Unsettled Landscapes: Czech and German Conceptions of Social and Ecological Decline in the Postwar Czechoslovak Borderlands

Abstract

After the Second World War, Czechoslovakia expelled around three million Germans from the border region known as the Sudetenland. Close to two million Czechs and Slovaks moved from the country's interior to settle the region. Though cut off from their former homes by international borders soon hardened by the Cold War, expelled Germans vigorously engaged their homelands. They wrote odes to their lost Heimats, travelogues of trips through ‘Sudeten’ landscapes, critical essays on Czech management of the borderlands, and demands for restitution or return. For Czechoslovak settlers and communist officials, the specters of Germans past and present were persistent reminders of the shortcomings of resettlement and the need to consolidate conditions in the borderlands. This article traces an ongoing conversation from the 1940s to the 1980s among communist officials, Sudeten German expellees, communist reformers, and dissidents about the Czechoslovak borderlands. By the 1980s, most parties to the conversation had come to understand the borderlands in ecological terms, stressing the inter-relationship of mental, social, and physical geographies. Though communist officials and critics largely shared a diagnosis of borderland decline, there was a wide range of prescriptions for how to restore the region to ecological and social health.