In late September 1938, the leaders of Europe’s then most powerful nations — Great Britain, France and Italy (but not the Soviet Union) — met up with Adolf Hitler in Munich to discuss the Sudeten question. Prior to the conference, Hitler had made it clear that annexation of the Sudeten areas into Germany was his final demand. Convinced that appeasement policy was the appropriate medicine to calm Hitler down, both France’s Premier Édouard Daladier and Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain agreed to throw democratic Czechoslovakia to the Nazi wolves.
“They had the choice between dishonour and war,” Winston Churchill later commented on his predecessor’s behaviour. “They chose dishonour, and got a war.”
As a result of the tragic Munich Agreement — or the Munich betrayal, as the Czechs call it — Czechoslovakia was forced to cede over 40,000 square kilometres of its territory to Germany (and later smaller areas to the Poles and the Hungarians as well), with a population of roughly four millions. Some 800,000 inhabitants of these areas were ethnic Czechs, who had suddenly become inhabitants of the Third Reich.
You don’t have to be a psychologist to understand how traumatic this blow was for the Czechs (the Slovaks were in another situation, as the later occupation of Bohemia and Moravia enabled them to establish their own state), and it had several important long-term consequences:
After 20 years of independence under the First Republic, most Czechs were both eager and determined to defend their country militarily. Actually, Czechoslovakia was not that badly prepared. During the 1930s, the government had poured billions of korunas into the construction of a vast network of 260 concrete fortresses along the borders. Moreover, the mobilization that was announced in the autumn of 1938 was greeted with common enthusiasm in the Czech population. With an army totalling 1.1 million men, Czechoslovakia boasted the world’s largest ground forces after Germany, Japan, France and Italy.
Nevertheless, pressed by the big European powers and haunted by visions of a terrible bloodshed like the one that happened in Spanish Guernica a year earlier (the Luftwaffe was incomparably better armed than Czechoslovak Air Force), president Edvard Beneš decided to give in without a fight. This led to a widespread contempt for the country’s political leadership in general, and to the democratic ones in particular. “I have a plan, or more precisely, an aero-plane,” the Czechs spitefully distorted one of the president’s remarks after he had fled the country.
The parallel to King Friedrich’s flight after another national disaster, the Battle of White Mountain, and later also to Dubček’s behaviour after the Russian invasion in 1968 is striking, and it underpinned the suspicion that Czech leaders tend to collapse when the country needs them as most.
Secondly, both Great Britain, widely admired in pre-war Czechoslovakia, and France, which was even a military ally, failed to help a small and threatened democracy in Central Europe (“Why risk our lives for a country we even can’t find on the map?” a British politician reportedly asked). Ever since, many Czechs felt that they could not trust the Western democracies that participated in the Munich betrayal.
The Soviet Union, on the contrary, had no Munich blood on its hands. Except for Western Bohemia, Czechoslovakia was even liberated by the Red Army, which was a tremendous propaganda advantage to Stalin’s local henchmen, who used the Russians’ image as true friends and peaceful liberators to pave the country’s way to communism.
And finally, the “disloyal behaviour” which the Czechs felt that the Sudeten Germans had demonstrated against their common state before the war led to a rather uncompromising reaction after Nazi Germany was beaten. Already in May 1945, civilian Sudeten Germans were rounded up and harassed by members of the Revolutionary Guards, and then concentrated in large camps.
Later, at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States gave Czechoslovakia the formal go-ahead to finish the operation. The Czechs didn’t waste their time. By the end of 1946, about 2.9 million Sudeten Germans — including social democrats who opposed Henlein’s SdP — had been mercilessly chucked out of the country, without any more belongings than the few things they could carry with them. Historians still disagree, but estimates suggest that at least 23,000 persons died during this “transfer”, as it is officially called in Czech.
Within three years of the end of the war, the number of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia was reduced to 150,000 persons (less than five percent of the pre-war community), who immediately had to assimilate into their Czech surroundings.
Judged by modern standards, the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans suspiciously resembles collective guilt and ethnic cleansing as lately seen in the former Yugoslavia. To most Czechs, though, it was a fair and deserved repayment for their undeniable participation in crushing democratic Czechoslovakia in 1938. It has also convinced many Czechs, especially older ones, that co-habitation with foreigners never brings anything good, and that multiculturalism is Western mumbo-jumbo.
Mushrooms
In one of his lectures, the legendary linguist Vladimír Skalička presented a theory that once and for all pinpointed the quintessential difference between Europe’s Germanic and Slavonic peoples.
“There is one decisive criterion,” the great linguist maintained. “While the Germanic nations detest mushrooms, the Slavonic peoples cherish mushrooms as a gastronomic delicacy, and use any opportunity to go to the forests and pick them.”
Photo © Terje B. Englund
The alleged cultural clash between the Germanic peoples and the Slavs definitely belongs in history’s graveyard. Yet in one respect professor Skalička was right. The Czechs are downright crazy about mushrooms! In late summer and autumn, a foreigner might even get the impression that the number of sponge-hunting Czechs roaming about in the forests with a punnet largely exceeds the possible number of mushrooms.
Why? As the professor said — mushrooms are considered to be a delicacy. If Czech cuisine in general appears to be — mildly speaking — a bit dull, this certainly doesn’t go for mushrooms. Any decent cook in the country knows at least a dozen ways to transform the fungus into more or less tasty dishes. And lots of other cooks know how to prepare the mushrooms that give you week-long hallucinations...
The advice to the foreigner is therefore evident: you needn’t become a mushroom freak, nor even pretend that the fungi dishes taste wonderful. But never speak derogatorily about them! In addition to insulting the Czechs’ cultural values, you will be perceived as a barbarian!
National Identity
Some years ago a sociologist, Jiří Pacek, confronted the readers of the daily Lidové Noviny with an intriguing question: when Pepa Novák, the average Czech, is to describe his country’s national identity, he normally doesn’t pull his punches. The Czechs by and large regard themselves to be a very cultivated, highly educated and broad-minded nation with golden hands and a natural flair for egalitarianism, improvisation and, not least, humour (see: Švejk, The Good Soldier).