The Czechs in a Nutshell

In complete accordance with this view, Czech state Television (based in Prague, of course) has practically only two ways of presenting life in the eastern part of the country: either you see thousands of pious Moravian Catholics attending mass, or a bunch of drunk chaps, who are dressed in folklore costumes and dance around in the village streets during some festival while roaring “I’m not Czech, I’m Moravian!”

Actually, there are also sober Moravians who seriously struggle to put an end to Bohemia’s dominance and Pragocentricism. The Moravian National Party was established in the early 1990s, and it is working to transfer some of the nation’s political decision-making to Brno. So far, only the Constitutional Court and the Anti Monopoly Office have left Bohemia for Moravia, but the MNP’s long-term policy goal is to reorganize the Czech Republic into a federation, like Austria and Germany, where the government in Prague will only decide major issues such as foreign and defence policy.

The Czechoslovak separation (see: Slovaks) was a hard blow to the Moravian nationalist movement. Many ardent supporters discovered that their country had suddenly shrunk almost in the half and could hardly be split into another two parts. Yet their distinctive cultural character is still a touchy matter for most Moravians. In the national census in 2001, more than 1.3 million of the Czech Republic’s citizens took great care to declare their nationality to be Moravian, not Czech.

This delicate situation may cause a foreigner some unexpected problems. While the adjective “Czech” in most European languages usually refers to the entire Czech Republic, český in Czech refers primarily to Bohemia (Čechy) and secondarily to the whole country.

So, if you are speaking about the famous “Czech composer” Leoš Janáček in Prague, you’ll probably be tolerated. Try the same in the composer’s native Brno, and you’ll be killed on the spot. Or imagine you are sitting with some locals in a wine cellar in charming Valtice in Southern Moravia and then foolishly spoil everything by saying something like “this Czech wine is surprisingly tasteful”.

What you actually want to say is that “Moravian wine” is terrific!

Munich Agreement

O nás, bez nás — about us (but) without us. These words of utter despair and powerlessness were spoken for the first time in September 1938, but have later been carved into the brains of more or less every single Czech (see: National Identity). They relate to an event most people in this country consider the biggest tragedy in their modern history — the Munich Agreement — and it’s no exaggeration to say that it still represents a national trauma for the Czechs.

It all started with the emergence of Czechoslovakia in 1918. The very name of the new state indicated that the country consisted of two peoples, the Czechs and the Slovaks, but this cleverly concealed the fact that 3.2 million ethnic Germans (compared to only 2 million Slovaks) were also living in the country.

The “Czechoslovak” Germans are a bit inaccurately called Sudeten Germans after the Sudeten mountain range, which stretches from the Elbe valley eastwards to Moravia. In reality, ethnic Germans, who were invited by the Czech kings to start agriculture in the kingdom’s fringe areas, had from the thirteenth century densely populated all border regions in Bohemia and Moravia.

Compared to Central Europe’s minority standards in the interwar years, it’s fair to say that Czechoslovakia granted the Sudeten Germans generous rights.

True, they didn’t enjoy the status as one of the country’s official nationalities, and German was not accepted as one of the state’s official languages. But they had cultural autonomy with their own schools, universities, theatres and a multitude of organizations, and ethnic Germans were represented in each and every Czechoslovak government from 1926 to 1938. At one point, the leader of the of the Sudeten German Social Democrats’ was a certain Mr. Czech, while the boss of the Czech Social Democrats was Mr. Němec (German)!

Yet the economic crisis in 1929 made tensions between the Czech majority and the Sudeten German minority grow rapidly. Export-oriented Czechoslovakia was hit badly, but the Sudeten areas, heavily dependent upon light industry and mining, received an almost fatal blow. Poverty surged, and unemployment in the Sudeten areas was among the highest in Europe — which is one of the factors that explains why Czechoslovakia’s Germans became grossly recipient to Hitler’s propaganda, not least since der Führer, after seizing power in 1933 effected great measures to raise employment.

In the same year, Konrad Henlein, a gymnastics instructor from Karlovy Vary (see: Carlsbad English Bitters), established the overtly Nazi-friendly Sudetendeutsche Partei.