The Czechs in a Nutshell

During the nineteenth century, when modern nationalism emerged, Prague’s Germans took their Sunday promenades exclusively Am Graben (today’s Na Příkopě), they visited only German theatres and restaurants, read only German newspapers and sent their children to German-speaking schools (and, after 1882, a German university), while the Czech upper classes strolled only on Ferdinand Avenue (now Národní Třída), visited Czech theatres (after 1883 the National Theatre) and restaurants, read Czech newspapers and educated their offspring in Czech schools. At one time Prague even had one Czech and one German botanical garden, and Czech hotheads regularly clashed with like-minded Germans in veritable mass brawls.

Still, it’s foolish to pretend (as some nationalists do) that the Germans’ long-lasting presence in Bohemia and Moravia and the close distance to Germany itself didn’t have a tremendous impact on the Czechs’ cultural and economic development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Prague’s Germans have a theatre, you say? Well, then we will certainly have one, too! Have the Germans codified their language by producing a large dictionary? Then we must do the same for the Czech language, and, in addition, develop an encyclopaedia that dwarfs any German lexicon! The Germans are establishing tourist clubs and erecting lookout towers on the peaks of the Krkonoše (Giant) Mountains? Just wait and see — our Czech tourist clubs will get far more members who’ll erect even taller lookout towers!

How did the northern parts of Bohemia and Moravia become one of the most heavily industrialized areas in Central Europe? Because these regions were densely populated with Germans, who “imported” mining technology, textile industries, mechanical factories and glass blowers from their kinsmen on the other side of the border in Saxony and Silesia.

The Czechs’ correct, although not too hearty relationship with their German compatriots received an almost fatal blow with the Munich Agreement in 1938 and the subsequent Second World War, during which a vast majority of Czechoslovakia’s Germans (but not all of them!) proved more loyal to Hitler’s Nazi regime than to Masaryk’s democratic ideals.

It’s easy to understand how this treason embittered the Czechs. First, they suffered the humiliation of being pressed to cede a large chunk of the country to Nazi Germany, and then they endured six years of occupation, which cost 120,000 Czechs — 78,000 of them of Jewish origin — their lives. In the Nazi retaliation against Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination in 1942 alone, more than 3,000 people, including all male inhabitants of the village of Lidice, were murdered.

Then add immense material damages and a population boiling with hatred (within the end of 1945, more than 700 collaborators had been executed), and mix it with 40 years of Cold War, when the communist propaganda portrayed Czechoslovakia’s Western neighbours as irreparable militarists, and you can with some tolerance understand why nácek (Nazi) and vepř (pig) still are among the slang words used for a German.

Yet the end of the Cold War has undeniably warmed most Czechs’ relationships to the Germans. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Germany has become by far the largest foreign investor in the Czech Republic and there was, quite surprising, only sporadic grumbling (see: Klaus, Václav) when the German icon Volkswagen took over the Czech national treasure, Škoda Auto, in 1993. Today, German-owned Škoda accounts for almost 10 percent of the Czech Republic’s total exports.

“Our mutual relations have definitely stabilized,” Václav Houžvička, leader of the Czech-German Forum for Discussion, recently told the Mladá fronta Dnes daily. “But unfortunately, there are still certain barriers that hamper the co-operations.”

What Houžvička calls “barrier” is what less diplomatic people would probably call plain Germanophobia. There is a widespread conviction among Czechs that the German government will someday officially support the evicted Sudeten Germans’ demand that Prague must compensate them for property that was confiscated by Czechoslovakia in 1945 (see: Carlsbad English Bitters). However wild and exaggerated this fear of revisionism might be (only one organization, the militant Wittiko Bund, has publicly demanded compensation), the “Sudeten ghost” wakes up every time there is an election in either Germany or the Czech Republic.