Friday, March 14, 2014
Forum (Omni Shoreham)
This paper examines changing interpretations of the post WWII expulsion of Sudeten Germans in Czech dissident and exile circles from 1970 through 1989. Following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, Czech intellectuals at home and abroad working within a series of loosely connected cross-border networks debated new ideas of Czech national identity and heritage. What emerged within these discussions were various incarnations of a “Middle European” identity that shared a decidedly Western orientation and were debated and promoted in Czechoslovakia's “Underground University” seminars and internationally circulated samizdat essays. This Western-oriented identity encouraged a critical moral interpretation of the expulsions and a spiritual reconciliation with Germany in Czech dissident discourse, which indeed emerged as a major theme in samizdat, underground seminars and in Czech émigré summits abroad in the 1980s and guided the policies and ideologies of former dissidents as they took the political reins after 1989. Using archival documents detailing underground university seminars, samizdat production and West Germany-based German-Czech cooperation, this paper argues that the changing expulsion discourse among Czech intellectuals indicates a transnationalization of expulsion memory and Czech national identity formed through distinct networks of cross-border cooperation.
