Slavic tribes began settling in the Bohemian Massif
from the sixth century. Over the next few centuries the tribes
gradually organised themselves in reaction to the activities of
the Avars and the invasions of Charlemagne. The Czechs, ruled
by a dynasty descended from the Premysls, were brought under control
by the eighth century.
In the ninth century, the Moravian basin began to
flourish. With its important north-south trade route, it came
under the rule of the Princes Mojmír, Rostislav and Svatopluk
who built a great empire. The Great Moravian Empire at its peak
included not just the current Czech Republic and Slovakia, but
stretched south through the Danube valley into parts of present
day Austria and Hungary. It was during this period that Christianity
came to the area. Rostislav asked the Byzantine Emperor to send
people who could interpret the teaching of Christ in the Slavic
vernacular. J. Hruza, et al. note that two of the people
sent, Cyril and Methodius, "laid the foundation of the Slavonic
script, and thus of Slavonic literature".
Greater Moravia was invaded by Arnulf, the East Frankish King, in 892. This had two main consequences. Firstly, it meant the end of an independent greater Moravia. Secondly, due to an accord made in 895 between Arnulf and the Prince of Bohemia, Borivoj, Bohemia was freed from the danger of invasion. Bohemia, ruled by descendants of the Premysls, began to gather influence in its own right, although for the next few centuries its fortunes were linked with the Holy Roman Empire.
Borivoj's grandson was Václav (Wenceslas).
Very little is known about this man, but he is unlikely to have
been much like the "Good King Wenceslas" of the nineteenth
century Christmas hymn. However, Wenceslas has been venerated
by the Czechs for many years, his memory was important in the
middle ages, and his cult reappeared in a more secularised way
during the Czech national revival of the nineteenth century and
in more recent times as a symbol of freedom of expression under
the communists. He was murdered by his brother Boleslav I, who
succeeded him and, who together with Boleslav II, extended Bohemia's
territory into what is now the Ukraine. In the years of uncertainty
following Boleslav II's death, much of Bohemia came under the
influence of the Polish prince Boleslaw Chabry.
For much of the twelfth century Bohemia was ruled
from Prague by a prince of the ruling dynasty. There was no succession
from father to son and this caused a certain amount of instability.
On the whole, however, things began to prosper. The existence
of a military threat from the east (the Tartars) gave the stronger
Princes the opportunity to gain favour with the Emperor. As a
result of this, in 1158 Prince Vratislav II was named King of
Bohemia, and crowned in Milan by the Emperor, Frederick I Barbarossa.
Bohemia began to prosper in the economic sense as
well. The country was well endowed with agricultural land, and
had quantities of some rare minerals, including gold and silver.
Under the Premysl kings, Otakar I, Václav I and Otakar
II, this economic power began to increase further. Germans were
invited in to the border areas of Bohemia, and encouraged to develop
the forests into agricultural land and to start mining, especially
for silver. They were also very adept at founding urban communities
too. Premysl Bohemia reached its height under Otakar II (1253-78),
who through alliances and marriage gained control of the Austrian
lands, including a small part of the Adriatic coast. In the North,
Otakar conducted operations against the pagan Prussians and helped
in the founding of Königsberg (Kaliningrad) by the Order
of Teutonic Knights.
Bohemia's political influence in the Holy Roman Empire was now at its height, but because of this, Otakar II had gained the hostility of many of the German princes, and in particular that of Count Rudolf of Habsburg, who was elected Emperor in 1273. Otakar was manoeuvred into giving up virtually all the added territories, and when he marched on Vienna in 1278, he was defeated and killed in a Battle at Dürnkrut, on the Moravian Field. His successor Václav II consolidated Bohemia, and even took the Polish crown, and then secured the Hungarian crown for his son. This state of affairs did nor last long, as Václav II died in 1305, and his son Václav III was assassinated the following year. As a result, the Polish and Hungarian crowns were lost, and the Premysl dynasty came to an end.
Bohemia was again plunged into a state of uncertainty,
complicated by the untimely deaths of the Emperor Rudolf of Habsburg
and his son. The country was divided between the Czech nobility
and the German burghers in the towns, and Bohemia was plunged
into what could be called a civil war. The king, Jindrich of Carintha
did not contribute much to the situation, so the Czech nobles
began to look further away, and towards the Duchy of Luxembourg
to provide them with a new king. In 1310, Jan (John) of Luxembourg
arrived to claim the Bohemian crown. Jindrich promptly returned
to Carintha.
Jan of Luxembourg, (1310-1346), was perhaps not an
ideal king. Very quickly he became an absent king, spending much
time in Luxembourg and in a variety of military adventures. Virtually
all internal power passed to the Czech nobility. Jan added various
parts of central Europe to Bohemian control, including the city
of Cheb, Upper Lusatia, Zhorlec and Silesia. He was finally killed
leading a Czech contingent on the French side at the battle of
Crécy-en-Ponthieu in 1346 against the English under Edward
III.
He was succeeded by his son Václav, who had
been wounded in the Crécy battle. He changed his name to
Karel (Charles) and his reign is often described as the "golden
age" of Czech history. J.F.N. Bradley says that he returned
to Bohemia, " a cosmopolitan adventurer, itinerant ruler,
learned administrator, and an imperial army officer, in other
words a king with wide experience, perfectly prepared for his
tasks". Charles reformed the constitution of Bohemia, and
clarified its position within the Holy Roman Empire. He himself
was crowned Emperor in 1355, being the only Czech king to hold
this position.
In a time of peace, Charles was able to encourage
the cultural development of Bohemia. Prague, which had been neglected
since the end of the Premysl dynasty, became the main focus of
his attention. It was Charles who created the Nové mesto
(New Town) planned by Matthew of Arras, and who built the stone
bridge over the Vltava now known by his name. L.A. Smith describes
the Nové mesto as "the most outstanding example
of town planning in medieval Europe". He also rebuilt the
royal castle, Hradcany, and began work on the Cathedral of St.
Vitus. His influence on the capital was immense, building numerous
churches and walls, and the results of his building programme
still dominate Prague.
In 1348, Charles founded an university in Prague,
the first such institution in central Europe. While primarily
intended to educate the people of Bohemia, the university also
had an important role in the foundation of other universities
in the Empire, especially after the death of Charles. The universities
at Kracow, Vienna, Heidelberg and Leipzig all to some extent owed
their foundation to the existence of the Prague university.
My marriage and astute political administration, Charles was able to add several territories to the Bohemian crown lands; the remaining parts of Silesia, Upper and Lower Lusatia, and then in the 1370s he managed to acquire parts of Bavaria, and to get his eldest son Václav elected Margrave of Brandenburg. In 1378 Charles died and was succeeded by Václav IV. Václav was not as good an administrator as his father. He soon made enemies amongst the Czech nobles and in the church. During the period of his reign, Bohemia became the stage for a new spiritual movement, of which Jan Hus is seen as its leading figure.
Jan Hus was a preacher and theologian, who had taught
at the university in Prague and who later became its Rector. In
1402 he was appointed to the pulpit of the Betlémské
Kapli (Bethlehem Chapel), the centre of the Czech reform movement
primarily concerned with the moral corruption of the church and
clergy. Hus was also a supporter of some of the ideas of the Oxford
theologian John Wyclif, whose views had somehow arrived in Bohemia.
In particular, Hus challenged "the rights of sinful prelates
and friars to keep their positions, status, and landed wealth".
He was, however, not an uncritical follower of Wyclif, remaining
steadfastly "orthodox" on the issue of the Eucharist
until the end of his life Hus was excommunicated in 1412, and
when he went to the general council in Constance, hoping to defend
himself against charges of heresy, despite a safe conduct from
Sigismund, brother of Václav and king of Hungary, he was
tried, condemned and finally burned at the stake on 6 July 1415.
As a result, while most of the Germans in Bohemia
remained faithful to the Church, the Czech nobility began to revolt
against its authority. The Hussites adopted the practice of giving
both bread and wine to the laity, thus earning themselves the
name 'Utraquist'. In 1420 they adopted the four articles of Prague,
"demanding freedom of preaching, the chalice for the laity,
an end to worldly power wielded by churchmen, and punishment of
grave sins committed by clerics". The reform movement, however,
soon became divided. Some of the more radical elements founded
a commune at Tábor which became the centre of resistance
against the church. The Táborites had a leader in Jan Zizka
who rapidly prepared his people for war.
Václav IV died in 1419, and his successor,
his brother Sigismund, found himself opposed by a large proportion
of the Czech nobility. He gathered an army to rid Bohemia of the
Hussites, but in the wars that followed he had difficulty against
the fanatical Táborites and their unique fighting methods.
Eventually the catholic armies were defeated at Doma_lice in 1431
and as a result, the church began an attempt to find a peaceful
settlement. In 1434 a combined catholic and Hussite army defeated
the Táborites at Lipany, and a negotiated settlement (the
Kompaktáta) restored Sigismund to the throne and brought
the Hussite wars to an end. Sigismund died in 1437 and left no
son, thus triggering yet another division amongst the Czech nobility.
The succession was confused for a while, further
complicated by the deaths of Albert II of Austria in 1439 and
Wladislaw III of Poland in 1444. In 1443 the Czech nobles recognised
the claims of the child Ladislas Posthumus, and Bohemia was ruled
by a series of regents. The most notable of these was George of
Podebrad, who outlived Lasislas and who then was elected King
himself in 1458. The religious struggles between the Pope and
the Utraquist (Hussite) Czechs continued all throughout this period.
In 1471, Vladislav II, the son of the Polish Jagiellonian King Casimir IV, was elected king. Under him and his son Louis II, the religious struggles continued, but in 1485 an agreement between the Utraquists and the Catholic Church was concluded at Kutná Hora, reaffirming the Kompaktáta of 1431. Louis was drowned near Mohács in 1526, retreating from the Turks in Hungary.
With the Jagiellonian kings gone, the way was open
for the return of the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs had been emperors
since 1437 and the family held great power within the Empire.
Ferdinand, the brother of the Emperor Charles V, made a formal
bid for the vacant throne. He was elected king in 1526 and crowned
in 1527. Like the Jagiellonians, Ferdinand I was obliged to honour
the Kompaktáta and to treat both Catholics and Utraquists
as equals. However, the early sixteenth century was a time of
profound religious and intellectual change, and the radical ideas
coming from Luther in Wittenberg, and from others, complicated
the situation in Bohemia even further. With the outbreak of the
Schmalkaldic War in 1546, (between the Catholic Habsburgs and
the German (Protestant) Schmalkaldic League), the Habsburgs asked
for support from the Czech nobles. A majority rejected this request,
and following the Habsburg victory at Mühlberg in 1547, Ferdinand
turned on those nobles who had opposed his plans.
Worse was to follow. Ferdinand was followed by Maximilian II (1564-76) and Rudolf II (1576-1612), both reigns being dominated by a continuation of the political and religious struggle that had dominated Bohemia for two centuries. After Rudolf was deposed, his brother Matthias took the crown. Matthias proposed his nephew Archduke Ferdinand of Styria as his successor, but this was opposed by the Czech nobles. In the inevitable conflict that followed, there took place the event known as the Defenestration of Prague. This "bungled assassination attempt" is described briefly by R.J.W. Evans.
Openly partisan action by ... Catholic lieutenants, entrusted with royal government in his [Matthias'] absence, provoked the defenestration of two of them [Vilém Slavata and Jaroslav Martinic] from the windows of the Hradschin on 23 May 1618, a messy and inefficient procedure [i.e. they survived] full of Hussite symbolism [defenestration had been used in Prague before, in 1419]
The event sparked a rebellion in Bohemia, a prelude for the Thirty Years War. When Matthias died in 1619, Ferdinand II was not permitted to enter Bohemia and the crown was offered to Frederick V of the Palatinate. On the 8 November 1620 a Catholic army, led by Maximilian I of Bavaria, defeated the Bohemian rebels at the Battle of the White Mountain, (outside Prague), and Ferdinand was able to take control of Bohemia.
Ferdinand II was a powerful and ruthless king. Charles
Ingrao notes that in June 1621 his government "executed twenty-seven
rebel leaders, whose corpses were then mutilated and exposed for
several years on Prague's Charles Bridge". Others were punished
by the forcible expropriation of their wealth. Evans says that
over fifty per-cent of all estates changed hands in the 1620s,
underlining just how profound were the changes initiated by Ferdinand.
The constitution was changed, and the right of the Bohemian nobles
to elect their own king was restricted.
The religious persecution of Protestants took place
on a large scale, some groups, like the Calvinists and the Moravian
Brethren, being forced into exile. One of those exiled was the
scholar, religious leader and educationalist Jan Amos Komenský
(Comenius), who was so influential in Europe at that time, and
whose sense of Czech nationhood so influenced Tomáš
Masaryk and others at the turn of the twentieth century. In the
meantime, the Roman Catholic hierarchy regained the importance
they had lost during the time of the Hussite and Protestant ascendancy.
W.R. Ward comments that the persecution of the Protestants was
so thorough and prolonged, that by the early eighteenth century
their internal collapse "seemed almost complete"
The time from 1620 until 1848 have been seen by the
Czechs and their supporters as a period of profound darkness.
A.J.P. Taylor wrote that in 1620, "Czech Hussite culture
was replaced by the cosmopolitan Baroque culture of the Counter-Reformation",
and this was not meant as a complement. In addition, the Czech
language fell into decline, although this was largely through
neglect rather than the result of official policy. Despite this,
in the Habsburg years, Bohemia kept a certain amount of its autonomy,
and it is the view of Evans that this period was not all that
bad for the Czechs. Certainly, things could have been worse. Bohemia
did lose its political élite, but in return, many Bohemians
gained influence at the Vienna court. Evans says that the cosmopolitan
culture of Bohemia allowed "educated and adaptable Bohemians
easy entrée into a broader Austrian world".
The period certainly had an enormous cultural influence on Prague,
which flourished architecturally in the Baroque era. Later Prague
also became a major music centre, especially in the age of Mozart.
Under the influence of industrialisation, the impact
of the French Revolution, and the presence of increased centralising
tendencies in an Empire dominated by the character of Metternich,
a Czech national renaissance began towards the end of the eighteenth
century. From the 1830s onwards there was a recovery of a national
consciousness amongst the Czech people. This to a large extent
was based on the renaissance of the Czech language. Prominent
in the revival of the Czech language and culture were the linguists
Josef Dobrovský and Josef Jungmann, the poet Jan Kollár,
and the historian František Palacký.
In 1848 revolutionary fever hit Europe. In Vienna,
Metternich was forced out of power, and a new constitution was
formed. In Prague, on the 11 March, both German and Czech Bohemians
joined together to demand what Taylor describes as the "usual
liberal 'freedoms' - freedom of discussion, suppression of the
censorship, and the like". The unity between German and Czech
did not last, and by the end of the months the Czechs were calling
for an independent Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. Eventually, the
demands of the Czech intellectuals, under Palacký, became
submerged in a meeting of a Pan-Slav Congress in Prague The Congress
was a mixture of Slav nationalists, who looked to Russia for leadership,
and others, who preferred a federalised Austrian Empire. Moreover,
most Germans, with their pre-parliament in Frankfurt, saw Bohemia
and Moravia as an obvious part of the new German national state.
For the more moderate Czechs, an Austrian federation seemed the
best solution, as it would militate against domination either
by Russia or Germany. As Palacký is reported to have said,
"if Austria did not exist, it would be necessary to create
her". The history of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the
Habsburg Empire bears this statement out.
In June the Congress turned into a full scale revolt. Fighting lasted several days, but order was restored by the Austrian Field-Marshal Prince Windischgrätz. With the end of the revolt, some thought that Czech nationalism had had its day. For example, Frederick Engels, no admirer of Palacký, wrote that "dying Czechish [sic] nationality - dying according to every fact known in history for the last four hundred years - made in 1848 a last effort to regain its former vitality, an effort whose failure, independently of all revolutionary considerations, was to prove that Bohemia could only exist, henceforth, as a portion of Germany, although part of her inhabitants might yet, for some centuries, continue to speak a non-German language".
For now, however, Bohemia and Moravia remained as
part of the Austrian Empire. Industry developed rapidly in Bohemia
in the nineteenth century, especially in Prague and in Pilsen.
Czech national sentiment continued to grow, and became prominent
in the arts. This was most visible in the world of music, where
Bedrich Smetana, Antonín Dvorák and Leoš Janácek
all drew on Czech national music for inspiration. German speaking
culture also flourished, amongst others: Gustav Mahler (composer);
Edmund Husserl (philosopher); Ernst Mach (Physicist); Adolf Loos
(Architect); and Sigmund Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis);
were all born in Bohemia or Moravia.
German Jewish culture especially flourished in Prague.
The nineteenth-century had been a time of considerable industrial
development and population growth in Prague. This was further
accelerated by the arrival of railways in the middle of the century,
which enabled the easier transport of raw materials and people
to and from Prague. F.W. Carter notes that between 1870 and 1900,
Prague's population more than doubled. Prague had been for many
centuries a city of three cultures, Czech, German and Jewish.
Ludwig Dietz estimates that in 1900, around 90% of Prague's inhabitants
were Czech, 5-6% German and 4-5% other minorities (Jews, Croats,
Magyars, etc). Use of the German language was an indicator of
social class. Count Franz Lützow relates a tale of members
of the Bohemian national movement being profoundly depressed when
they encountered two young women who had been speaking Czech suddenly
convert to German, saying: "Take care they hear us talking
Bohemian; they will take us for peasants". Even at the end
of the nineteenth century it could still be assumed that "the
educated classes spoke German while the people spoke Czech".
The Czech revival helped polarise Czech and German cultures. In
1882 Charles University had been divided into two universities,
Czech and German. In addition, literary contact between the two
languages was also in decline.
There had been Jews in Prague since the middle ages.
For many years they had been forced to live in a ghetto, Josefov,
on the east bank of the Vltava, but during the nineteenth century
those who could, moved out into the suburbs. Josefov itself was
largely demolished and rebuilt in the 1880s in an attempt to deal
with the bad sanitation of this poor crowded area. During this
time, the Jews tried to assimilate to either Czech or German culture.
Gary Cohen notes that by 1860 the regional Jewish dialect, Mauschel-deutsch
had been almost completely replaced by German as the principal
language spoken in the larger Jewish communities. That German
had been chosen, as opposed to Czech, may indicate the middle-class
aspirations of many Prague Jews at the time, and their commitment
to German liberal culture. However, this liberal culture was by
then on the wane. The end of the century saw the growth of a virulent
and pervasive anti-Semitism in the Austrian Empire which persuaded
Theodor Herzl, amongst others, that only a national Jewish state
could save the Jews, and Zionism was born. Prague itself was not
spared the experience of anti-Semitism, both Pan-German nationalists
and Czech radicals indulging in such activity. The Czechs held
anti-German and anti-Semitic riots in Prague in 1871. In was in
this context, that a group of German-Jewish writers, the so called
Prager Kreis (Prague Circle), came to prominence. Their
number included Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Rainer Maria Rilke and
Franz Werfel, although these were the only the most prominent
members of the group. The literary culture created by the Prager
Kreis was unique, unrelated either to the mainstream of German
literature or to the Czech revival.
Some writers have suggested that the reason for this literary uniqueness was that the Prague Jews were forced to live in some kind of 'voluntary ghetto', with very little contact with either the majority Czech population, or with the German middle class.
If the German writers of Prague seemed to be stricken more violently and for a much longer time by a-vitality ... it was because their unique position in an alien environment tended to aggravate and to perennialize their disturbances.
On the other hand, other writers have suggested that the Prague Jews had assimilated almost entirely with the German minority in Prague, and that it was the rediscovery of their Jewish roots that creatively influenced their literature.
The repressed streams of the ethnic and religious factors forced their way through to the surface of active consciousness from the deepest sources of the soul.
However, it is not necessary to assume that what may have been true for the sensitive young men of the Prager Kreis is true for all Prague Jews. For German speaking Jews there appears to have been some contact with Gentile Germans, at least at what Ritchie Robertson calls the "upper end of their social range". However, in private life, Jews tended to congregate together by choice (it seems) and only very rarely married into Gentile families. It was in this situation, and in what Franz Kuna describes as a "peculiar hothouse atmosphere", that Prague was able to become a centre of a new Jewish-German literary culture.
Towards the end of the nineteenth-century, the so-called 'nationalities problem' of the Austrian Empire began to get worse. The Empire contained a very large number of different nationalities, and its attempts to keep all these groups happy was fraught with danger. Even relatively minor matters could trigger an international incident. It was the Southern Slav problem which helped trigger the First World War, and it was the war that really ensured the end of the Austrian Empire in 1918. The sudden collapse of the Empire took many observers by surprise. In many ways, her alliance with Germany proved her undoing. Mark Cornwall says that it "eclipsed her status as an independent power in Europe both in the eyes of Germany and of the Entente". In Alan Sked's words, Austria had become "Germany's poodle". At the end of the war, the Entente powers realised that they did not have to ensure the survival of the Empire, and when the various nations asked for autonomy, the Allies were prepared to give it to them. It was only in 1918 that formal recognition was given to Czechoslovakia's claims. According to Sked, the responsibility for the events of 1918 falls on the people of the Austrian Empire themselves.
[The monarchy's dissolution] was not brought about by the Allies, who hoped until almost the last that it might endure. Instead, the peoples of the Monarchy at long last demanded their rights: democracy and independence became their clarion calls ... The peace treaties, in many instances, therefore, merely approved their faits accomplis.
One of the new states created by the peace treaties, was the new state of Czechoslovakia, made up of Bohemia and Moravia, together with the old Hungarian province of Slovakia. Its first president was Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.
Masaryk was born in 1850 in Hodonín in south-eastern Moravia, and he later studied in Brno and Vienna. From 1882 he taught philosophy at the new Czech University in Prague, later becoming one of the Czech deputies in the Vienna Reichsrat for nine years. In the 1890s he wrote a series of books on the Czech nation and its heroes, expounding for a Czech audience the importance of Hus, Havlícek and Palacký in Czech history.
Not with violence but with love, not with the sword but with the plough, not with blood but with work, not with death but with life - that is the answer of our Czech genius, the meaning of our history and the heritage of our great ancestors.
Masaryk, like Palacký would have preferred
a Czechoslovak State to have been part of an Austrian federation,
but once that path seemed blocked, he began to call for an independent
Czechoslovak republic. After the outbreak of the First World War,
Masaryk called for the creation of a belt of small nations stretching
from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, in order to separate Germany
and Russia. Masaryk had gone into exile at the start of the war,
and in 1916 he, together with Milan Štefánik, Edvard
Beneš and Josef Dürich, formed the Czech National Council,
based in Paris. The Council had the aim of founding an independent
state for both Czechs and Slovaks, and the leaders, especially
Beneš, tried to persuade the Allied powers of the strength
of their claims. This diplomatic activity eventually paid off
when in early 1918 President Wilson's 'Fourteen Points' speech
specifically called for the people of the Austrian Empire to be
given the "freest opportunity for autonomous development".
Even at this stage, Wilson and the allies were reluctant to break
up the Austrian Empire, but after the unsuccessful finish of secret
negotiations with Austria, their policy became that of encouraging
the nationalities to revolt by seeming to offer the prospect of
independence. In June and August 1918 France and Britain recognised
the Czech National Council as officially being able to represent
the Czechoslovak cause. On 3 September, however, the United States
government recognised the Council as the de facto government
of an independent Czecho-Slovak state.
The Emperor Charles recognised Czech autonomy in late October 1918, and he abdicated the following month. Following negotiations between the Paris Council and the National Committee based in Prague, the Czechs and Slovaks decided on a democratic parliamentary republic, and Masaryk was elected President. The borders of the new Czechoslovak Republic were confirmed by the Great Powers at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
The Czechs are rightly proud of their republic. It
was the only democracy that took root in eastern Europe between
the wars. However the method of gaining independence resulted
in a new problem, namely that of the German minorities. Just as
the Austrian Empire was an amalgam of various nationalities, it
was the same with the new Czechoslovakia. Philip Longworth comments
that in numerical terms, the Czechs (46%) were easily outnumbered
by the combined Slovaks (13%), Germans (28%), Hungarians (8%),
Poles (2%) and Ruthenes (3%). The main problem was with the three
and a half million German minority. These Germans mostly lived
in the border areas of Bohemia and Moravia, and were called Sudeten
Germans after the mountain range dividing Bohemia from Saxony.
In a period of months, the Sudeten Germans found themselves a
minority in a country ruled by their traditional enemies, the
Czechs. Friedrich Prinz says that for Germans living in Bohemia,
the short period after the end of the war constituted a decisive
psychological caesura.
In his first address to the Czechoslovak National Assembly, Masaryk cited Comenius: "I, too, trust the Lord that after the storms of wrath ... the rule over things will return to thee, O Czech people". The speech underlined how far the Sudeten Germans had been marginalised. Masaryk emphasised that it was the Czech and Slovak people who "built our state", and invited "our Germans" to collaborate in the future development of the country. This was difficult for the Sudeten Germans to accept, and they made at least one attempt to join themselves to German Austria before their areas were occupied by the Czech forces. Masaryk, like most Czechs, believed in the "organic connection" between the Czech and German parts of ancient Bohemia. This viewpoint is supported by the historian Mamatey, who says that if the Sudeten German areas had joined Germany and Austria, the Czech areas would have been absorbed soon afterwards. However, some western politicians did not consider the medieval borders of Bohemia to be sacrosanct, and would have been happy to have seen some of the German-speaking areas to come under the control of Germany itself.
The years following the end of the First World War
were primarily ones of political consolidation. However, in Slovakia,
a movement led by two Roman Catholic Priests, Msgrs. Hlinka and
Tiso, demanded Slovak autonomy. During the years of depression,
Czech industry was hit very hard, especially in the more industrialised
German areas. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas has commented that the "employment
rate among the Sudeten Germans was high and [that] they were discriminated
against not only in civil service jobs but also in the private
sector". In this depressed economic background, and with
the Nazi seizure of power in neighbouring Germany in 1933, the
pressure for Sudeten German autonomy grew even stronger. In October
1933, Konrad Henlein founded a Sudeten Patriotic Front, which
after the elections of 1935 became a powerful political force.
Masaryk retired from the Presidency in December 1935
and was replaced by Beneš. From about 1937, German pressure
for expansion in the east grew rapidly. Adolf Hitler saw that
he could exploit the Sudeten German problem in his quest for German
Lebensraum. At the beginning of 1938, Hitler began to pledge
support for Germans "who live beyond our frontiers and are
unable to insure for themselves the right to a general freedom,
personal, political, and ideological". The Anschluss
with Austria on the 11 March 1938 threatened Czechoslovakia further,
as it was now surrounded on three sides by German land. At this
time, Henlein offered his services to Hitler, and privately made
it clear that in his opinion, the whole of Bohemia, Moravia and
Silesia should be included in a larger Third Reich.
Henlein now made public appeals for the Sudeten German areas to be given autonomy, so that they could ally themselves with their larger German neighbour. His calls were received with some sympathy in parts of the West, especially where the post war settlements were thought to have been too harsh on Germany. For example, the year before, Arnold Tonybee had written of the Sudeten Germans' natural desire to join the Reich. The crisis came to a head in September, and the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, visited Hitler several times in a quest to find some settlement agreeable to the German leadership. At Munich on the 29 September, an agreement was signed between Hitler, Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and Edouard Daladier which ceded to the Third Reich all areas of Bohemia and Moravia with 50 per cent or more Germans. Very shortly before this agreement was signed, Chamberlain made one of his three most quoted pronouncements.
How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.
There may have been good arguments in favour of the
policy of appeasement, especially in late 1938, but ignorance
was not one of them. This comment of Chamberlain's has not been
forgotten by the Czechs or their supporters. President Havel has
spoken of the "agglomeration of inconveniences" that
provided excuses for Western inaction in 1938, and has concluded
that Chamberlain "regarded Nazism as a problem that would
go away if he stuck his head in the sand, or as it were crossed
over to the other side of the street". The Munich Agreement
was received as a success in many parts of the West, but there
were a few dissenters. The Bishop of Durham, for example, commented
that "a grievous injury has been inflicted on a brave and
free people: [and] the moral prestige of the great Western democracies
has been destroyed".
On the 30 September, the Czech government surrendered
the Sudeten lands. Beneš decided not to fight, believing
that the Czech cause was hopeless. A recent study has suggested
that Czechoslovakia did stand a fair chance of withstanding a
German military invasion in 1938, and accuses Beneš of a
"lack of nerve". However, Beneš had to confront
his country's betrayal by the West, and can perhaps be excused.
He resigned on 5 October.
The following year was one of political instability.
Czechoslovakia lost almost a third of her territory and over a
third of her people. Even more importantly, Czechoslovakia lost
much of its industrial potential. In addition, she had lost the
use of her defensive fortifications, based on the French Maginot
Line, and stood militarily at the "mercy of Germany".
The second crisis came as a result of the continued
Slovak calls for autonomy. Slovak nationalists under Tiso held
secret negotiations with Germany, and in 1939 the Slovak National
Assembly voted for independence. In the confusion following this,
the Czech leaders Hácha and Chvalkovský visited
Berlin to discover what Germany intended to do with Slovakia.
While there they were there, they were forced by Hitler to agree
to the total capitulation of the Czech army. On the 15 March 1939,
German troops marched into Czechoslovakia. The following day,
Hitler came to Prague and promulgated the new Protektorats
Böhmen und Mähren, the Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia.
The Protectorate was the responsibility of a Reich
Protector, Konstantin von Neurath, who stayed until 1941, when
power passed to Reinhard Heydrich. Conditions took a turn for
the worse under Heydrich, including the imposition of Martial
Law. In 1941, a small number of British trained Czech soldiers
were parachuted into Czechoslovakia. Some of them found support
in the Czech underground, and on 27 May 1942 two of them successfully
assassinated Heydrich. In response, the German authorities completely
destroyed the village of Lidice, all the men being shot, and the
women and children sent to concentration camps.
Culturally, the Protectorate did not suffer quite
to the same extent as Poland under the Third Reich. The Czechs
were supposed to be racially 'poor cousins' of the Germans, and
were supposed to be capable of Germanisation. Czech culture was
repressed to some extent, for example, the performance of some
works by Smetana or Dvorák was banned. However, like elsewhere
in eastern Europe, it was the Jews who suffered worst of all.
Many were forced to live in the ghetto in Terezín, but
others were sent to the death camps in Poland. Gotthold Rhode
estimates that around 70,000 Jews, or over three-quarters of Czechoslovakia's
Jewish population, were killed during the time of the Protectorate.
The end of the war came with Czechoslovakia's invasion from both east and west. The U.S. Army, by arrangement with the Soviet Union, stayed to the west of a line between Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) and Ceské Budejovice (Budweis). On the 9 May, Soviet tanks entered Prague. President Beneš returned from exile later the same month.
The newly liberated Czechoslovak Republic now tried to assert its authority throughout the country. Perhaps its most notable achievement was what one history calls the "solution of the minorities problem". The solution chosen was the mass expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from the borders of Czechoslovakia, and their resettlement in Germany. Beneš had decided on this radical policy while in exile, and gained the support of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Czech population, remembering Lidice and other horrors, set about implementing this policy almost immediately after liberation. On the 2 August, a decree issued at Košice (the Kaschauer Statut) deprived the Sudeten Germans of their Czechoslovak nationality, arguing that Munich had turned them into German citizens. The 'Orderly transfer of the German Population' was confirmed by Article XII of the 1945 Potsdam Conference, and mostly carried out by the end of 1946. In this short period, over three million Sudeten Germans were stripped of their Czechoslovak citizenship, and then expelled. Although some of the transfers were carried out in an orderly fashion, many were not, and the German refugees suffered much in their enforced exile. Implicit in the ideology behind the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans was the appropriation of their property, and its consequent nationalisation. The policy was therefore to be used as an instrument of social reform in the new Czechoslovakia. The Sudeten German question has surfaced again recently, Václav Havel commenting that the expulsions were not a just punishment, but merely revenge.
We also expelled many, not on the basis of any individual culpability, but simply because they belonged to a particular nation. Under the pretext of exercising "historic" justice, we inflicted suffering on a large number of innocent people, particularly women and children.
Even more recently, the question of compensation for the confiscation of German land has been discussed, as yet with no definitive solution.
In elections held in May 1946, the KS_ (Communist
Party) did well, ending up with 38.7 per-cent of total votes.
Klement Gottwald, their leader, became Prime Minister. In February
1948, in reaction to a dispute about the alleged appointment of
Communists to senior posts in the police force, the non-communist
members of the government resigned, hoping to force Gottwald to
step down. This did not happen, and instead - with the help of
workers' marches through Prague, Beneš accepted the formation
of a new Communist dominated government. Power passed to a Soviet
backed "Central Action Committee", and the Communist
coup d'état was complete. In the despair that followed
this event, Jan Masaryk, the foreign-minister and the son of Tomáš,
was found dead in the courtyard of the foreign ministry; although
this was probably a suicide rather than another defenestration.
Beneš, by now "a sick and bewildered man", himself
resigned on the 4th May. He died less than four months later.
Gottwald succeeded him as president, but it was becoming increasingly clear that Stalin's influence was getting greater. Czechoslovakia adopted the Soviet model of government and power passed to the Communist Party. The nineteen-fifties were marked by the first serious purges of Czechoslovak politicians. When Gottwald died in 1953, quite soon after Stalin himself, he was replaced by Antonín Novotný. Novotný's rule was also one of terror, and show trials were a common experience. Despite the existence of Five-Year Plans, by the 1960s the Czechoslovak economy was in a mess. Novotný finally was deposed in 1967. He was replaced by Alexander Dubcek, a leading Slovak Communist Party Member.
Dubcek chose to try a different approach, what became to be known as 'Socialism with a human face'. The reforms suggested federal autonomy for the Slovaks, a revision of the constitution guaranteeing civil rights, and the reform of agriculture and industry in an attempt to revitalise the economy. This movement became known as the 'Prague Spring'. In June 1968, some Czechoslovak intellectuals published the "two-thousand words", a document calling for the introduction of more democratic reforms in Czechoslovakia. The Soviet leadership did not believe that Dubcek could control the reform process, and feared that his attempt to create a pluralist state could result in the acceptance of multi-party politics. Not wanting to take the risk, and on the invitation of Czechoslovak hard-liners, on the 20 August, Soviet, East German, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian troops invaded the country. The people tried passive resistance, but the Soviet army remained in occupation, and the 'Prague Spring' came to an end. On the 16 January 1969, in protest against the Soviet occupation, a student named Jan Palach, set fire to himself in Wenceslas Square in Prague. The death profoundly affected Czechoslovakia, and at the time comparisons with the death of Jan Hus were common. Finally in April 1969, Dubcek was ousted and replaced by Gustav Husák, who ensured a return to the more oppressive atmosphere of Novotný's Czechoslovakia. This process was known as 'normalisation'.
Written 1993-94. Web Page by Michael
Day, University of Bath.
Last updated: 20 January 1998