Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [154]
The Sudeten Germans themselves protested ineffectually in 1918 and 1919. Largely prosperous farmers and solid bourgeois, they were divided between despising their new Czech rulers and fearing the left-wing revolutions sweeping through Germany and Austria. Czechoslovakia at least offered stability. In any case, Germany, engrossed in its own problems, showed little interest in them at the time. The German delegation in Versailles mentioned them only once in passing in its written comments to the peacemakers. The German foreign minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, offered the Sudeten Germans his sympathy but made it clear that Germany would not risk its negotiating position with the Allies by looking out for people who had, after all, never been part of Germany. Linking up with Austria was an equally unlikely solution for the Sudeten Germans in 1919, given the way the German speakers were situated in a crescent along the Austrian and German borders. Moreover, in 1919 Austria itself scarcely seemed likely to survive.23
The Czech government did keep many of its promises. In districts with significant numbers of Germans, they could use their own language for official matters. There were German schools, universities, newspapers. But Czechoslovakia was still a Slav state. Its banknotes showed young women dressed in folkloric Czech or Slovak costumes. Germans— along with Hungarians and Ruthenians—never felt they entirely belonged. 24 Perhaps that would not have mattered, if the Depression had not hit Sudetenland industries particularly hard and if Hitler had not made the cause of the lost Germans his own. At Munich in 1938, the Sudeten Germans provided him with the excuse to destroy Czechoslovakia.
Czechoslovakia’s borders with Hungary took longer to settle, partly because the treaty with Hungary was delayed, first by the communist revolution at the end of March and then by the outbreak of more fighting. Assuring the peacemakers that their only intention was to combat Bolshevism, the Czechs moved in to seize Hungarian territory shortly after the revolution. With Foch’s approval, their forces occupied crucial railways on Hungarian soil and then moved ahead, beyond what Foch had authorized, to take the last remaining Hungarian coalfield. The Hungarians counterattacked at the beginning of June. The Czechs immediately appealed to the peacemakers. They were amazed and hurt that anyone should think they had provoked the Hungarians. “I know nothing about a Czech offensive,” said Kramář. “All I know relates to the advance of Hungarian Bolshevism, mixed and confused with Magyar chauvinism.” Beneš painted a picture of a peaceful Czechoslovakia, unaware of the menace to the south: “We were busy with our domestic reforms and forthcoming elections.” Czech forces had been concentrated largely on the German border, ready to leap into action if Germany refused to sign its treaty. “It was then that the Magyars, seeing Slovakia completely defenceless, advanced.” The Czechs took the opportunity to make fresh demands on Hungarian territory: additional railway lines, for example, and a bridgehead on the south bank of the Danube. The Allies, by now seriously worried about the conflict, rejected most of these. “We must be fair even to the Hungarians,” said Lloyd George, “they are only defending their country.” The one exception was the largely German town of Bratislava on the Danube, which was given to Czechoslovakia on the grounds that it needed a river port. Even so, Czechoslovakia ended up with a substantial piece of what had been Hungary, and over a million ethnic Hungarians.25
Czechoslovakia also had trouble with Poland, over the little triangle of Teschen, where Upper Silesia met the western edge of Galicia. As part of Austria-Hungary, Teschen was up for grabs. It