Last stop expulsion - The minority question and forced migration in East-Central Europe: 1918-49

This article deals with the European minorities in the period between the two world wars and with their final expulsion from nation-states at the end of World War II. First, the tensions which arose between the organised minorities and the successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy are accounted for primarily by the argument that the various minorities located within the successor states had already undergone a comprehensive processes of nationalisation within the Habsburg Empire. Therefore they were able to resist assimilation by the political elites of the new titular nations (Czechs, Poles, Rumanians, Serbs). A second topic is that of the use made of the minorities issue by Adolf Hitler to help achieve his expansionist aims. The minorities issue was central to the international destabilisation of interwar Europe. Finally, the mass expulsion of minorities (above all, Germans) after the end of the war is explained by strategic considerations on the part of the Allied powers as well as involving the nation-state regimes. It is argued, against a commonly held view, that German atrocities during the period of occupation had little to do with the decision to expel most ethnic Germans from their territories of settlement in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The article shows that it is necessary to treat national minorities in the first half of the twentieth century as a single phenomenon which shares similar features across the various nation-states of East-Central Europe.

Architektura a ideologie. Výchovné instituce Adolfa Hitlera v protektorátu Čechy a Morava a v Říšské župě Sudety

This article examines the architecture of the Nazi regime in two occupied cities of Czechoslovakia, Praha/Prag and Jihlava/Iglau (the latter being one of the traditionally German-speaking island in the bohemia country), and focuses specifically on the process by which Hitler youth organisations (Hitlerjugend) in case of ‘education’ and indoctrination of youth were or were not successfully established in these cities. As comparison, he takes the political-administrative centres of the Sudeten Reichsgau, Ústí/Aussig, Opava/Troppau, Karlovy Vary/Karlsbad and Liberec/Reichenberg. Drawing on Czech and German archive materials, the extensive body of modern analytical literature, and propagandist literature from the period studied, the author examines the extent to which architecture served as a projection screen for Fascist propaganda in the Occupied Eastern territories. He describes the role played by the Reichsstelle für Raumordnung and shows how the Reich’s propagandist objectives came to be reflected in a high specific typology and stylistic lexicon/configuration for the architecture of Hitler youth hostels and homes He examines the process by which these organisations were powerful implanted into the space of occupied Czechoslovakia (and Sudeten) too, a topic that has not yet been addressed in (art) history too. The building projects developed for the Protectorate (published here for the first time) and managed by the Reich’s Hitler Youth Leadership in Berlin (Kulturamt, Reichsjugendführung, RJF, Abteilung HJ) reveal the ties that existed between the construction authorities in the Reich and the Protectorate, including the Planning Committee for the City of Prague. The author asks how many German and Czech architects participated for their own profit in the Nazi system, and for future research raises the hitherto taboo question of guilt and collaboration with the Nazis and the perception of this phenomenon in art history, i.e. the measure of active cooperation of not just German but also Czech architects who contributed to the planning and implementation of projects and thereby unequivocally had a hand in consolidating the totalitarian regime and de facto in the forced „Germanification” of their own people under occupation.