The Fall and Rise of a Nation: Czechoslovakia 1938-1941 by Edvard s> Beneš Milan Hauner (review)

Abstract

146 SEER, 83, I, 2005 aspects of his topic, he often resorts to cataloguing themes addressed in journals or public lectures. This is perhaps inevitable, as his topic is the popularization of science rather than its content perse. Still, the descriptive tone left this reader at least vaguely dissatisfiedand wanting more analysisof the content of popular science, the narrativesconstructed,and their evolving place in both the popular imagination and propaganda campaigns. Indeed, the argumentthat popular science became increasinglyoriented towardsthe technical needs of industrialproductivity is wholly credible but also incomplete . Did not the heroicepics of Stalinistpropaganda,asin polar exploration, for example, also build on earlier trends and tastes?More attention to the thirdcomponent in Andrews'ssubtitle popularimagination would have enriched this study. Still, this well-researched monograph deserves a wide readershipamong studentsof earlySoviet history. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies SUSAN MORRISSEY University College London Edvard Benes. 7he FallandRiseofa Nation.Czechoslovakia I938-I94I. Edited and translatedby Milan Hauner. East European Monographs, Boulder, CO, 2004. xxvii + I90 pp. Notes. Index. $40.00. EDVARD BENES had a crucial at times a decisive -influence in the evolution of international affairsin Eastern Europe throughout most of the period 1914-48. Establishedat the crux of Czechoslovakpolitics as the righthand man of Tomas Masarykin the course of WorldWar I, he was critically instrumental in the newly independent state as well as in European affairs more generallyfromthe originsof CzechoslovakiathroughitstrialsatMunich and the new World War and its demise at the hands of Stalinism in 1948. Milan Hauner identifies Benes's controversial role in four fateful issues: Munich, the maintenance of an allegedlyartificialunion between Czechs and Slovaks,the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in 1945, and the capitulation in the face of the Communistcoup in February1948 (p. vii). Benes's life has been voluminously but far from fully documented in great part from his own writings and state papers. A substantial collection of Czechoslovak government-in-exile documents naturally accumulated in London during the War. Prior to the fall of the Soviet bloc, an important element of pertinent documentation was sequesteredin the state archives of Prague. The London papers have now been transferred to the Masaryk Institute in Prague. Recently, scholars such as Z. A. B. Zeman, Antonin Klimek (The Life of EduardBenes,Oxford, I997), Igor Lukes (Czechoslovakia between HitlerandStalin. TheDiplomacy of EduardBenesin theI930s, Oxford, I996), and Milan Hauner have exploited the Benes papers to give us authoritativeaccountsof largepartsof his life and work. Hauner, widely published in Czech and Americanjournals on the period, has recently addressed himself especially to producing critical editions of Benes's memoirs, which are remarkablycopious, disparate and incomplete. Of three volumes that Benes planned, he completed and published only the middle one (English translation, Memoirs.FromMunichtoNew WarandNew REVIEWS I47 Victoy,London, 1954). His memoir materials pertinent to Munich were gathered and published by a Czech emigre organization in London in I955 under the titleMnichovske dny(enlargededition, Prague I968). The title under reviewhere, previouslyunpublished,is from the collection of Benes'swartime papersin London. Benes addressed in this volume several particular subjects:the successful struggle to achieve official recognition of his government-in-exile by the Britishand American governments;the equally successfulstruggleto achieve recognition of the pre-Munich bordersof Czechoslovakia(thoughit materialized only afterthe period covered here, i.e. in I942); the brutalconditions of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia;the organization of a Czechoslovakarmyin exile and itsparticipationin thewarin France;and the evacuation of this army, and especially its crucial component of fighter pilots (8oo of them, Benes says!),to the BritishIsles after the fall of France.Munich is not addressed at length here, as Benes says explicitly (p. i53) that it would be premature to discuss it at the early date of the composition of this memoir (I 940-41). Benesaddressed Munichseriously onlyinMnichovske dny, butthe subjectintrudestangentiallyinto thisvolume. Especially curious here is the publication of a hitherto obscure speech of Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten German Party,in I94 I. Henlein was widely believed in Prague to be the willing servant of Hitler's imperialist intentions. We now have the German diplomatic documents in which Hitler and Ribbentrop instructedhim never to breakoff negotiations and yet never to make acceptable demands. What we have lacked until now is his candid confession...