Deutsche Kulturpolitik im Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren, 1939 bis 1941

The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was one of the Third Reich's more curious creations. Established in Berlin on 16 March 1939, the day after the German occupation of the western half of (post-Munich) Czecho-Slovakia, and formed at the ‘invitation’ of the ‘Czech’ President, Emil Hácha, the Protectorate eventually expired on 9 May 1945, twenty-four hours after the war in Europe had ended. On one level, the Protectorate was a colonial possession, presided over by an appointed Reichsprotektor who was directly responsible to Adolf Hitler; on another, its Czech inhabitants at first retained their own (theoretically) autonomous government, while its ethnic German population—the Sudeten Germans—were granted full citizenship of the Reich. This peculiar form of administration differed from those imposed elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe; it was not wholly German, but nor was it Czech. Rather, it was a hybrid arrangement that reflected the long-running national tensions in the region. In addition, Czechoslovakia's significant industrial infrastructure, combined with its crucial geo-strategic location and a largely acquiescent (and thoroughly intimidated) population, meant that Berlin viewed the region as a vital asset in its war effort. Consequently, the repression its inhabitants experienced was far less intense than in Poland. To date, much of the literature on the Protectorate has focused on its political dimensions, economy, administration and resistance to it (or the lack thereof), and key personalities, not least Reichsprotektor Konstantine von Neurath and his more famous, ill-fated successor, Reinhard Heydrich. Intriguingly, the earliest of these studies, such as Shiela Grant-Duff's A German Protectorate: the Czechs under Nazi Rule, which was sympathetically reviewed by A.J.P. Taylor in Time and Tide (Vol. 23, No.18, 2 May 1942, p. 372), appeared in Britain during the war. Since then Detlef Brandes, Václav Král, Vojtech Mastny and Alice Teichová have undertaken subsequent research, some of it coloured by the polarised politics of the Cold War. To this relatively slender canon we can now add a useful contribution by Tim Fauth, of the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials held in Prague and Berlin, Fauth explores the cultural policies (Kulturpolitik) employed by the German administration in the Protectorate. In doing so, he covers similar ground to Jiří Doležal's earlier work, Česká kultura za protektarátu [Czech culture in the Protectorate] (1996), although he approaches the subject squarely from the German perspective. Beginning with the creation of ‘Department IV’, a body designed to co-ordinate and direct cultural life in the Protectorate, Fauth details its proposed control of the theatre, the press, radio and cinema. The ultimate objective was the indoctrination of the Protectorate's Czech population in order to create a suitably collaborative atmosphere. In theory, these developments should have enabled the administration to dominate what Fauth calls the ‘cultural economy’ through the imposition of censorship and propaganda. In practice, inter-agency disputes, personality clashes, and a chronic lack of personnel meant that these policies were never coherently enforced. Despite these efforts and sporadic outbreaks of violence, in November 1939 and again after Heydrich's assassination in May 1942, Czech culture was never entirely supplanted, and cultural resistance persisted. Although the administration of the Protectorate failed to achieve Heath Robinson-like levels of absurdity, Fauth's research reveals that it fell far short of the Teutonic efficiency that might have been expected. In the event, once Germany lost the war and Czechoslovakia recovered its independence, it was Sudeten German culture that was effectively expunged from both Bohemia and Moravia. Marred only by its short length—at ninety-five pages, this is more of an introduction to the subject than a definitive account—and by the lack of an index, this book is a welcome addition to our understanding of minutiae of Nazi policies in the Protectorate.