Peter Demetz: “Prague in Danger”

IN THE MAIL:  Peter Demetz, “Prague in Danger:  The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45:  Memories and History, Terror and Resistance, Theater and Jazz, Film and Poetry, Politics and War” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), being published on April 15, 2008.

Peter Demetz is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Germanic Language and Literature at Yale University.  He was born in Prague in 1922 and immigrated to the United States in 1948, where he received a master’s degree at Columbia and a Ph.D. from Yale. 

During 1939-45, Demetz was a boy living in Prague as a “first degree half-Jew,” according to the Nazis’ categories, and this is a chronicle of that time.  It begins with this ominous echo reaching forward to our time:

Czechoslovakia had signed treaties with France in 1926 and with the Soviet Union in 1935 precisely to protect itself against German aggression — the Soviet Union promised to intervene, but only if France acted first — but it remained exposed and vulnerable. . . .

When, only two months after the Nazis’ annexation of Austria, German troops readied to march across the border in May 1938, the Czechoslovaks partly mobilized, and the situation became increasingly ominous.  The ambassadors of France and Great Britain delivered a note to President Edvard Benes on September 19 demanding that the republic hand over its Sudeten territories to Germany in exchange for a guarantee of its new borders . . .

On September 23, in a desperate gesture, Czechoslovakia once more mobilized its army and air force.  Hitler’s ally Benito Mussolini then proposed a four-power meeting to resolve the Czechoslovak crisis.

The famous conference convened on September 29-30 in Munich . . . .  The Sudetenland was to be united with the Reich as of October 1; this and further concessions deprived the Czechoslovak Republic of a major part of its historical territory, its principal fortifications against Germany, and much of its iron, steel, and textile factories. . . . The Munich Conference not only deprived Czechoslovakia of defensible borders . . .

The echoes of Czechoslovakia still reverberate to the present time.