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16.
The Czechoslovakian state
After
four years of war with destruction and hunger in Europe, the
people craved for peace more and more. Thomas Masaryk and
Eduard Benes went into exile to America during the war and
managed to establish a principle which weighed heavily in
later negotiations with Austria, namely, that a "Czechoslovak
National Council" was recognized as the government of a
nation at war. When in October of 1918, the government of
Austria appealed to President Wilson for peace on the basis of
Point X of his Fourteen Points which reads: "The peoples
of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to
see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest
opportunity to autonomous development.", President Wilson
declared this point as now irrelevant since Czechoslovakia has
been recognized as a sovereign state. On October 28, 1918, a
national committee in Prague proclaimed the sovereign
Czechoslovak state and assumed governmental powers. The
government in Vienna acceded. After only a few days it became
evident that the new state was asserting power over the whole
of Bohemia, Moravia and Austro-Silesia and would refuse
autonomy for the Sudetengermans for which President Wilson had
given his word. Masaryk stated in a governmental declaration
on December 23, 1918: "The Bohemian regions populated by
Germans belong to us and shall remain our property. We have
fought for this state and the legal position of the Germans,
who once came as immigrants and colonists, is therewith
settled once and for all. We have a legitimate right to the
riches of the whole of our land …". Worth to note, in
October 1918 in Philadelphia he proclaimed: "The rights
of the minority shall be secured by proportional
representation; equal rights shall be enjoyed by national
minorities.
The
Czech military began occupying the Sudetenlands in November
and concluded the operation by January 1919. Resistance was
inconceivable in the war-exhausted regions. Reluctance voiced
by the winners, especially English and American diplomats, was
successfully hushed by Benes with a falsified demographic map.
On March 4, 1919, when hundred thousands of Germans
demonstrated for their autonomy, the Czech military fired into
the masses in several towns. 54 dead and 104 injured were the
result of this day. After the signing of the Versailles Treaty,
June 28, 1919, the Sudetengermans realized that little
opportunity was left for getting their demands considered.
Even so, the Germans participated in the first local elections.
The vote count reflected the coherent German-populated regions;
a fact now evident for the western powers too. In the
following years the Czech administration modified these
regions systematically; important positions in the civil
services were filled by Czechs (this included post office and
railroad). Germans were discriminated against in all fields of
public life and in the economy. Up to 1927 approximately 500
German schools with about 3500 school classes were closed, and
the ones that continued were practically excluded from
maintenance by the state. During the years of the first
Czechoslovak republic, more than half of the total number of
unemployed happened to be Sudetengermans.
From
the very beginning, the new state proclaimed itself as
Czechoslovak "national state". The Sudetengermans
were made citizens of this new state against their will, were
kept out of the drafting-process of the constitution and 300
further fundamental acts. Later on, words of oppositional
initiatives were suppressed by the "Law for the
Protection of the Republic" of 1923, under which
political opponents were taken to court. Count Richard
Coudenhove-Kalergi, a 26-year-old author with Sudetengerman
family connections, wrote in an article in 1921: "The
German question is the essential question to the survival of
the Czechoslovak Republic; should the Republic be able to
reconcile the three and a half million Germans with nine
million Czechs and Slovaks, it will become rich, respected and
an example for the development of future supranational states.
Should this reconciliation fail, the republic is bound to
stagger from one crisis into the next, and German Bohemia will
tear itself from this republic as soon as international
political circumstances provide for an opportunity … If
Czechoslovakia departs from nationalism, it can set an example
for a new Europe where language conflicts have become a thing
of the past.
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