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The Sudeten Germans and the Twilight of the First Republic

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The Sudeten Germans and the Twilight of the First Republic Review The Sudeten Germans and the Twilight of the First Republic Petr Kaplan BRANDES, Detlef: Die Sudetendeutschen im Krisenjahr 1938. (Veröffentlichungen des Collegium Karolinum, vol. 107.) München, R. Oldenbourg 2008, xvi + 399 pp. In his monograph the well-known German historian Detlef Brandes focuses on the position of the Sudeten Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia and their role in the destruction of the young republic. His basic hypothesis is that the causes of the catastrophic development between Czechs and Germans in the Czech Lands, which ultimately led to the postwar expulsion or transfer of the Germans, must be sought in the years 1935–38, especially in the period between the Anschluss of Austria and the Munich Agreement. The theme is one that has been the subject of a great deal of historiographical treatment, but Brandes tries to approach it from a new angle: he considers the fortunes of the Sudeten Germans not as the single story of a homogenous population group but as the history of many social groups and their relationships. The rise and radicalisation of the Sudeten German Party (SdP) cannot in his view be grasped without an understanding of the internal and external infl uences af- fecting the everyday life of German inhabitants in the First Republic. He therefore considers moods in the borderlands, explores the conditions inside the community 150 Czech Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. I of Sudeten Germans, and describes their growing support for the policy of the SdP and counter-actions by the local social-democratic and communist groupings, who up to the last moment kept trying to win German voters back to their side. Nor of course does he forget the problematic relations between the Germans and the “borderers” (hraničáři), i.e. the Czech inhabitants of the borderlands, who did not wish to concede any form of German autonomy. Brandes documents these levels of social relations using local cases and so shows the differences between individual regions and at the same time the common phenomena that applied to the whole Sudeten German territory. The book is therefore a history of the border regions of the Czech Lands (not only of Sudeten Germans, as might appear from the title) in the context of the tense internal political situation and growing threat to the re- public, with a stress on the “crisis” year of 1938 when the German-populated territo- ries were annexed by the Reich. The book rests on an extensive foundation of sources. The author has explored and studied the funds of many Czech archives, including the Archive of the Czech National Bank, the Archive of the Offi ce of the President of the Republic and the Prager Presse Clippings Archive. He notes that the fund of the Beneš Presiden- tial Archive has not been preserved in its entirety. The funds of the former Archive of the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic (now the Security Services Archive), which contain detailed and concrete reports from the police and border guards on investigated incidents but also complaints submitted and mutual legal actions by the inhabitants of the Sudetenland, turned out to be particularly valuable material. The Czechoslovak police sent their men to all SdP actions to supervise maintenance of order and to present reports on the events. Brandes tested their reliability by comparing them with articles by foreign and above all British journal- ists. As another control source he also used the reports of the exiled German Social Democratic Party whose members found a temporary refuge in Czechoslovakia. In these reports the German Social Democrats comment on events in Germany and in Czechoslovakia and offer useful comparisons. Brandes has also exploited editions of Czechoslovak, German, British and French documents, and has not overlooked the autobiographies of important actors of the political life of the time, for example Edvard Beneš, Kamil Krofta and others. The approach is chronological and the book divided into fi ve chapters followed by a fi nal summary and appendices. The fi rst chapter, “The Mutual Tackling of National Issues in the First Republic”, traces the development of the German political par- ties in Czechoslovakia up to 1937. This is a very densely packed account of events starting with the fi rst parliamentary elections in 1920, when seven supra-regional and ten smaller German parties were standing. Brandes emphasises the fact that these parties (with the exception of the communists) wanted to share in the running of the new state and were seeking to develop an activist (as opposed to rejection- ist) policy. It was the economic crisis in the 1930s that brought the major rupture. In the eyes of the German population the Czechoslovak government was to blame for the slow recovery from the recession, which had caused a steep increase in un- employment. The loss of jobs affected Sudeten Germans proportionately more than The Sudeten Germans and the Twilight of the First Republic 151 the rest of the inhabitants of the Republic, as Brandes shows using many statistics and tables. Comparison of their own situation with the fast recovery of Germany just over the border led Sudeten Germans to the fi rst formulation of demands for separation from Czechoslovakia. According to Brandes’s fi ndings, Henlein’s party did not enjoy equal favour in all the border regions (just as in the case of the Nazi NSDAP in Germany itself), but in the time of crisis it succeeded in gaining the up- per hand with the forcefulness of its policies. Apart from high unemployment Brandes sees two other factors behind the radicalisation of the German population. The fi rst and foremost was in his view the rather unsuccessful nationality policy of the Prague government, which by its insistence on the concept of a Czechoslovak nation state contributed to whipping up Sudeten German nationalism and made it impossible for Germans and the other minorities to identify with the Czecho- slovak state. The second factor according to Brandes was discrimination against the German inhabitants in comparison with the Czech hraničáři in the fi elds of lan- guage, schooling, employment in state service, the allocation of state contracts and suchlike. Brandes considers that it was these three factors that led to the rise of the chairman of the German Turnverband Konrad Henlein and to the victory of the Sudeten German Party over the other German parties in the parliamentary elections of 1935. The second chapter focuses on the year 1937 in the course of events preceding the disintegration of Czechoslovakia. Brandes looks at the attempts of the “activ- ist” parties, which participated in the functioning of the government coalition but in 1935 lost the support of the majority of the German population, to weaken the ri- val SdP. Following the elections the SdP gained infl uence in a range of Sudeten Ger- man organisations and in the German press, and this proved an ideal instrument for spreading party propaganda. Brandes emphasises that while the Sudeten German Party was built on the Führer principle from the outset, at this point it distanced itself from Hitler’s National Socialism (to avoid possible misunderstanding Brandes translates the Czechoslovak National Socialists as Volkssozialisten). Christianity was another attribute of the SdP and so Brandes argues that expressions of anti- semitism in the Sudetenland should be understood as more religiously than racially motivated. By a policy of concessions (in the fi eld of language, in the employment of Germans in the state sphere, in support for German fi rms with government orders and suchlike), which were contained in the so-called February Agreement (Feber- Abkommen) of February 1937, the Prague government tried to bolster support for the rest of the German parties against the SdP, but implementation of the agree- ment met with resistance from the Czech inhabitants of the borderlands. Fearing the ever-stronger Sudeten German Party, the hraničáři refused to cooperate with any of the German parties. Brandes ends this chapter with Konrad Henlein’s offer to Adolf Hitler to use the SdP as an instrument for the breaking up of Czechoslo- vakia after the postponement of the municipal elections in which Henlein’s party was expected to reap further success. The third chapter is entitled “From the Anschluss of Austria to the Municipal Elections”, which indicates its major content. Brandes begins by highlighting 152 Czech Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. I the enthusiasm with which the merger of Austria with Germany was greeted by the Sudeten Germans. This was because the Anschluss was regarded by the sup- porters of the Sudeten German Party as the prefi guration of the expected solu- tion to the “Sudeten Question”, and added to their self-confi dence. The party organised recruitment campaigns and used coercion to try to get new members. Here Brandes identifi es another aspect of the success of the SdP. Henlein’s party had the support of the employers, who based on the Reich model wanted the workers to leave left-wing parties and unions. One way of motivating them to do so was, for example, offering protection to SdP members during forced lay-offs. The new self-confi dence of the Germans was also expressed in the boycott of Czech and Jewish shops. Brandes condemns the failure of nerve of the non-Marxist German political parties, who out of fear of “levelling down” decided to voluntarily dis- solve themselves or become affi liated to the SdP. Whether this was really a matter of fear or of opportunism, after Henlein’s public speech in April 1938, in which he openly identifi ed with the ideas of German National Socialism, there could be no doubt as to how the Sudeten German Party was planning to deal with the op- position.
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