Emigranten und Kolonisten“ und „Drang nach Osten“: B ilder von den Deutschen und die Ideologie der Vertreibung im tschechischen Diskurs 1918-1944

A statement by Tomáš G. Masaryk, the President of the newly founded Czechoslovak Republic, contending that the Germans had come to the country as “emigrants and colonists” (1918), and the Germans’ alleged “thrust toward the East” implied in a later utterance by President Edvard Beneš (1943) mark the two main points of reference within a greater discourse, which aims at overcoming nationality conflicts with minorities. The starting point of this article is the intellectual and political situation in Czechoslovakia starting from the end of the First World War, when the concept of resettlement was added to the option of assimilation and protection of the minorities. The notion of resettlement was based on the idea of “demixing” in order to form homogeneous states out of nationally mixed communities as represented by Georges Montandon and others. The present article advocates the thesis that a grading and classification of national units within the state system had to take place prior to a “demixing.” Whether the latter would develop into integration or segregation (expulsion being the extreme) was impossible to predict in advance. Thus, any historical determinism must be avoided, although a diachronic point of view enriches the analysis. On the example of the Czech discourse of 1918-1944 it shall become clear that the handling of national conflicts about minorities in East-Central Europe can be paradoxical and multi-threaded—here with reference to the German population.