Once Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, he turned next to Czechslovakia, particularly to the Sudetenland (the predominantly German-speaking area on the borders between Czechoslovakia and Austria and Germany). The Czechs looked toward the English and the French to guarantee their borders, as they had promised, but in September 1938, the British and French, in an effort to appease Hitler, gave into his demands rather than go to war over, in the famous words of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing” (quoted Humphreys 250). The Czech government (headed by Edvard Beneš) made a controversial decision not to resist the Germans, so Hitler moved in unopposed, and Czechoslovakia lost one-third of its territories. The Nazis quickly split Czechoslovakia into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a separate Slovakia.
In retrospect, the actions of the appeasers are difficult to defend. One might argue that England and France were not ready for war and that this agreement gave them some additional time to prepare for the inevitable conflict with Nazi Germany. In addition, the Sudetenland people did have some genuine grievances against the Czech majority—many of them were unwilling citizens of the country created at the Treaty of Versailles. And some people, no doubt, believed that Hitler might well stop his aggressive expansion once he had created his greater Germany. However, quite apart from a massive betrayal of earlier assurances and the failure even to consult the Czech government, the action handed over an important economic power and its armed forces to the Nazis without a struggle, thus removing a potentially vital ally from the coming war, and it certainly bolstered Hitler’s reputation and power in Germany. In addition, the betrayal made some Czechs deeply bitter about the Western European powers and encouraged them to look for leadership after the war to the Communists (Stalin strongly opposed the Munich agreement).
The Nazis operated quickly to stifle Czech nationalism or any focus for resistance. They closed the universities, gutted the libraries, and re-imposed the German language on the country, at the same time insisting on celebrating German power by re-naming streets and important state institutions and redecorating public spaces. They carted away would-be protestors to distant concentration camps, including many of the country's most important artists (Josef Čapek among them: he died in Bergen-Belsen).
A major event during the Nazi occupation was the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the major Nazi official in the Protectorate, by Czech paratroops in 1942 on the streets of Prague. The Nazis responded by the total destruction of the the village of Lidice, a major atrocity. Heydrich had earlier ordered the evacuation of the fortress town of Theresienstadt near Prague (now Terezín) to create a common collection point for the Jews, and once the extermination program began in earnest, the place was turned into a staging place for victims on the way to the camps (it was something of a "showcase" for the Nazi extermination program, the subject of a propaganda film and the only camp the Red Cross was permitted to visit).
The Communist People's Republic
The Nazi control of Czech lands ended when the Russians armies advanced, reaching Prague in May 1945 (there was a three-day popular uprising against the Germans just before the Russians arrived, and Prague suffered some war damage). The new Czech government, headed again by Edvard Beneš (who had led the country at the time of Munich), with the approval of the allies and the Russian armies, began the forced removal of German-speaking Czechs and the Hungarians from all Czech territory, including the restored Sudetenland. About 2.5 million German-speaking Czechs left the country (Humphreys 252), and their property was re-distributed. Many died or were killed in the process (Sayer suggests as many as 250,000). In addition to getting rid of the German population, successive governments set about erasing the memory of Germans as an important element in the culture of Czechoslovakia (once more re-naming towns, streets, and buildings and re-organizing public spaces).
In the elections of May 1946 the genuinely popular Communist party (which had spearheaded the expulsion of the Germans and Hungarians) emerged as the strongest party (with about 40 percent of the vote in an election where extreme right-wing parties were not allowed to participate). President Beneš appointed the leader of the Communist party, Klement Gottwald, prime minister. The new government, which had pledged itself to parliamentary democracy, at first tried to follow an independent course of action, but was pulled into line by Stalin and the army. In 1948 the hard liners in the Communist Party, in effect, carried out a bloodless coup and were in sole control, thanks in large measure to the Party's relatively high popularity. A new constitution was drawn up which enshrined power in the hands of the Communist Party. One consequence of the coup was the third defenestration of Prague, when Jan Masaryk, the son of the first president of the republic of 1918 and a prominent non-Communist member of the government (Foreign Minister), fell to his death from a window in a government building. It is still not clear whether he committed suicide due to a temporary mental derangement (the official Communist line) or was murdered. Later investigations into his death have produced different conclusions (see Masaryk).
The Communist rule of Czechoslovakia became increasingly autocratic and tyrannical. Problematic Party members were arrested and, in the 1950's, a series of Stalinist show trials was put on in Prague, as a result of which many Party members, some of whom had held prominent positions in the Communist government, were executed. In addition, as Sayer points out at length, the Communists set about, like so many before them, to re-write Czech history by purging libraries, controlling all art exhibitions and book publishing, renaming and reshaping the urban landscape (including a colossal memorial to Josef Stalin in Prague), and appropriating Czech memorials for their own purposes.
The Prague Spring, 1968 and Charter 77
Plagued with economic difficulties and the failure of the government's attempts at economic reform, the Czech people grew increasingly restless during the 1960's. The situation prompted debates within the ruling party itself. In 1968 Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of the Party and introduced some modest reforms (the most important of which was a relaxation of censorship laws). This measure prompted a mass movement denouncing the strict Stalinist style of the government and calling for important reforms, "socialism with a human face," a time of optimistic hopes after years of harsh repressive rule (the Prague Spring).
In August 1968, however, the Soviet armies invaded Czechoslovakia to reinforce the hard-line faction within the government. Once again, organized Czech resistance was minimal, unlike the response in Hungary some years earlier. The spirit of Schweikism manifested itself once more as the people altered all the highway signs so that Soviet army convoys kept getting hopelessly lost on Czech country roads. Dubček was replaced by Gustáv Husák (who was a Slovak with no great love of the Czechs) as First Secretary of the Party, and over the acts of individual protest (like the self-burning of student Jan Palach in Wenceslas Square) the government re-imposed the harsh "normalization" of earlier Stalinist rule. Not until the mid 1970's did dissidents let their voices be widely heard again. They produced the important document Charter 77, a list of human rights demands which was signed by over 1000 people by 1980 (243 people signed the original document of January 1, 1977, including the popular playwright Václav Havel). Many of the signatories, including Havel, were jailed for long periods of time.
These events led to a significant shift in the general attitude to the Communist Party, which for a considerable period had been genuinely popular among young Czechs, who found in communism an obvious place for their idealistic hopes. The invasion of 1968 and the continuing interference in Czech affairs of the Warsaw pact (culminating in the the issue of placing nuclear weapons in Czechoslovakia in 1983) dramatically increased the disillusionment of the young with their government (Holy).
The Velvet Revolution and the Velvet Divorce
Once Russia, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, introduced major reforms in the Communist rule in Russia (perestroika) and adopted a more open stance toward the West (glasnost), the Prague hard-liners came under increasing pressure to reform their rule in Czechoslovakia. In 1989 opposition groups organized the Civic Forum, demanding the resignation of the present Communist leadership and amnesty for political prisoners (among other things), in accordance with the principles of Charter 77. On November 20, the first of many mass nationwide demonstrations in support of these reforms took place (with more than 200,000 people in Wenceslas Square). On November 24, Dubček and Havel appeared there together before a crowd of 300,000. Under the intense pressure the government quickly fell apart, and Havel was elected president on December 29.
In the general elections which followed (in 1990), the Civic Forum and its associated party in Slovakia won 60 percent of the vote. The new government faced two urgent problems: economic reform and the issue of Slovakia. Havel was a champion of maintaining a united federation of the two parts of the country, but his efforts were unsuccessful. Many Slovaks were fed up with the economic, political, and cultural domination of Prague, and many Czechs were not particularly enthusiastic about supporting the economically depressed region of Slovakia. On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia officially and peacefully split into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (the Velvet Divorce). Since that time, the Czech Republic has increasingly opened itself up to and sought economic ties with Western Europe. Of all the Eastern bloc countries newly liberated after 1989 and now established as independent countries, the Czech Republic has fared the best economically and politically, thanks in large part to the re-discovery of Prague as a major tourist destination for Westerners and large-scale investments of capital in the new economy (which is not to say that there are not serious economic issues remaining). The Czech Republic is now a member of NATO and is poised to join the European Union within the next few weeks (in May 2004). At the same time, however, the country faces many of the familiar difficulties brought about by a sudden transformation to a market economy in a world of increasing free trade (rising unemployment, poverty, crime, and so on), and the heady optimism which led to a 99 percent voter turn out in the 1990 elections has given way in many quarters to a deep disillusionment with what people see as endemic corruption in the government. In the 2002 elections, there was a 58 percent turn out, with 18 percent of the votes going to the Communist party (Humphreys 261). In addition to this apparent loss of participation in the democratic process, there is a sense, too, that many Czechs, like those in other Eastern bloc countries, are wondering (and worrying) about just what the rapid shift in the country's history to an economy dominated by corporate capitalism and free trade now means for those living in a land which has had more than its share of dislocating transformations.
It seems clear also that events since 1989 have had a serious effect on the prestige and popularity of Czech writers and intellectuals within the country, since they have, in effect, lost much of their social and political role (Holy). Now media entertainments, Western-style magazines and best sellers (like novels of Stephen King or Tom Clancy or biographies of Princess Diana, and so on) dominate the market for reading material (Anyz and Vrba), and the political excitement and challenge of the samizdat traditions, which turned writers into national heroes, have disappeared. Given that the forces of market capitalism are the great dissolver of national identities and old traditions (except where the appearance of these can be maintained for commercial purposes) and frequently tend to bring rich local identities down to an international lowest common denominator, it remains to be seen where the long struggle for a distinctively Czech nation will lead next.
