Milena by Margarete Buber-Neumann

Author:Margarete Buber-Neumann [Buber–Neumann, Margarete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-430-7
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2011-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

She also criticized the Prague government for its failure to deal intelligently with the German minority. In an article entitled “Germans against Germans—Czechs against Germans—and alas!—Czechs against Czechs,”* she describes the situation in the north. “The Czechs are boycotted by all—the only exception being the democratic Germans. But in the interest of the truth it must be admitted that no adequate attempt was made to build a democratic bloc including the democratic-minded Germans. The cardinal error of our propaganda and of the Czechs inhabiting the frontier zone was failure to understand that it was not yet too late to bolster up those elements in the German camp who, though speaking a different language from ours, shared our political outlook…. If that had been done, Hitler’s propaganda may not have fallen on such fertile soil….

“Wherever I go, the people are agreeable if I speak German to them. If you speak Czech, they shrug their shoulders and leave you standing. But once they see a Czech taking the trouble to talk German to them, they melt. I’ve tried it any number of times. The man in the street is touchingly grateful when he hears a Czech speaking German. His tight-lipped hostility evaporates. In nineteen cases out of twenty, he shrugs his shoulders and remarks with a friendly gesture: ‘So why should we argue? You’re a Czech, I’m a German. Let me live in peace and I’ll let you live in peace.’

“And that’s the crux of the matter. We should have realized sooner who these people are and what we wanted of them. If we had regarded them as German citizens of the Czechoslovakian Republic….” Here the Czech censorship stepped in and cut seven lines out of Milena’s article, a sign of the nervousness that had taken hold of the Czechoslovakian government. The article goes on: “… The Germans love their language, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t respect that love. They are Germans but not Nazis….” (Here the nervous censor stepped in again and deleted twelve lines.) “These people and their families,” she goes on, “could have been carriers of democratic propaganda, they could have become ethical, social and cultural props of Czech democracy and of democracy as such in the north of our country….”

After 1918 the government of the Czechoslovakian Republic tried to find a democratic solution to the problem of the German minority, but alas, they went about it too slowly, deterred by the anti-German feeling of the Czech population, carried over from the days when their country was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But it was not until 1933, with Hitler’s seizure of power, that the problem became really acute. Hard hit by the world economic crisis of the thirties, the Sudeten Germans offered fertile soil to National Socialist propaganda. Though the seditious character of the Sudeten German party could not be held in doubt, President Masaryk, in the name of his democratic principles, refused to suppress it. In the general elections of 1935 Henlein won two-thirds of the German vote, and in 1938 the figure rose to 92 percent.

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