The Sudeten German Question and Czechoslovak-German Relations Since 1989

By Timothy Burcher
18 Jun 2004

Between the years 1945 and 1947, twenty-nine out of thirty German speakers who were on Czechoslovak soil at the end of the Second World War were ‘expelled’ from the region known as Sudetenland. The division of Europe rendered debate of these events futile, a mere game of rhetoric. Then in 1989 the ground rules suddenly changed. Whether the lifting of the iron curtain would create the conditions for actual redress and reconciliation, or simply lead to the seizure of renewed opportunities for falling out, nobody knew; given the international context of the fifty year old events in which what we now call the Sudeten German Question finds its immediate roots, the prominence that it has assumed on the purely bilateral agenda of Czech-German relations in the new Europe is perhaps surprising. It is ‘the foremost foreign policy problem of the Czech Republic’ precisely because of the potential it holds to complicate the future course of European integration, a project which is by its very definition multilateral. By origin and present context, it is a problem immovably situated in the international arena.

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