For the German government itself, on the other hand, the fate of the Sudeten Germans, who had not belonged to the Bismarckian-Wilhelminian empire, had at this moment of defeat and revolution a relatively low priority. Hence, it gave them no serious support when Czech Legion troops, newly returned home from France and Italy, proceeded to occupy the German-populated areas and thus reassert the territorial integrity of the historic Bohemian lands during the next weeks. The provincial capitals of “Deutschböhmen” and “Sudetenland” fell to the Czechs on December 16 and 18, respectively, and all remaining localities by Christmas. The absence at this time of military resistance by the local Germans to this Czech occupation was a function not only of weakness but also of confidence that the Allied Powers at the peace conference would order plebiscites whose results would prove decisive. Three months later, when it was clear that such expectations were erroneous, the local Germans belatedly staged massive protest demonstrations, with scattered marches on gendarmerie barracks, on March 4, 1919, the day of the opening of the new Austrian National Assembly in whose election they had not been allowed to participate by the triumphant Czech authorities. In the course of dispersing them, fifty-two Germans were killed and eighty-four wounded by the Czech gendarmes and troops.
For the Czechs, the principle of the integrity of the historic Bohemian-Moravian frontiers was not negotiable. They refused to acknowledge the self-declared German provincial governments within these frontiers. Echoing the celebrated words of Prince Windischgrätz to the Hungarians in 1848, the Czech minister Alois Rasin now curtly informed the deputy chief of the “Deutschböhmen” movement, Josef Seliger, that “I don’t negotiate with rebels.” On December 22, 1918, two days after his return to the country from his wartime endeavors in the West and in Russia and one day after his installation as Czechoslovakia’s first president, Masaryk, in a solemn address to the National Assembly at the ancient Prague Hradčany (Royal Castle), insisted that the German-populated areas would, come what may, remain in the new state. Inviting the Germans to recognize this inevitable fact and to help build the new state, Masaryk reminded them of their one-time status as “immigrants and colonists.” Though historically valid, this expression, which was uttered rather vehemently, was scarcely the most tactful one to use when discussing the Germans’ political rights within the new democratic republic, and Masaryk sought to soften it by visiting the Prague German Theater the next day where he spoke soothingly of full equality for all nationalities in Czechoslovakia.
At Paris, meanwhile, concerned lest the German demands for self-determination make a positive impression on the peace conference in general and on the American delegation in particular, the new Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Beneš, was promising that it was his government’s intention “to make of the Czecho-Slovak Republic a sort of Switzerland, taking into consideration, of course, the special conditions of Bohemia.”3 He thereby, alas, gave later German propagandists, who habitually cited only the first clause of this statement, ammunition with which they would attempt to shame Czechoslovakia before the world when Hitler launched his pre-Munich propaganda offensive against her in the 1930s. At Paris in 1919 Beneš had also argued that a strong Czechoslovakia within her historic western borders not only would be an element of stability in the midst of anarchy, but also would simultaneously serve as a bulwark against both the Bolshevik tide rolling in from the east and the German Drang toward the east—the historic borders being happily also strategically strong and economically rational ones. The American delegation was initially unimpressed, the British reserved; the French, however, were at that time enthusiastic, and as they were the best organized and most purposeful of the Great Power delegations, they carried the day for Beneš and the Czechs.
To appreciate fully how their current discomfiture and impotence struck the Sudeten Germans, how allusions to them as “colonists,” “immigrants,” “rebels” enraged them, one must bear in mind that they were traditionally the most Pan-Germanist of all the Germans of the Habsburg Empire, far surpassing in nationalistic intensity, for example, those of the Austrian Alpine provinces proper. They regarded themselves as historically conditioned and destined to rule over the inferior Czechs in Bohemia, to control the imperial government in Vienna, and, in alliance with the Reich Germans to the north, to organize all Central Europe against the West and the Slavs. During the Great War they had expended their blood and their treasure with desperate abandon in the cause of Germandom, sustaining casualties that were proportionately greater than those of any other group in the Habsburg Empire, and indeed, in the German Empire as well.4 Now, overnight, their dream was shattered, and their first response was an instinctive refusal to live as a minority in a land where they had once held a privileged status. Sudeten German Social Democrats were, if anything, initially even more vehement in their insistence on seceding into a Greater Germany than were the bourgeois nationalists, for to them this option bore the further ideological legitimacy of the Marxist radical German democratic vision of 1848. As late as June, 1919, the Social Democrats called a general strike in protest against the Treaty of St. Germain which officially and definitively confirmed the Sudeten lands to Czechoslovakia.
As time passed, the Germans reluctantly took stock of the new situation. Always politically energetic and shrewd, they now insisted that, the bulk of their territories having been assigned to Czechoslovakia, any partial arrangements that would lower their numbers and lessen their political weight within this state (for example, the rumored cession by Czechoslovakia of the extreme western Egerland district to Germany or other minor border rectifications) were not permissible. They now recalled that, long before they had become Pan-Germans, they had been “Böhmer”—provincial German patriots characterized by a particularly tenacious and parochial sense of identity with their land and with each other.5 Finally, their economic elite sobered and bethought itself of the unwelcome consequences should it have to compete with the German Reich’s industry in a Greater German market unprotected by Bohemian tariffs. Furthermore, as a “victor” state, Czechoslovakia, in contrast to Germany and Austria, escaped heavy reparations obligations. More dramatically, the Sudeten German elite could draw an instructive contrast in the spring and summer of 1919 between the reassuringly bourgeois government of Prague and the alarmingly “red” ones of Vienna, Munich, and Berlin. This comparison lost nothing in vividness with the great inflation and political turmoil of 1923 in Germany and Austria. The Sudeten Germans now decided to bide their time, meanwhile fighting tenaciously for their rights, privileges, and powers within a Czechoslovakia whose western half had been restored to its historic frontiers.
When it came to delimiting the borders of the eastern half of the new state, the provinces of Slovakia and Ruthenia, the arguments were reversed: history and economic factors were the weapons of the Hungarians, and it was the Czechs who now turned to the theory of national self-determination. Another difference is that the Hungarians were initially willing and able to offer much more serious military resistance to the Czechs than were the Germans and Austrians.
Among the Slovaks, the Protestant minority (16 percent) had traditionally felt close to the Czechs, and its fraternal sentiments had been reinforced since the end of the nineteenth century by the influence of Masaryk’s western-oriented, as contrasted to Pan-Slavic, Czecho-Slovak ideology, whose main Slovak organ was the revue Hlas (Voice). The first serious Czech political claims to Slovakia came during World War I. Masaryk’s group articulated them in the Western capitals, and, in an address of May 30, 1917, to the new Habsburg emperor Charles, the Czech delegation to the Vienna Reichsrat demanded a federal reorganization of his entire realm, that would unite the Czech and Slovak-populated lands at the expense of millennial Hungary. The political lead was taken by the Czechs since the Slovaks were politically impotent in old Hungary, both in the gerrymandered central parliament at Budapest as well as in the local administration. In 1910, for example, there were only 184 Slovak speakers out of 3,683 judicial functionaries in the Slovak-populated counties of northern Hungary, and only 164 Slovaks out of the other 6,185 civil servants. Furthermore, since the Ausgleich of 1867 the Hungarian rulers had imposed on the Slovaks a rigorous policy of linguistic and cultural assimilation (but not racial exclusion) that had by the outbreak of World War I achieved such success among the nonpeasant strata of the Slovak population as to deprive it of much of its potential national elite.
At the