AGE-OLD QUARREL

Evening Star, Issue 22975, 4 June 1938, Page 3

AGE-OLD QUARREL

TEUTON AND SLAV [Edmund Taylor, in the Chicago ‘Tribune.’] A Czech army colonel stationed in a German-populated town goes into a barber’s shop and asks—in Czech—for a shave. The harbor, who speaks only German, does his best to understand, but the final result is a singe or shaiuP9O. The colonel, enraged, expresses his opinion of the German race as a whb;e, utilising his military vocabulary. The barber defends the national honour. The neighbours call the police. The German and Czech papers comment variously. • ' Homely and unimportant and ludicrous, but painful incidents like this occur constantly in Czechoslovakia. Your first tendency is to disregard all these neighbourhood bickerings, but when you look deeper you discover that they have more than just a picturesque value. The political issue of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, which Berlin has serious reasons for keeping an open sore, is only the visible upper third of the iceberg. Beneatn there are deep strategic social and economic facBut there is something else which it is necessary to understand to appreciate these factors. ■ It is the age-old racial conflict between Teuton and Slav which has drenched the soil of Central Europe with blood throughout history. At the dawn of history in the west, Slavs and Teutons were already at it.Tire Slavs figured mostly as victims of the Teutons. In this part of Europe, as well as in the north-east, the.y lived in loose tribal federations, cultivated the soil or tended live stock and practised a kind of primitive Communism. They were a gentle and peace-loving folk. The Germans kept coming down on them, mostly from the north-west, first on marauding expeditions, later to settle down permanently on their relatively fertile lands. Czech histories dealing with these half-legendary times give a ‘ picturesque example of the feeling of the Slavs toward their Teutonic neighbours. It seems that the first Christian missionaries .who i came into what is now Czechoslovakia had a hard time convincing the natives of the merits or the new faith. _ The natives objected to Christianity because of “ immorality shown by thievery and robbery prevalent among Christians and on account of cruelties which they committed on one another ’ (Vita St. Otonis, cited by Nosski). TEMPORARY IMPROVEMENT. You see, the only Christians with whom the Slavs had comb into contact up to this time were Germans, and they naively supposed that all Christians must be like that. Later the relations between the races, at least between the Slavs living inside the natural fortifications of pre-sent-day Bohemia, and the Germans, improved. The kingdom of Bohemia became a part of the Holy Roman [German) Empire and their rulers early acquired the dignity of electors. Sometimes the kings of Bohemia were Slav leaders, sometimes German princes freely elected by the. native Czech feudal nobility. . : The Bohemian, kings, regardless ot nationality, invited German emigrants to settle in Bohemia and gave them special privileges. Sometimes the greater feudal lords-followed the same policy ou their own Estates. The Germans at thai; time had a higher degree of culture - than the Czechs, as least technologically. They were the artisans, traders, sometimes even the bankers. They were mostly city dwellers, so the Government encouraged them in order to foster commerce and industry in the kingdom. , . . 1 Soon there were German colonies ni nearly every big Czech town —in Prague they had a special German settlement with a legal status of its own under the walls of the Hdracany castle. These early - German settlers formed the nucleus of the cltv-dwelling bourgeoisie 111 Bohemia and became , a middle class between the peasants and the nobiuty, both Czech, both living on the land. The Germans .made important contributions to Bohemian culture and greatly augmented the wealth of the" historic lands. Yet even in those faivoff times, when nationality in the modern sense was unknown, the antagonism between the two races was evident.in the occasional complaints against the royal policy of encouraging German immigration. , . Dalimil’s chronicle, for instance, the first historical work written in Czech (1310), puts in the month of Prince Oklrich v who married a Czech peasant girl, the following sentiments: — " Rather would I marry a Czech peasant girt than take a German queen as my wife. A German woman will have German servants, and German she will teach her children. That .would bring division of languages and thereby ruin the State-” "PRUSSIANS OF THE SLAVS.” The same writer takes a nationalistic crack at Prernysl Otakar, the Iron King, for unduly favouring the Germans : ‘‘The kiug_ began to heed no longer his countrymen—towns and villages he began to give to Germans. The Germans appeared to surround him. Against the nobles he used violence, therefore many of them became angry and appealed to the Emperor against him, saying: ‘ ’Tis better that the land should be a desert rather than that hy the king’s order the Germans should hold it.’” That sounds much like some ,of the more nationalistic Czechoslovak papers to-day. • , In the course of centuries, Czech and German intermingled and reacted upon one another, and even intermarried to some extent. The Sudeten Germans lost many of the Teutonisms preserved by their northern brothers; the Czechs became the “Prussians of the Slavs. Jn the great revolt against .Hapsburgs in the seventeenth century, many Hussite Germans fought ■ aide by side with Czechs against the Austrian overlord and died on the block or went into exile exactly as did the Czechs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a great influx of Germans into Bohemia. The native Czech nobility had been practically wiped out in the revolt and the Thirty Years’ War. Their estates were given to Austrian nobles, so Bohemia fell under the social yoke of an alien dynasty and State—a very important develonment in Czech history. All the new German arrivals were not aristocrats. Austrian Germans of every social category and profession poured into the country, settled in thicklystrewn communities along the slopes of the Sudeten mountains and occasionally created German islands inside the Czech racial zones.