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

Chapter III
“Sudeten”, which cannot be avoided
when explaining Czech-German
relations. The description “Sudeten
Germans” was invented as an overall
term for the German population in
Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. It is
analogous with such terms as
Carpathian or Alpine Germans. It
started to be used at the beginning of
the 20 th century and it is commonly
supposed to have been coined by the
German politician Franz Jesser. As he
himself said, he proposed it as an
expression of the national
distinctiveness of the German
population of the Czech lands. As in
the case of the other similar
appellations, it is one based on
geographical criteria.
The term Sudeten mountains was
used by the Alexandrian
mathematician, physicist and
geographer Ptolemy in the second
century AD in his description of central
Europe, probably to designate the Ore
Mountains. The identification of
Ptolemy’s “mountains of wild boar” with
that specific mountain range is not
absolutely certain, however, so the
designation became used for other areas
too. In his “History of the Czech
Nation”, František Palacký states that
“Sudetenland” protects the Bohemian
provinces “from Silesia”, and that it is
“an extension of the Giant Mountains”.
Eventually Sudetenland was identified
with the entire northern border area of
the Czechoslovak Republic inhabited by
Germans. According to Hemmerle’s
Lexicon, Sudetenland is a territory
some 380 km. long and 60 km. wide,
stretching from the area of Dečín to the
Moravian Gap.
The expressions “Sudetenland” or
“Sudeten” promoted by Jesser took quite
a long time to catch on. Their meaning
was not enhanced until after 1918,
when, in the words of Josef Pfitzner “a
new historical era opened for the
Sudeten Germans” by the incarceration
of the Bohemian and Moravian
Germans in the newly-created
Czechoslovak Republic “which rocked
their existence”. Those designations
Czechs and Germans in a Democratic
Czechoslovakia, 1918-1938
98
were increasingly drawn into the
political vocabulary and became
ideological terms. It was Pfitzner, albeit
originally a gifted professor of history at
Prague’s German university, whose
works of the 1930s, particularly his book
“Sudetendeutsche Einheitsbewegung” of
1937 who helped effect that ideological
shift. It is because those terms were so
closely linked with Nazi ideology that
the words still have such strongly
negative overtones in the consciousness
of the Czech general public.
EUROPE AND
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
IN THE 1930s
The dramatic events at the end of the
1930s cannot be understood without
taking into account the international
changes the occurred during the first
half of that fatal decade.
The tension between the countries
having an interest in preserving the
Europe that emerged from World War I
and the peace treaties on the one hand,
and their various opponents, on the
other, entered a new phase with the
economic and social crisis of the early
1930s. That gigantic crisis actually
broke Europe and the world in two. The
post-war world once more resembled
the pre-war one. It spelled profound
social devastation and therefore
encouraged those movements that were
geared to the destruction of the values
of a democratic civil society, particularly
fascism in various guises. The defeat of
democracy by Nazism in Germany had
a fundamental influence on
international relations.
The global effect of the fateful
replacement of the Weimar Republic by
a Nazi dictatorship was only gradually
felt, however. Hitler’s regime first had to
devote itself to shoring up its position at
home and creating external conditions
for the building of a powerful army.
After it left the League of Nations and
the disarmament conference in October
1933, Germany was actually at serious
risk of international isolation. It was
therefore not in its interest to exacerbate
its foreign relations, even though its