Czechoslovakia 1929–1938

Summary

At first Czechoslovakia was not seriously affected by the Great Depression: her finances were sound: she was fairly self-sufficient. The population, at any rate in Bohemia and Moravia, was reasonably well educated, and the constitution worked satisfactorily. Here in the 'twenties there seemed to be the new twentieth-century society freed of an alien aristocracy. Life in Prague competed with that in Berlin and Vienna; the intellectuals had the same strong bias to the left and their own special relationship with the Russians—life was less brilliant than in Berlin but a little saner, less isolated from its hinterland. An interesting figure of the day was Kafka's Milena. Before 1914 she had been a revolutionary Czech schoolgirl thirsting for national independence. Then there was Kafka and his early death; after translating his novels she became a literary journalist and a focus of Czech intellectual life. In the later ’twenties not only the Prague Jews but some of the other Bohemian Germans began to settle down to acceptance of the Czechoslovak Republic: Beneš's activities at the League of Nations —the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister presided over the Assembly of the League of Nations on the day of Germany's admission in September 1926 —added to its standing.

Their own circumstances and temperament made it difficult for the Czechs, whether Masaryk and Beneš or the general public, to grasp what began to happen all round them in the ’thirties. Stalin had chosen the path of despotism already in 1928.