Brendan Simms, a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, is the author of The Impact of Napoleon and, with Alexander Nicoll, of Bosnia.
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Vol. 21 No. 4 · 18 February 1999
pages 9-11 | 2486 words
One Good Side
Brendan Simms
- The Life of Edvard Benes, 1884-1948: Czechoslovakia in Peace and War by Zbynek Zeman and Antonin Klimek
Oxford, 293 pp, £40.00, July 1997, ISBN 0 01 982058 5
Edvard Benes, as A.J.P. Taylor once remarked, enjoyed the doubtful distinction of having signed away his country twice, once to the Germans, and later to the Russians. His capitulation at Munich in 1938, the betrayal by Britain and France, the tribulations of the Nazi occupation and the final humiliation of the Soviet takeover in 1948 all helped to foster the image of a democratic, peace-loving Czechoslovakia which has endured to the present day. The Western world could not but sympathise with a (relatively) liberal state which, for all its faults, firmly refused to succumb to the tide of authoritarianism sweeping Central and Eastern Europe between the wars; unlike virtually all its neighbours, pre-1938 Czechoslovakia was never guilty of any kind of state-sponsored anti-semitism. The events of 1968, when Soviet tanks crushed Dubcek’s experiment of ‘socialism with a human face’, could only reinforce this impression.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 6 · 18 March 1999
From Hans Koning
There are contradictions in Brendan Simms's piece about Edvard Benes (LRB, 18 February): surely it would have been odd if Benes had not changed his opinion of Germany between 1908 and 1916, or if he had continued armed intervention in the Soviet Union in order not to infuriate Czech conservatives. What I criticise most sharply, though, is his lack of understanding of the role Germany, and particularly Sudeten Germans, played during the war. 'Eight hundred years of German civilisation' did not come to an end 'at a single blow' when the Sudeten were expelled in 1945: they had come to an end in 1938 when Konrad Henlein used them as the catalyst for Hitler to start his war against the Czechs, the Slavs and indeed against Europe. Simms does not know how it felt to live in a German-occupied country. I do, and as someone who at a very early age was involved in the Dutch resistance, I can vouch for the acceptance as a cruel yet unavoidable rule that the resistance was not to be stymied by German retaliations: it would have been unthinkable not to have killed Heydrich for fear of the obvious repercussions.
Hans Koning
Fairfield, Connecticut
From Colin Armstrong
Am I alone in finding faintly nauseating Brendan Simms's reference to the via dolorosa of the Sudeten Germans? The historian Liam Kennedy has written of the MOPE ('Most Oppressed People Ever') syndrome in Irish nationalist polemics. Dr Simms appears to have applied the syndrome to the Sudeten Germans.
Colin Armstrong
Belfast
Vol. 21 No. 7 · 1 April 1999
From Brendan Simms
The burden of Hans Koning and Colin Armstrong's criticisms of my review of Klimek and Zeman's biography of Edvard Benes (Letters, 18 March) is that it did not give sufficient prominence to Nazi atrocities, underplayed the extent to which the Sudeten Germans were responsible for these and exaggerated what I called their 'via dolorosa'. In fact, I had chided the two authors of this excellent book for not making more of Nazi crimes against the Czechs; and I criticised Benes for 'generalising the undeniably high level of Sudeten involvement with the Nazi regime into the "collective guilt" of all Bohemian Germans', whether they had supported Hitler or not. The suffering of the Sudeten Germans, guilty and innocent alike, who were murdered and deported in huge numbers in 1945, is not, I think, in dispute.
Brendan Simms
Peterhouse, Cambridge
