Interview with Professor Francesco Leoncini – an internationally renowned historian and professor of Slavic and Central European history at the University of Venice
The term “Sudeten” came into use in 1918, the year of the foundation of the Czechoslovakian state, the German language minority in Bohemia that had been present on that territory since the Middle Ages and before that date, known as “Bohemian-Germans” and “Silesian-Germans”.
“The term derives from the homonymous mountain range located in northern Bohemia and refers to a group within a new state that was to have a unified identity,” explains Professor Francesco Leoncini – the internationally renowned historian and professor of Slavic and Central European history at the University of Venice – a real expert on the subject, to which he has dedicated a book entitled “The Sudeten issue 1918-1938″, published by Liviana, Padua 1976. We met him in Prague last
April at a conference on the Italian Risorgimento, organized by the Italian Institute of Culture. We took the opportunity to get to know his views on this subject, opinions that are often in contrast with those of both Czech and German historians. According to prof. Leoncini, at the end of the First World War, the Sudeten political leaders rejected the Czechoslovakian state, claiming they belonged to German Austria, Deutschösterreich. “The Czechs invited them to take part in a Constituent Assembly in so far as the idea of Edvard Beneš, the then foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, was to create a system similar to that of Switzerland, based on the Swiss cantonal system, due to the different ethnic groups on the territory. The Berlin representative in Prague was also of the same idea and invited the Sudeten politicians to take part in the Constituent, declaring that such action would have a strong impact on the future destiny of the new state. But the Sudeten were all strongly against it”, Leoncini points out.
A number of historians claim that Beneš, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, had lied about the actual number of Sudeten present in the new state, to support territory concessions to Czechoslovakia, and pursued a policy of forced assimilation against the ethnic minorities present on the territory. The latter is, however, a thesis that Leoncini refutes by putting forward the argument that: “Among the successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy, Czechoslovakia was the one that most of all respected and guarantees the development of the minorities. During the two wars, in fact, it was the only country, East of Switzerland, that held a democratic structure with full political representation. Let us not forget that the Communist Party was legal and that the minority groups had ministers within the government. “The Italian historian is also very critical towards those scholars who see in the Sudeten issue a failure to apply the famous Fourteen Points, exposed in 1918 by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at United States Senate, for a new post-war world order with the popular principle of people’s right to self-determination. “When we took a decision on the on the Czechoslovakian border – Leoncini points out – Wilson intervened first hand, who was asked if he approved them, and since the Sudetens had never been part of Germany, it would not make sense to exclude them from the Czechoslovakian border. Anyway, the right to self-determination had to be contextualized and could not be defined as absolute, as for example with the right to liberty or property. If it had been applied mechanically, the first to benefit from it would have been the Germans, who would have then expanded. Therefore, such a solution in favour of Germany was considered unacceptable. We should also add that Wilson, at the beginning, did not speak of “self-determination” but of an “autonomous development of the people of Austria-Hungary.” Wilson envisaged this situation placed in a new world order of which the League of Nation were to be the guarantors”.
Leoncini is equally critical of the argument according to which, in the aftermath of World War I there was a certain determination by the victorious States to punish Germany. “This took place towards the end of the Second World War. Instead, after the Great War, Germany was subject to very limited territorial losses and even war reparation was not decided in Paris, but later on. So, even that is a myth”.
We also have to add that the Sudetens were themselves divided in their political participation within the Czechoslovakian government, even if in 1926 they were also able to gain a number of ministers. The Sudeten parties were legal within the new state and one of them, the Sudetendeutsche Partei, became the first party in Czechoslovakia for number of votes and almost gained the relative majority. At the beginning with a somewhat conservative political policy and around 1935 it moved towards a form of cantonalization of Czechoslovakia. The turning point came between 1936 and 1937 when close contacts took place between the Party and the Reich until 1938, when this became the instrument that Hitler used to destroy Czechoslovakia.
“After the war – Leoncini explains – there was the expulsion of the Sudeten (that involved about 3 million people en. An operation that was also driven by a desire for vengeance against Germany on the part of the victorious States that, as we have seen, had not occurred at the end of the First World War. ”
The Italian historian does not fail to remind us that “After the expulsions, relations between Germany and Czechoslovakia were clearly hostile and full of indifference, and were to change only with on advent of Ostpolitik, when Brandt went to Warsaw to apologize for what the Germans had done. And in 1973, a new kind of relationship developed between Czechoslovakia and the German Federal Republic”. Still today in Germany, a strong role is played by the Landsmannschaft Sudetendeutsche Association that is located in Munich, with an office also in Prague. “After the expulsion – Leoncini maintains – many Sudetens moved to Bavaria, and Munich changed from a farming town to an industrial city, where the Sudetens became a strong lobby that influenced the Bonn government. As for current relations between the two countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, we have to say that the Czechs feel somewhat surrounded by the German-speaking world, so it’s purely a psychological problem. Bohemia is like a wedge between Austria and Germany; there is still a sense of fear, a sort of subordination complex towards this looming neighbouring country, whose economic power in the Czech Republic today is quite strong”.
By Mauro Ruggiero