Suchergebnisse

On 27 February 1992, almost 47 years after the end of the Second World War, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of a re-united Germany and President Václav Havel of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic [the ČSFR] signed a Friendship Treaty between their two countries in the Spanish Room of Prague Castle, the residence of the Czechoslovak president. While this treaty could have signalled a new era of Sudeten German-Czech relations, in fact it did not, as some 2,000 protesters who greeted Kohl and Havel with denunciatory placards following the signing made clear. Why not?

Aus einem ultranationalistischen Blickwinkel skizzierte Kuffner auf 32 Seiten und fünf beigefügten Karten die aus seiner Sicht notwendige territoriale Neuordnung Europas, die sowohl die allslawische Frage "od Šumavy až po Bajkal či Tichý Oceán" [vom Böhmerwald bis zum Baikalsee bzw. Pazifik] lösen als auch einen dauerhaften Frieden garantieren sollte. Die Hauptrolle dabei hatte er einem neu zu formierenden Staat zugedacht, dem er zwar den Namen "Čechy" (Böhmen) gab, der jedoch nicht nur die historischen Grenzen des Königreichs, sondern auch diejenigen der 1918 gegründeten ČSR deutlich überschritt. [.] Mit dieser überzogenen Denkschrift sollte Kuffer (unbeabsichtigt) einer antitschechischen Propaganda dies- und jenseits der 1919 sanktionierten Grenzen für 20 Jahre Dauermunition liefern: Binnen weniger Jahre avancierte sie zum meistzitierten tschechischen Werk im völkisch-deutschnationalen Schrifttum der 1920er und 1930er Jahre. Man glaubte in Kuffners Schrift "das heimliche Grundkonzept des tschechischen Imperialismus" aufgedeckt zu haben. ; The political memorandum "Náš stát a světový mír" (1918) of the Czech national extremist Hanuš Kuffner, propagating a reorganization of the world zones, the permanent military oppression of Germany and the creation of a Great Czech state ready to defend itself, became the most quoted Czech publication in German nationalist literature during the 1920s and 1930s. Mostly it was cited in order to "unmask" the "real goals" of the Czechoslovakian government towards Germany. The paper offers a survey of its history of reception showing the facets of the politically motivated use of the pamphlet by (Sudeten) German circles against Czechoslovakia. Particular emphasis is put on its German basis of reception: the translation Unser Staat und der Weltfrieden presented by Sudeten German circles in 1922. In this process it will be illustrated that it meant more than just a literal text transmission, in other words a "didacticized" version focussing on German readers, with a tendency to exacerbate in decisive passages the already too violence-orientated pamphlet.

This assessment of Germany's European identity examines the impact of the "Sudeten German question" on relations between Bonn and Prague. The analysis joins this issue with a proposed theoretical approach to the formulation of post-Cold War German foreign policy priorities. This view of interest formation combines Keohane's institutionalism and Wendt's constructivism to argue that institutionalised international interaction may produce a collective identity. The study concludes that Bonn's post-1989 policies concerning Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten German conflict have reflected efforts to define German foreign policy priorities in terms of collective interests - embodied in the framework of established international European institutions. (German Politics / FUB)

Recent historical studies on the organizations of German expellees and their influence on West German political culture highlight the insincere attitude and deception by the whole West German political establishment toward the expellee politicians and activists and their cause. One study in this field is Matthias Stickler's important book "Ostdeutsch heißt Gesamtdeutsch," and a more recent one by Manfred Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen?, takes Stickler's thesis even further. It creates the impression that the expellee organizations, highly dependent on the government for financial and political support, had no option in this matter and were even helpless in that they had to accept the noncommittal rhetoric and the West German government's unwillingness to obligate West Germany for their cause. In this article, I probe this portrayal of the expellee politicians and activists as objects rather than subjects of German politics by inquiring into the political and public relations activities of the German Sudeten Council (Sudetendeutscher Rat) in the field of foreign policy during and around the tenure of Hans-Christoph Seebohm as the leader (Sprecher) of the German Sudeten Expellee Homeland Society (Landsmannschaft) (1959–1967). The Sudeten Council is a non-party association; one half of its members are elected by the federal assembly of the German Sudeten Landsmannschaft and the other half by the political parties of the Bundestag. As well as being a politician of the expellee organization, Hans-Christoph Seebohm pursued the longest political career in the German federal cabinet—seventeen years. He served as Minister of Transportation and Mail of the Federal Republic from 1949 to 1966 under Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard. To date, no monographic work has been written about Seebohm.

In 'Czechs and Germans 1848-2004', Václav Houzvicka describes the development of the Czech-German national controversies from the mid-nineteenth century through the establishing of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 and finally to the beginning of the twenty-first century. He focuses mainly on the tragic end of the nations' coexistence in 1938-1945 and the development - in the latter part of the twentieth century - of differing Czech and German explanations for the reasons the Germans were removed from the Czechoslovak Republic after 1945. A detailed explanation of Czech, German, and Sudeten-German concepts is rendered coherently and in detail within the international and socioeconomic context of the twentieth century