History

Few dates

As we all know, history is complicated and subject to interpretation ... Here at at least a few dates relevant to the stories told in the documentary.

DATES

from 13th century

19th century

1918 - 1938

1938 - 1945

1946 - 1948

1948 - today

EVENTS

Hilly border regions of Bohemia are settled by ethnic Germans.

National tensions arise, both in the form of the "austroslavism" ideology developed by Czech politicians and Pan-Germanist activists raising the German question.
The name "Sudetendeutsche" emerges by the early 20th century.

Austria-Hungary breaks apart after World War I. Newly created Czechoslovakia includes more than 3 million German speaking people - 23% of the whole population.
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk becomes the first president of the Czechoslovak "First Republic". The Czechoslovak national anthem is sung in Czech, Slovak, German and Hungarian.
During the Great Depression the mostly mountainous regions populated by the German minority were affected more than the interior of the country.
In these years, the parties of German nationalists and later the Nazi Sudeten German National Socialist Party (SdP) led by Konrad Henlein, gained immense popularity among Germans in Czechoslovakia.

In September 1938, Hitler, Daladier, Mussolini and Chamberlain sign the Munich Agreement, accepting the immediate occupation of the Sudetenland.
The Sudetenland becomes part of Nazi Germany, Northern and Western parts are reorganized as Reichsgau Sudetenland, with the city of Liberec (Reichenberg) as the capital and Konrad Henlein as the Reichskommissar.
Men from Sudetenland are obliged to join the Wehrmacht.

The Potsdam Conference in 1945 determined that Sudeten Germans would have to leave Czechoslovakia. An estimated 1.3 million ethnic Germans were deported to the American zone (in what would become West Germany) and 800,000 to the Soviet zone (in what would become East Germany).
There remained areas with noticeable German minorities where skilled labour of remaining ethnic German men remained necessary in mining and industry.

As the German population was expelled, the former Sudetenland was resettled, mostly by Czechs.
Population has never reached the pre-war level resulting in a de-population of the mountain areas and to the extinction of some villages and many of the traditional activities from this region.

In the 2011 census, approximately 20,000 people in the Czech Republic claimed German ethnicity.

QUOTES FROM DOCUMENTARY

Ms Severová: "Look here, I’m telling you, there were only Germans in this village, just them… We didn’t even realize that we were Czech or that we belonged to that… There were 1400 residents here, and then there were only three Czechs among them."

Ms Severová: When President Masaryk was 86, we learned a poem… “Sechsundachtzig Jahre” that is: eighty-six “ist eine lange Zeit”, is a long time.
Ms Boucká: Well, that Masaryk, he was a very good president, perhaps too good.

Ms Boucká: "So, they then said that if he joined that Henlein, he would get a job in Germany, here in Eastern Germany. And he wanted a job because we were four kids. We would make bobbin lace at home, that wasn’t enough."

Ms Boucká: Then people would call them names, too, enough and to spare. When someone was killed, the fathers or brothers, oh yeah, there was screaming everywhere, always! They would be waiting for the postman, right, and then when he brought the letter, it was horrible.

Ms Boucká: "So, if all the Germans had to go, we also figured we’d go. But too late, then no others were admitted. (...) Well, glad…yes, glad we were. In the winter, those relatives of ours would write: be glad you stayed there because it’s horrible here.

Ms Severová: There’s still ten of us here, the original Germans. Ten. New people moved in later. In 50 or 60 years you maybe get used to it, but the beginnings weren't easy at all, they weren't easy.

You will find a lot of background info in the debate with Ondřej Matějka about the documentary here (in Czech), and an article from him here.

Links in English about history: http://www.krusnehory-erzgebirge.eu/en/about-the-region,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_from_Czechoslovakia,
http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/3676541-sudetenland-s-last-germans
Link in Czech: http://www.antikomplex.cz/o-sudetech.html
Article about the topic in current Czech politics: http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2013/05/czech-politics

Why did our "ladies" stay?

As most Germans were expelled after the war, some stayed - about 30 thousand "experts" and 50 thousand for family reasons.

The father of Ms Boucká and the husband of Ms Zettlová were both "experts" - they were allowed to stay as they were necessary for local industry.

Ms Severová's story is complicated - Ms Severová's family was expelled in 1945, she stayed on her own to work in a factory in Nejdek for another year and then was sent to join her family. However, in between she fell in love with a Czech and therefore came secretly across the border to join him. While hiding in post-war Trinksaifen, she became pregnant, gave birth and was expelled again to Germany with her 3 month old son. Despite all her and her future husband's efforts, including a request to the president of Czechoslovakia, she was not allowed to come back. Only after three years and with the help of the International Red Cross, they were allowed a "distance" wedding and Ms Severova could come back to join her husband in Trinksaifen/Rudne. Her story is recounted in a (film) documentary "Babička je Oma/Babitschka heisst Oma" (Grandmother is Oma), directed by Martin Janoušek (Praga Film 2006).

The Lost Sudetenland project

"The Lost Sudetenland" (Zmizelé Sudety) was an inspiration for the documentary. You will find its description, with further historical context here.

Trinksaifen/Rudné village chronicle(s)

As a way of structuring the documentary, we have used the local village chronicle of Trinksaifen, or more precisely, the two chronicles.

Pamětní kniha obce (The memory book of the village) was written by Johann Dittrich, the mayor and mill owner. The first entry is in 1922 and the last one in 1938. It was translated into Czech by Roman Kloc, with the collaboration of Rosa Severová, Margit Klocová, Barbora Kosíková, and Milan Augustin.

Mr Robert Šperl arrived in Trinksaifen/Rudné in 1946. When he became the local librarian, he was charged with writing the local chronicle. His vivid descriptions describe the changes in the village until 1971 - in particular, Mr Šperl deplores the arrival of the television, which in his opinion is the main cause in his falling library membership as well as a loss of village community life.

Here are the extracts from the village chronicle(s) used in the documentary (and a bonus one).

Social capital in Sudetenland

In his article, Ondřej Matějka discusses the impact of post-war events on the Sudetenland region through the prism of "social capital".

"The end of Czech-German co-existence within one country thus resulted in probably the greatest territorial change in the history of today’s Czech Republic. No war or political regime changed the country’s character more than the two post-war years, which saw a traditionally multicultural country become, by European standards, an ethnically homogenous state without precedence.

These events offer a unique opportunity to examine the creation of social capital in a place where, practically from one day to the next, all social life was extinguished and started anew. The discontinuity in development was of immense proportions: in the years 1945 – 1947 as many as five million people were in motion within the territory of the Sudetenland. (As a comparison: immediately after the Second World War, there were about nine million people living on the territory of today’s Czech Republic.) In essence, the process of “restoring life” to the border regions (a Czech synonym for the Sudetenland) has never been completed. To this day, there are clear differences between the interior and the border regions – the Sudetenland has its specific social, economic, cultural and environmental problems."

You can find the full article (Matějka, Ondřej, Social Capital in the Contemporary Sudetenland, in: Znoj, Milan / Lewandowski, J., D., (eds.): Trust and Transitions. Social Capital in a Changing World, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge 2008, S. 277 – 295.) here.

Thanks to Ondřej for allowing us to use the article on this website.