Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

  xxix Charles V’s native Flanders (part of the Spanish Netherlands) had been the scene of his personal bitter repression of the Protestant Reformation, and as such had remained largely Catholic, making for an uncomfortable union with the thoroughly Protestant northern Netherlands. In 1714, the Spanish Netherlands (modern day Belgium) fell through inheritance back to the Austrian Habsburg line of the dynasty. The territory would not gain its independence until after the Napoleonic Wars and the revolutions of 1830, when the kingdom of Belgium was established and guaranteed by the Concert Powers.

  xxx The Siebenburgen region of Transylvania, formerly part of Hungary (now part of Romania), was home to a large German-speaking community who had started emigrating there as early as the twelfth century. The community was often referred to as the ‘Siebenburgen Saxons’. The German community had come as farmer settlers and to help fortify the towns against the advancing Turks, who after conquering Anatolia set their sights on further gains to the north including Hungary, and from the fifteenth century onwards ceaselessly attacked the region. ‘Siebenburgen’ means the seven forts, which included the towns of Klausenburg (Cluj-Napoca), Kronstadt (Braşov), Bistritz (Bistriţa), Schäßburg (Sighişora), Mediasch (Mediaş), Mühlbach (Sebeş) and the capital of Hermannstadt (Sibiu) — other German-speaking towns included Weissenburg, Millenbach, Michelberg, Kertzenberg, Stolzenburg, Altenberg). Before the Second World War, the German community still numbered three-quarters of a million people.

  xxxi Wallenstein received the Dukedom of Mecklenburg along with its seat at the Reichstag, another unilateral decision of Ferdinand’s that broke the Reich constitution.

  xxxii Guastavus Adolfus was killed at the Battle of Lützen in 1632.

  xxxiii One of the last confessional wars in Europe was the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in England in 1688, which deposed the Catholic Stuart King, James II, and replaced him with Holland’s William of Orange, as King of England. This ended the long-running confessional conflicts in England, Wales and Scotland (the Act of Union with England took place in 1707) but the conflict lingered on in Ireland.

  xxxiv William of Orange — King William II of England’s reign — remained childless, whereupon Parliament decided on the Act of Settlement in 1701 that the ‘heirs’ to the English throne should come from the Protestant House of Hanover.

  xxxv Not until the aftermath of the Seven Years War from 1756–63, which France had waged against Britain in North America and against Prussia in Europe, would France again be in such debt. The cost of these expeditions to the depleted French treasury, in the opinion of many historians, precipitated the crisis of insolvency that compelled King Louis XVI to summon the ‘Estates General’ and begin the unravelling of the Ancien Régime that culminated in the revolution of 1789.(20)

  xxxvi During the Seven Years War, the French laid waste to a number of German territories, most famously the city of Bad Heresfeld in 1761, torching the land in retreat, leading to the death through starvation of thousands.

  xxxvii See the map of Imperial Napoleonic France with its incorporation of the Rhineland, Palatinate, Saar, Spanish Netherlands, United Netherlands and northern Germany, as far east as Hamburg and Rostock.

  xxxviii Great Britain had not yet deigned to grant any monarch such a grandiose title; that would only come later in the reign of Queen Victoria.

  3

  The Rise and Fall of German Central Europe

  Before we chart the meteoric rise of Prussia and her establishment of a new empire out of the ruins of an old one, we now take a step back to one of the most important centres of the old Holy Roman Empire; to the heart of Europe and also to the heart of the problems that would emerge in a German-dominated empire that contained numerous other nationalities.

  The Holy Roman Empire’s mission to spread Roman Christianity beyond its own borders saw German settlement moving east from the twelfth century onwards. This brought co-habitation, assimilation and confrontation between Germanic and Slavic peoples across much of Central and Eastern Europe. Bohemia, with its central location both within the empire and the wider European Continent, would often come to find itself at the crossroads of major political, religious, dynastic and ethnic upheavals. The rulers of the crown lands of Bohemia, as this description denotes, were the only rulers within the empire allowed to bear the title of king other than the emperor himself. Bohemian kings were at the core of the college of electors who elected the emperor and Bohemia’s kings can be counted among some of the most powerful emperors in the empire’s thousand-year history. The ancient kingdom of Bohemia (now the core of an exclusively Czech state) played an integral role in the development of German history — from the time of the First Reich right through until the end of the Second World War, with the magical city of Prague twice doubling as the empire’s de facto capital. Its pivotal location, approximately half way between London and St Petersburg, and its colourful history helps to explain why the small and relatively young nation of the Czech Republic should come to possess one of the Continent’s most magnificent capital cities.

  BOHEMIA: THE HEART OF EUROPE

  The ebb and flow of the major population shifts across the European continent have seen the kingdom of Bohemia constantly settled and resettled by a succession of different peoples, including the Celts, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Jews and the Roma. The result is a diverse multicultural melting pot featuring an incredible variety and attractiveness of the people in these lands, an observation made by many writers and travellers throughout the centuries, from Goethe to Mozart. Among Goethe’s favourite haunts were the spa towns of Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) and Marienbad (Marianski Lazne). Goethe wrote, ‘That to experience the best the world had to offer, a man had to see Rome, Karlsbad and Weimar.’ Of Marienbad, Goethe noted ‘the pretty girls, easy going atmosphere and cosmopolitan nature of this wonderful spa town’.(1)

  The ethnic divergence of Bohemia is recorded in the early twelfth century by Cosmas’s Chronicle of Bohemians, in which he praised the virtues of the Premyslids — the ruling Czech family — but then went on to describe a German bishop as being worse than ‘asses’ shit’ and the Poles as being ‘carpetbaggers with uncircumcised lips’! He was no more flattering about the Jews, saying of Jacob the Jew, ‘His hand makes dirty whatever he touches… Satan is his steady companion…’(2) These texts, written between 1119–25 show a level of ethnic diversity that was clearly not to everyone’s liking. Multiethnic and multicultural states have, throughout the ages, faced challenges from those who regard their fellow citizens as ‘non-historic peoples’ with a lesser right to live alongside them, and in the murderous conflicts for self-determination of the twentieth century, often attributed them no right to live at all.

  During the Cold War, communist historians in the Czech Republic were enlisted to glorify the benefits of Czechoslovakia’s recently acquired Slavic homogeneity. The irony was that they were arguably unable to honour one the greatest of all the Czech kings, Ottokar II (1258–73), who had established an empire from the Baltic to the Adriatic, because he was held responsible for encouraging new waves of German settlement into the kingdom. Ottokar II remains a neglected historical figure in the Czech Republic, even though he was one of the most powerful monarchs of the late Middle Ages, a man who was immortalised in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, and in Dante’s Divine Comedy where he is seen standing on the steps of purgatory alongside his nemesis Rudolf von Habsburg.(3) Yet the legacy of nationalist historiography meant that not even Vaclav Havel, the first president of Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, felt able to list Ottokar among the good and the great of Czech history.

  Ottokar was not the only aspect of Czech history that was ignored. For decades, novelist Franz Kafka remained alien to communist authorities. This was primarily because he was a Jewish Bohemian who wrote in German and the streets and topography that Kafka wrote of, describing the magical city of Prague, could not be explored by visitors because all the names had been changed, as bot
h Jewish and then German Prague were expunged. It wasn’t until many years after the fall of communism that books appeared with German and Czech street names in and around Kafka’s old home in the Castle district so that visiting tourists could take tours of Kafka’s Prague. The emphasis, however, was put on Kafka’s Jewishness since it was still not politically acceptable to admit there had ever been a German Prague. Why a Jewish writer would write in German, while in a supposedly Czech city at a time when there was no Czech state, was a question that remained firmly off limits, not least if asked by a German tourist who might venture to be so ‘politically incorrect’.

  For similar reasons, in the Czech Republic, you will not find any plaques or references to other great sons of Bohemia such as Ferdinand Porsche, (designer of the VW Beetle and Porsche cars), Sigmund Freud (founder of psychoanalysis), Gustav Mahler (the composer), Baltasar Neumann (the great architect) or Oskar Schindler. Bohemians who are not Czech do not count, something that remains the case, especially for German Bohemians. Official town histories in the Czech borderlands, once known as the Sudetenland, continue to show signs of historical amnesia. The official history of Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) only has this to say about the upheavals of the twentieth century, ‘The military conflicts of the twentieth century brought an end to the golden era of Karlsbad. The international situation, economic crisis and the rise of fascism made an end to prosperity at the world famous spa. Today Karlsbad once again welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors…’(4) The official history of Marienbad (Marianske Laze) doesn’t mention its German history, or pre-war German population at all. It is as if recalling the truth is too painful. Such are the blinkered remnants of the Communist era’s attempts to paint out of the official histories anything that did not fit, leaving a bitter legacy with both those who were to be forcibly assimilated (the Czechs) and those who were eventually forcibly ‘expelled’ (the Germans).

  The events of Bohemia’s history are not uncommon in Europe. Kingdoms that are dominated and subsumed by their more powerful neighbours, or those that become part of great empires, such as the Celtic kingdoms of the British Isles, or the Basques and Catalans of Spain, or in this case, Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire, can find that their very language, culture and traditions are brought to near extinction through centuries of creeping cultural assimilation. Such was the experience of Bohemia and Moravia. Nevertheless, nationalist Czech historians who try to write out, or play down, the influence of German culture on these regions face some difficulty, not least because most of the sources they rely on are in German. Hence why the German historian Ferdinand Seibt once wrote, ‘You cannot mention the specificity of the Czech character without saying something about the Germans as well.’(5)

  The legacy of the German-speaking communities who lived in these kingdoms for over 700 years is apparent everywhere: many favourite Czech dishes are heavily overloaded with meat, dumplings, pork and cabbage; these are a variation on a theme found in Austria and Germany. The Czechs have a great love of Pilsner, which owes its origins to the Bavarian brewer Joseph Groll who was head hunted to Pilsen (Plzen) in Bohemia in 1842 to start mass production of the beer using the lower fermentation method that is used to make Pilsner. Becherovka, the bitter tasting national icon, known in slang as beton (the German word for concrete), was the favourite drink of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph and was developed in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) by the pharmacist Joseph Becher in 1841 — initially for medicinal purposes.

  Today there are still over half a million Czechs with surnames of German origin, including such variants as Bauer, Mueller and Toepfer, many with Germanic surnames masked by orthography ‘subrt’ or ending in ‘ova’. Leading national figures like the pop legend Karel Gott, or politicians like Klement Gottwald, Vaclav Klaus and Karel Schwarzenberg are other prominent examples.xxxix (6) If one examines the Viennese phone book, further examples of two cultures that were inseparably bound for over 300 years of multicultural Habsburg domination can be found, as over 200,000 of the listed names are of Czech origin. Many of the country’s most famous cultural treasures, including St Vitus’ Cathedral in Prague and the St Barbara Cathedral in Kuttenberg (Kutna Hora) were designed by the German builder Peter Parler, whose greatest endeavour was his work on the cathedral at Cologne. Father and son team, Christopher and Kilian Dientzenhofer from Bavaria, built the St Nicolas Cathedral in Prague and the sculptures on the Charles Bridge were created by the German artist, Ferdinand Brokoff. Literally hundreds of churches that are spread all over Bohemia and Moravia, plus numerous functionalist gems erected by ethnic German architects during the First Republic’s boom, and many other elements that make Prague and other Bohemian cities extraordinary, should actually be credited to non-Czech populations of these cities. Prague would never have become the ‘magic city’, to use a term introduced by the Italian literate, Angelo Maria Ripellino, had it not been for the region’s ethnic and cultural symbiosis.(7)

  Other institutional similarities between the Czechs and Germans remain today, from the Czech obsession with academic titles, to similar educational systems and a love of overblown bureaucracy. Herman Hesse put it very succinctly when he wrote, ‘If you dislike a person, you dislike something in him that is a part of yourself. Consequently, the Czechs dislike the Austrians even more than they dislike the Germans, because they, thanks to the centuries of Habsburg rule, have even more in common with them. But the difference is not too significant. As every Czech knows — Austrians are basically Germans who wear hats!’(8)

  If one considers the geography of Bohemia and Moravia before the end of the Second World War it is apparent that to the north, west and south, German speakers, both in Germany and Austria, surrounded the kingdom. As Prague lies roughly half way between Berlin and Vienna on the north-south axis, and actually further west than Vienna, it is no surprise that Czechs recognised the threat, some saying, ‘We are like the birds that sit in the crocodile’s open jaws!’ After centuries of German cultural assimilation the German language had become so dominant that by the mid nineteenth century in the ancient kingdom, leading Czech cultural icons like the composer Dvorǎk, the poet Karel Hynek Mácha, Jindrich Fügner, the founder of the nationalist Sokol gymnastics movement and the fathers of the modern Czech language, Josef Jungmann and Josef Dubrovský, felt more confident writing in German than Czech. Even the father of Czech nationalism František Palacký wrote the first three volumes of his History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia in the German language.(9) Nevertheless, while Palacký led the call for a revival of the Czech language and inspired Czechs to think more patriotically, he recognised the essential geopolitical realities of the mid nineteenth century stating, ‘Fate has left us to clash and to cooperate with the Germans.’(10) Such moderation did not survive the rising tide of ethnic nationalisms that engulfed Central and Eastern Europe from the late nineteenth century.

  As the twentieth century dawned, extreme Czech and German nationalists vied with one another for ever more radical solutions to the ethnic tensions in Bohemia and Moravia, with the most extreme elements on both sides calling for the other’s explusion. Despite the influence of all things German on the Czechs, it is important to understand how one-sided and tenuous this connection became when centuries of gradual assimilation and Germanisation took on more sinister overtones during the Nazi occupation. And had Nazi Germany won the war, the Czechs would have faced forced assimilation, deportation or extermination under the genocidal megalomania of Generalplan Ost (the general plan for the east), which would have removed up to 30 million ethnic Slavs from Central Europe. However, in the end, in league with other East European leaders, Stalin turned this policy back on the Germans, destroying their 700-year cultural legacy in Central and Eastern Europe. As a consequence, 19 million Germans were driven from their ancient homelands in a war that was the ultimate irrational fulfilment of the drive for ever more homogenous nation states.(11)

  This was perhaps the reason why Albert Einstein once famously wrote, ‘If my
theory of relativity is proven, the Germans will claim me as one of their own and the French will proclaim me a citizen of the world. However, if it fails, then the Germans will say I am a Jew and the French that I am a German.’ The majority of Czechs continued to prove averse to embracing their nation’s multicultural past, perhaps for fear it would dilute their own claims to greatness. If you read official histories produced for tourists in the Czech Republic today you will still see the Germans and Hungarians described as ‘colonists’, and the Jews barely get a mention at all, unless it allows them to put a boot into the Germans. The Czechs and Slovaks used the opportunities presented them by the end of the Second World War to offload their German, Hungarian and the few surviving Jewish ‘minorities’. Then, once they had joined the European Union, they happily used it as a chance to ‘encourage’ their Roma people to leave for ‘greener pastures’ elsewhere. Few nations in post-war Europe have proved more stubbornly resilient to embracing their multiethnic past, let alone a multiethnic future.

  The Czech émigré to the USA and professor at Yale University, Peter Demetz, takes those to task who in his own homeland have tried to portray Jews, Germans, Hungarians and others as ‘non historic peoples’ or mere colonists berating the poisonous legacy of such thinking, which unfortunately still pertains in all too many quarters to this day, writing of his native Prague:

  Multiethnicity, or a livable society made up of different societies, has become a fundamental commitment in political life and in academic studies, at least in the United States. It is sad to see that in the Old World many places of multiethnic traditions have, in the past generation or so, turned to the more solid enjoyments of a single national culture characterised by policies of exclusion and a dash of Xenophobia. In this particular moment it may not be useless to explore the history of a European city built over centuries by Czechs, Germans, Jews and Italians — though many of the national historians would like to diminish the contributions of one or the other group and often agree only in their efforts to ignore the people of the Jewish town. Prague has a long history of mass murder, whether triggered by street mobs or organised by bureaucrats, and religious or ethnic ‘cleansings’ that invariably dirtied the hands that ‘cleansed’. Prague had a pogrom in 1389, in which 3,000 Jews were killed, Maria Theresa’s expulsion of the Jews from their ancient town in 1744, and the shoah of 1940 to 45, the transports to Theresienstadt and the killing camps; Prague historians know the history of the forced expatriation of all Evangelicals, Czech and German, after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, and the expulsion of nearly all Germans, whether culpable or not, after May 1945.(12)