical Roots
History is not a simply regular or
even logical development. In many
respects it constitutes events open on
many sides offering multifarious scope
for the future. On the other hand, at
certain moments it seems to follow a
single course with terrifying directness.
Moreover, nothing happens in history
by chance: it does not comprise an
“absolute zero”. The present always has
historical roots, sometimes reaching
An imaginary mediaeval town from
the King Wenceslas Bible.The founding
of many towns in Bohemia coincided
with the arrival of German colonists
back far into the past. An observer
gazing at the past follows its
ramifications and tries to trace their
story. The roots of one of the most
sensitive and painful chapters of
modern Czech history – the relations of
the Czechs and Germans – tend all too
often to be sought only in the two
turning points of the twentieth century:
1918 and 1938, and in parts of Sudeten
German literature in the month of May
1945. They are much older, however,
and they actually reach back to the very
beginnings of the Czech state and the
birth of the German states. In the
course of the past thousand years they
have been linked in a thousand and one
ways and intertwined to create new
12
shapes with new ramifications. As
František Palacký aptly observed, the
Czechs and Germans both rubbed
shoulders and crossed swords in the
course of history, and lived on good and
bad terms with each other.
History, in terms of things that
happened, can be judged and is judged
in all sorts of ways. There is one History
but it is generally made up of several
histories. These select only certain
strands from the past, only certain
circumstances. The historians’ task is to
strive for the most accurate picture of
the events as a whole, to try to find the
maximum possible real connections and
links corresponding to the period, to
describe all the various shapes, scars and
tumours that they identify in the history.
Czech-German relations in modern
times – described by Jan Křen as a
“confrontational community”– also have
their deep-seated causes rooted in the
past. Czech and Germans alike have
cited them, used them as arguments and
fashioned them in the spirit of their
notions of each other and themselves.
When that confrontational community
came into existence in the first half of
the nineteenth century, this “updating”
of the past served the ends of national
self-identification and was often
subordinated to it. A hundred and fifty
years later, now that the key part of the
European continent is striving for the
closest possible co-operation, perhaps it
is possible for us to view nationalisms
with a certain detachment. Nonetheless
it would be worthwhile tracing briefly
the lineage of Czech-German relations
from the early Middle Ages to the
threshold of the twentieth century.
CZECHS AND GERMANS
The history of the cohabitation of
Czech and Germans on the territory of
the present-day Czech Republic has
deep roots, the main ones reaching as
far back as to the thirteenth century. At
that time new inhabitants started to
arrive in the country. They were
attracted both by the availability of land
for agriculture and by the opportunities
to develop trades and commerce in the