Sudeten Germans
German Bohemians, later known as Sudeten Germans, are ethnic Germans living in the Czech lands of the Bohemian Crown, which later became an integral part of Czechoslovakia. Before 1945, over three million German Bohemians constituted about 23% of the population of the whole country and about 29.5% of the population of Bohemia and Moravia. Ethnic Germans migrated into the Kingdom of Bohemia, an electoral territory of the Holy Roman Empire, from the 11th century, mostly in the border regions of what was later called the "Sudetenland", which was named after the Sudeten Mountains.
The process of German expansion was known as Ostsiedlung. The name "Sudeten Germans" was adopted during rising nationalism after the fall of Austria-Hungary in the aftermath of First World War. After the Munich Agreement, the so-called Sudetenland became part of Germany.
After the Second World War, most of the German-speaking population was expelled from Czechoslovakia to Germany and Austria.
The area that became known as the Sudetenland possessed chemical works and lignite mines as well as textile, china, and glass factories. The Bohemian border with Bavaria was inhabited primarily by Germans. The Upper Palatine Forest, which extends along the Bavarian frontier and into the agricultural areas of southern Bohemia, was an area of German settlement. Moravia contained patches of "locked" German territory to the north and south. More characteristic were the German language islands, which were towns inhabited by German minorities and surrounded by Czechs. Sudeten Germans were mostly Roman Catholics, a legacy of centuries of Austrian Habsburg rule.
Not all ethnic Germans lived in isolated and well-defined areas; for historical reasons, Czechs and Germans mixed in many places, and Czech-German bilingualism and code-switching was quite common. Nevertheless, during the second half of the 19th century, Czechs and Germans began to create separate cultural, educational, political and economic institutions, which kept both groups semi-isolated from each other. This semi-isolated status continued until the end of the Second World War, when almost all of the ethnic Germans were expelled.
Names
In the English language, ethnic Germans who originated in the Kingdom of Bohemia were traditionally referred to as "German Bohemians". This appellation utilizes the broad definition of Bohemia, which includes all of the three Bohemian crown lands: Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. In the German language, it is more common to distinguish among the three lands, hence the prominent terms Deutschböhmen, Deutschmährer and Deutschschlesier. Even in German the broader use of "Bohemian" is also found.The term "Sudeten Germans" came about during rising ethnic nationalism in the early 20th century, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the First World War. It coincided with the rise of another new term, "the Sudetenland", which referred only to the parts of the former Kingdom of Bohemia that were inhabited predominantly by ethnic Germans. These names were derived from the Sudeten Mountains, which form the northern border of the Bohemian lands. As these terms were heavily used by the Nazi German regime to push forward the creation of a Greater Germanic Reich, many contemporary Germans avoid them in favour of the traditional names.
Before the First World War
Middle Ages and early modern period
There have been ethnic Germans living in the Bohemian crown lands since the Middle Ages. In the late 12th and in the 13th century the Přemyslid rulers promoted the colonisation of certain areas of their lands by German settlers from the adjacent lands of Bavaria, Franconia, Upper Saxony and Austria during the Ostsiedlung migration.In 1348, the Luxembourg king Charles I, also King of the Romans and Holy Roman Emperor from 1355, founded the Charles University in Prague, the first in Central Europe, attended by large German student nations, and its language of education was Latin. Czechs made up about 20 percent of the students at the time of its founding, and the rest was primarily German. A culturally-significant example of German Bohemian prose from the Middle Ages is the story Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, written in Early New High German by Johannes von Tepl in Žatec, who probably had studied liberal arts in Prague.
For centuries, German Bohemians played important roles in the economy and politics of the Bohemian lands. For example, forest glass production was a common industry for German Bohemians. Though they were living beyond the medieval Kingdom of Germany, an independent German Bohemian awareness, however, was not widespread, and for a long time, it played no decisive role in everyday life. Individuals were usually seen as Bohemians, Moravians or Silesians. Defining events later in German Bohemian history were the Hussite Wars, the occupation of Bohemia by the Czech Brethren, the Thirty Years' War, when the Lands of the Bohemian Crown were severely affected, which caused the immigration of further German settlers.
After the death of King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia in the 1526 Battle of Mohács, the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand of Austria became King of Bohemia, which became a constituent state of the Habsburg monarchy. With the rise of the Habsburgs in Bohemia after the 1620 Battle of White Mountain, the old Bohemian nobility became virtually meaningless. Increasingly, the Bohemian crown lands were ruled from the Austrian capital, Vienna, which favoured the dominance of the German language and German culture. On the other hand, the 18th-century Silesian Wars started by Prussian King Frederick II of Prussia against Austria resulted in the loss of the traditionally-Bohemian crown land and weakened Germans in the remaining parts of Bohemia. As the 19th century arrived, resistance to the German domination began to develop among the Czechs.
Austria-Hungary
After the revolutions of 1848 and the rise of ethnic nationalism, nervousness about ethnic tensions in Austria-Hungary resulted in a prevailing equality between Czechs and German Bohemians. Each ethnicity tried to retain, in regions in which it was the majority, sovereignty over its own affairs. Czechs and Germans generally maintained separate schools, churches and public institutions. Nevertheless, despite the separation, Germans often understood some Czech, and Czechs often spoke some German. Cities like Prague, however, saw more mixing between the ethnicities and also had large populations of Jews; Germans living with Czechs fluently spoke Czech and code-switched between German and Czech when talking to Czechs and other Germans. Jews in Bohemia often spoke German and sometimes Yiddish. The famed writer Franz Kafka exemplifies the diversity of Bohemia since he was a Prague-based German-speaking Jew, but his surname was of Czech origin.In 1867, the equality of Austrian citizens of all ethnicities was guaranteed by the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which enshrined the principles of constitutional monarchy. The agreement established the Dual Monarchy and gave the Hungarians sovereignty over their own affairs. The preservation of German cultural dominance throughout Cisleithania had proved to be difficult and now seemed to be was utterly impossible.
With the agreement, the desire for an autonomous Czech subdivision was mounting. Both German Bohemians and Czechs were hoping for a constitutional solution to the demands, but Czech nationalist views remained a constant part of the Bohemian political sphere. The Czechs had feared Germanization, but the Germans now worried about Czechization.
A symbol of the rising tensions was the fate of Charles University, then called Charles-Ferdinand University. Its Czech students had become increasingly perturbed by the sole use of German for instruction. During the 1848 revolution, both Germans and Czechs fought to make Czech one of the university's official languages. They achieved that right, and the university became bilingual. By 1863, out of 187 lecture courses, 22 were held in Czech, the remainder being in German. In 1864, some Germans suggested the creation of a separate Czech university. Czech professors rejected that because they did not wish to lose the continuity of university traditions.
The Czechs, however, were still not satisfied with bilingual status and proposed creating two separate constituent colleges, one for the Germans and one for the Czechs. The Germans vetoed the proposal and called for a full division of the university. After long negotiations, it was divided into the German Charles-Ferdinand University and the Czech Charles-Ferdinand University. The Cisleithanian Imperial Council prepared an act of parliament, and the emperor granted royal assent on 28 February 1882.
In 1907, the Cisleithanian Imperial Council was for the first time elected by universal male suffrage. As part of the process, new constituency boundaries had to be drawn throughout the empire. Electoral officials were very careful to demarcate areas as clearly either German or Czech and to assure that there would be no conflict as to which ethnicity had a majority in any constituency. Nevertheless, that did not settle tensions among Czechs, who wanted to govern themselves from Prague.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand came up with a plan, known as the United States of Greater Austria, in 1909. German Bohemia, as it was to be called, was going to be separated from the Czech areas around it in the plan. That would create ethnically homogenous self-governing provinces that would hopefully end the ethnic conflict. However, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, and the First World War destroyed all hopes for a redrawn Cisleithania.
Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye
The end of the war in 1918 brought about the partition of the multiethnic Austria-Hungary into its historical components, one of them, the Bohemian Kingdom, forming the west of the newly created Czechoslovakia. Czech politicians insisted on the traditional boundaries of the Bohemian Crown according to the principle of uti possidetis juris. The new Czech state would thus have defensible mountain boundaries with Germany, but the highly industrialised settlement areas of three million Germans would now be separated from Austria and come under Czech control.The Austrian head of government, Ernst Seidler von Feuchtenegg, wanted to divide Bohemia by setting up administrative counties, which would be based on the nationalities of the population. On 26 September 1918, his successor, Max Hussarek von Heinlein, offered the Czechs wide-ranging autonomy within Imperial and Royal Austria. Also, Austria was no longer considered to be a major power by the victors of the war.