[This is a peer reviewed thesis, by me, for a British university about the perceptions Czechs have of Germans.] To be ‘Czech’ has traditionally meant to speak the Czech language and to live in the territory inhabited by the Czech people. During the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries, at the time of forming of what we now consider nations, two models of nation emerged.

On one hand, there was what has been called the ‘Western’ model of the nation as a political and legal entity arising from the ideas of unity and equality created by the French revolution. On the other hand, there was the ‘Eastern’ model of the nation as a cultural and linguistic entity, arising from Herder’s philosophy. As Czechs have for a long time had to do without their own state, and needed to defend their language to avoid its extinction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their idea of the Czech nation was based on the Czech language, traditions, customs and myths.

This idea of identifying language with the nation was formulated in the nineteenth century by Josef Jungmann, a linguist, literary historian, and publisher of the first comprehensive Czech-German dictionary. As he put it in Slovesnost: ‘Language... is a national treasure which should be cherished by the patriot’, and ‘We will remain a Czech nation as long as we keep the Czech language exact and pure... our nation is contained within our language. Violation of the language means violation of the nation and the beginning of its fall.’ Language, then, became the biggest part of Czech national identity and a means of identifying oneself with the emerging Czech nation.

The opinions and approaches of one nation or ethnic group to another also help to define their identity. A fairly good insight can be gained about the way in which Czechs have been trying to redefine, revitalise or reconstitute their national identity since 1989 when looking at their relations with their biggest neighbour, Germany.

The Czech sociologist Olga Šmídová argues that Germany and the Germans (be they Czech, Austrian or German Germans) have long been an important, if not the main, frame of reference for the Czechs’ opinions of themselves and others, the background for the perception of their domestic and international affairs and relations.

From the mid-nineteenth century, the German element in the Czech lands had constituted a political problem for many Czech intellectuals and politicians (e.g. the historian turned MP, František Palacký) as both emerging nations were attempting to gain a certain degree of autonomy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was not until the 1840s when the notion of Germans as the ‘hereditary Czech enemy’ emerged.

This stereotype was later reinforced by several historical events. The Munich agreement of 1938 when Czechoslovakia was forced to cede to Germany its border regions inhabited by predominantly German-speaking population - the so-called Sudeten Germans - was perceived by the majority of the Czechs as an attempt by the Sudeten Germans and the German Reich to dominate the Czech lands. The destruction of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, six years of German occupation during which plans were made to ‘germanise’ the Czech lands and to exterminate parts of the Czech population, and during which thousands of Czechs were murdered, had a significant impact on the stereotype of the Germans as Czech enemies.

The expulsions of Germans from Central Europe after the Second World War, including close to three million Czechoslovak Germans, were accompanied by campaigns in the Czech press which portrayed the expulsions as justified and definite. Some viewed the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia as a final redress for the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 after which the Czech lands were dominated for hundreds of years by the Germans in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

After 1948, the topic of the Sudeten German expulsions became an ideological tool for the regime’s historians whose interpretation of the end of the Second World War in Czechoslovakia as well as that of Czechoslovak relations with Western Germany became part of the history books and school textbooks.

This ideological interpretation held that the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans was a historical necessity and that the Second World War showed that the Czechs and Germans could not live beside each other in the Czech lands. Several historians also pointed out that the Sudeten Germans who had settled in the Federal Republic of Germany were developing a revanchist policy aimed at the re-evaluation of the results of the Second World War. This kind of propaganda to a certain degree helped to fortify the generally held opinion of the public that Germany and the Sudeten Germans constituted a threat to the Czechoslovak state.

Attempts were made in the late 1960s by some historians and writers to evaluate the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in the context of the Third Czechoslovak Republic and criticism was levied at the way in which the expulsions were carried out. Dissident and exiled intellectuals at the end of the 1970s re-opened the debate which went largely unnoticed in Czechoslovakia. However, these intellectuals managed to subvert the stereotype of the German enemy and some of their opinions later shaped the official Czechoslovak foreign policy towards Germany after 1989.

The cultural has always been political in the Czech lands, and it was not until the 1990s when intellectuals turned politicians had risen above the political to bring about a degree of moral reconciliation between the Czechs and Germans. Nonetheless, recent surveys show that the Czechs are still subconsciously apprehensive of their German neighbours, albeit for slightly different reasons.

After the First World War, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk argued that despite its humanist literature, music and philosophy, Germany had been ‘Prussianised’, meaning that its political representation had accepted the ideas of military expansionism and pan-germanism which Masaryk identified with Prussia. He further argued that ‘our gravest problem is our relationship to the Germans in Germany’, and urged the newly formed Czechoslovakia to establish friendly and co-operative relations with Germany in order to overcome the German ‘Drang nach Osten’.

His initial relationship to Czechoslovakia’s German minority, also called the ‘Sudeten Germans’, can be gleaned from his opening speech as president to the Czechoslovak Parliament in December 1918:

The territory settled by the Germans is ours and will remain so. We have created a new state, defended it, and now we shall build it. I wish that our Germans co-operated on this... I repeat: we have created our state. This determines the constitutional position of our Germans who originally came into the country as immigrants and colonists.

Although he later apologised and explained the meaning of this statement, the reaction of the Czechoslovak Germans, whose political representatives regarded the newly established Czechoslovakia as a hybrid state which had denied them the right to self-determination, was that of boycotting the Czechoslovak Parliament by not sending any deputies to serve in it. According to the historian Eva Broklová’s research, the image of Czechoslovak Germans as viewed by the majority of Czech-speaking population during the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938) changed from that of an enemy attempting to separate from Czechoslovakia to that of a citizen with equal rights who, although in opposition, had been won over and joined the government to co-operate.

Towards the end of the 1930s, Czechoslovak Germans tended to be perceived as a minority whose substantial part supported Nazi Germany and eventually prepared the way for the destruction of Czechoslovakia. The economic and political developments of the two inter-war decades suggest a great degree of credibility of Broklová‘s research findings.

The impact of the Munich conference in 1938, the oppressive Nazi regime in the Protecorate of Bohemia and Moravia personified by the Reichsprotector Reinhard Heydrich, and the thousands of Czech victims during this period brought out what the influential critic, Václav Černý, termed ‘everything dark, wild, and savage in the little Czech.’ The so-called ‘wild expulsions’ of ethnic Germans which took place between May and August 1945 and the newspaper campaign during the organized exulsions between 1945 and 1947 testify to a great outburst of hatred on the part of the Czech-speaking population.

The fact that the president of the country, Dr Edvard Beneš, in his speech in Prague on the 16th of May 1945 called for the ‘uncompromising liquidation of the Germans in the Czech lands’, as well as the anti-German campaign in the Czech press contributed to the fortification of the stereotype of the ‘hereditary German enemy’.

The journal Obzory (Horizons) published letters to the editor which indicate that readers did not question the moral justification for the expulsions of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. As one editorial summed it up:

Our national and political interests are:

1. That a great number of Germans be moved out of our country

and

2. That Germany never again be allowed to grow into an expansionist empire which would devour its neighbours and cause a new armed conflict.’ (Obzory, 1945: 116) .

Immediate post-war and, after 1948, communist propaganda appears to have been more or less successful in creating an image of history which held that the transfers of approximately three million Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1947, which were sanctioned by the Potsdam agreements signed by the Allies, were just and the only possible solution to the historically burdened relationship between the Czechoslovak Germans and the majority of the Czech-speaking population.

In Lesson from History, a survey of documents relating to the Nazi extermination policies in the Czech lands during the Second World War, the historian Václav Král claimed that ‘many times in their history the Czech and Slovak nations have had to struggle for their existence. The main threat has come from German aggression.’ He wrote of ‘expansionist tendencies in neighbouring Germany’ in the 18th and 19th centuries, and pointed out that after the creation of independent Czechoslovakia, the leaders of the Sudeten Germans ‘could not reconcile themselves to a situation where they ceased to be the ruling group.’ He criticised the ruling elites in Czechoslovakia between the wars for ‘not daring to put an effective curb on the Henlein Sudetendeutsche Partei because they feared the Nazis and any threat to their own capitalist interests.’

He further claimed that ‘the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia enjoyed all the rights of citizens of a democratic state’ which they did not appreciate and, during the Second World War, ‘the Sudeten German Nazis were the chief executors of the policy of destroying the national existence of the Czechs.’ Therefore, ‘the transfer of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia was... not only in the interests of the Czechoslovak State and people, but at the same time in the interests of world peace and security.’ He concluded that ‘the sinister forces of German imperialism, which have learnt nothing from the catastrophic defeat of Hitler Germany, are very active again’ and that the Czechoslovak and German people have a common enemy, ‘this common enemy is the forces of war and revanchism, which threaten peace.’

The historian Antonín Šnejdárek argued along the same ideological lines in his Revanchists Against Czechoslovakia. In this study, Šnejdárek discussed the conditions for the creation of Sudeten German organisations in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s, their position and influence in the West German state, and the forms of propaganda they used. He accused ‘forces’ in Western Germany of:

attempting to cover up from the world public the whole process of preparation of new retaliation which is happening on the territory of Western Germany, so that at a moment when weapons have been made and forces carrying them are ready […] a great blow of retaliation and revenge could be dealt for the defeat in 1945.

In his evaluation of the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after 1945, Šnejdárek claimed that ‘the transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945 was not an ad-hoc act but a result of a long-term process whose preparation took generations and which was begun by the German chauvinists’ intolerance and hatred and their desire for exclusive rule in a country which was not theirs’.

First official attempts at critical re-evaluation of the manner of the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans were made by the historian Jan Křen in his study ‘The Transfer of Germans in Light of New Sources’ . Křen conceded that the transfer did not bring any benefit to the countries which carried it out that ‘it does not belong to the most brilliant achievements of European civilization in the 20th century’ . However, in line with the official opinion, he described the expulsion as ‘a tragic historical necessity’.

A similar line of argument was taken by the historian Milan Hübl who, in a ‘trialogue’ about the year 1945 held that the expulsion was not an optimal solution to the problem but that the official political representation of Czechoslovakia succumbed to mob psychosis and did not prevent some of the most horrific crimes perpetrated on the Germans. The period of ‘normalisation’ of the 1970s and 1980s which followed the liberal period of the late 1960s put a halt to any serious historical research and the official line as presented by Šnejdárek was only slightly softened around the year 1973 when the Treaty of Mutual Relations between Czechoslovakia and the Federal Republic of Germany was being negotiated.

During the 1970s, only a small group of dissident or exiled intellectuals attempted to re-open and question the official interpretation of the post-war expulsions of the Sudeten Germans. The exile journal Svědectví provided a significant platform for discussion. In his ‘Theses on the Expulsion of the Czechoslovak Germans’, a writer who signed his name as Danubius (the Slovak historian Ján Mlynárik) argued that by expelling its German-speaking minority, not only did Czechoslovakia lose its multicultural atmosphere, but the de-population of the border regions of the country, previously occupied by the Sudeten Germans, created economic implications.

Many expelees were skilled workers in the textile, glass, and mining industries and these areas were severely affected by a lack of qualified labour after the war. More importantly, Danubius claimed that during and immediately after the Second World War, many Czechs lost their moral inhibitions together with proper respect for human beings. The so-called ‘wild expulsions’ were accompanied by instances of ‘gold-digging’ and some severe abuses of basic human rights (many thousands of Germans were brutalized and killed, women raped), and the government tended to turn a blind eye to such behaviour. Danubius concluded that this general loosening of morals contributed to the rather smooth communist coup in 1948. This theory received no significant response from the official Czechoslovak side, but it prompted a long discussion among the dissident and exiled intellectual community.

The majority of reactions to Danubius was negative, many criticising his ‘Theses’ for taking the expulsion of the Sudeten German out of its historical context, disregarding the horrors of the Second World War which preceded it, thus making the year 1945 a Stunde null. Others accused Danubius of ‘implicitly presenting a requirement for the revision of the transfer as well as that of Czechoslovak borders’. Among the few who supported Danubius was the philosopher Erazim Kohák who wrote that ‘the transfer of the German quarter of our country’s population was a denial of the basic human right for homeland.’ Similarly, the German historian Rudolf Hilf praised the fact that most contributors to the discussion in Svědectví refused the principle of collective guilt. He called for ‘good will for reconciliation [...] no matter how modest in practical terms.’

Recently, Danubius’ Theses were criticized by the historian and sociologist Václav Houžvička for ‘bringing into the Czech-(Sudeten) German relations an eternal stigma of guilt of the Czech nation, moreover formulated on the basis of the principle of collective guilt whose application [Danubius] fundamentally refuses in the case of the Germans.’

However, Houžvička also claimed that the Czechoslovak foreign policy towards Germany after 1989 was largely formed by the dissident community which was influenced by the debate surrounding the Danubius discussion in the late 1970s. For obvious reasons, this policy was formulated by a small number of dissidents without any input by the Czechoslovak public. This may help to explain the dismay and protests of the Czechoslovak public in early 1990 at president Havel’s apology to the Sudeten Germans for the expulsion as well as the continued fundamental difference of opinion between the political elites and the general public throughout the 1990s.

Czechoslovakia and Germany established economic ties almost immediately after 1989: political and social relationships, however, proved very difficult to establish. For one thing, there were (and still continue to be) very many negative perceptions about Germany and its population deeply ingrained in the minds of many Czechs. These were only reinforced by years of communist propaganda. Many Czechs who lived through and survived the Second World War have had either personal or mediated experiences with Nazi terror or concentration camps and regarded the post-war expulsions as just and this part of Czechoslovak history as concluded.

A sociological survey, conducted by the Institute for Sociological Studies of Prague Charles University and the Centre for Social Analysis in Bratislava, aimed in 1992 to find out how Czech people were assessing events from their country’s relatively recent history (meaning the Second World War and the time immediately following it). The survey also attempted to establish what expectations and/or anxieties Czechs had about the future developments and changes in Czech-German relations in view of newly established European structures as well as the approaches and opinions of Czechs to Germans, including personal experiences and stereotypes.

The results of the survey showed that many Czechs in 1992 did not consider the ‘German question’ to be solved. More than 50% of the people surveyed expressed deeply rooted, historically conditioned distrust towards Germans, however they were generally inclined to respect the rights of the German minority which had remained in the country after the war. On the whole, most of the Czechs surveyed displayed optimism in view of future relations between the two countries in a united Europe. In general, older people were more distrustful and less optimistic than younger ones.

To the sociologist Eva Stehlíková, this seemed a sufficient proof that the historical division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was very strong in the Czech mind and that the ‘picture of the enemy’ had been successfully painted and supported by the communist ideology before 1989.

The efforts to solve the sticking points in Czechoslovakia’s relationship to Germany – including the issue of the expulsions – and to break old stereotypes was very tempting for Czech intellectuals at the end of the cold war. The efforts of Václav Havel, Jiří Dienstbier or the historian Jan Křen to swing Czech public opinion met with misunderstanding, disapproval or outright hostility.

The fact that already at the end of December 1989 Václav Havel apologised to the former Czechoslovak citizens expelled after the Second World War without asking the Parliament or the general public made many people wary of what might come next. The prospect of the former Sudeten Germans coming back to Czechoslovakia or the Czech Republic to claim confiscated property, or even the remote prospect of some of them coming to settle in Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic brought back the old fear of a small nation (as, according to the anthropologist Ladislav Holý, the Czechs like to see themselves) being once again under threat from a great nation with potential expansionist aims. This fear was not alleviated even after the signing of the 1992 Friendship Treaty between Czechoslovakia and the Federal Republic of Germany.

In the 1997 Czech-German Declaration on Mutual Relations and their Future Development, the signatories expressed their commitment never to re-open sensitive issues stemming from the past. In Article II, the German side acknowledged that the National Socialist policy prepared the ground for ‘post-war flight, forcible expulsion and forced resettlement’. In Article III, the Czech side acknowledged that, during the post-war expulsions of the Sudeten Germans, ‘guilt was attributed collectively’ and that crimes committed during the so-called ‘wild expulsions’ had not been punished. Both parties agreed not to ‘burden their relations with political and legal issues which stem from the past’.

Article VII provided for the establishing of the so-called Fund for the Future, into which both countries contribute substantial sums of money to enable the compensation of victims of National Socialism, the support of many cross-border activities, such as student exchanges, the care of old people, the building and maintenance of carehomes, the care of architectural heritage and graves and their refurbishment, the support of minorities, the Czech-German discussion forum (which has, in fact, been in operation since 1990 when the Joint Commission of Czech and German Historians was set up), joint scientific, cultural and ecological projects, language teaching and cross-border co-operation (3.5million euro per year).

Thanks to the Declaration and the Fund for the Future, Czech-German relations stopped focussing on individual political proclamations or attitudes and became everyday partnership. It is this everyday activity which during pre-election campaigns has made Czech-German relations apparently resistant to outbursts of nationalism on both sides of the border.

In a 2003 sociological survey conducted by the Czech Academy of Sciences, ‘Attitudes of Czech Borderland Population towards Germany’, it transpired that although the majority of population perceive contemporary Czech-German relations as very good, about 90% thought that the reason why Czech-German relations have not been fully reconciled yet is due to the continuing demands of the Sudeten German representation for the return of confiscated property.

While two thirds of the population thought that the post-war transfers of the Sudeten Germans were just, 69% felt that conflicts in the past are a burden on Czech-German relations today and over 67% felt that the Czech Republic must always be wary of Germany. According to the sociologist and historian Václav Houžvička, due to the Sudeten German question Czech-German relations are constantly overshadowed by past conflicts which leads to a general feeling of anxiety and doubt in the Czech population. This historical burden is emotionally charged and has the potential to mobilize Czech society in cases when fundamental decisions of foreign policy do not match opinions and attitudes of the general public.

The stereotype of Germany attempting to dominate Central Europe has in recent years been commuted into a slightly different one: every now and again, Czech newspapers and even ordinary people in the street express the view that, since the Germans did not manage to dominate the Czechs by force, they are going to dominate them economically. Germany is currently the biggest trading partner of the Czech Republic. However, to speak of economic domination in a globalised world is a bit far-fetched.

There are also many forms of cross-border co-operation, mostly within the framework of so-called Euro-regions, which focus on cultural, social or ecological issues and development. Once again, these specific projects provide everyday experience in Czech-German co-operation, giving people from both countries an opportunity to develop a tolerant relationship between the two nations.

Stereotypes are not easily or quickly eroded. With the arrival of democratic political culture in the Czech Republic throughout the 1990s, and with intellectuals such as the former president of the country, Václav Havel, Czech political discourse appears to have started to be less insular and confrontational and more reconciliatory. With the Czech Republic being a member of the European Union, Czech politicians also bear more international responsibility. It is everyday, hands-on experience of mutual contacts which helps to create positive image of the other and to overcome prejudice.