Moral Political Dissent in German-Czech Relations

Since 1989, the German-Czech relationship has been burdened by the problem of a just assessment of World War II and the following forced transfer of the Sudeten Germans. Why are democrats on both sides, who acknowledge the same values and principles, unable to reach an agreement about crucial events in the past? The political and legal differences imply a moral dissent which is not being discussed systematically. The article tries to investigate the deficits of the moral arguments on both sides. Czech Sociological Review, 1998, Vol. 6 (No. 2: 173-186) 1. Problems with the Recognition Controversy When in 1989/1990 Vaclav Havel publicly expressed a moral apology for the expulsion of Germans from post-war Czechoslovakia, he hardly suspected that the very foundations of detente policy – which had been interpreted by East Europeans as a German step towards reconciliation, based on their acknowledgement of the political status quo resulting from World War II – could ever be questioned. German unification was seen as the sine qua non of peaceful European integration and was consequently welcomed with something approaching euphoria. It was not only because of the East German and Czech (Czechoslovakian) revolutions of November 1989 that Vaclav Havel selected Munich and Berlin as the destinations for his first foreign trips. His apology was intended as a gesture which would contribute to overcoming the burdens of the past and reflected the policy later advocated by the Czech government, i.e. making a clean break with the past, at least on a political and legal level. If the only reactions to Havel’s apology had been the amiable reply of then German Federal President Weizsacker and the prompt signing of a new friendship treaty between the two neighbours, many of the tensions which later arose would have been avoided. But the Sudeten Germans, the audience which Havel was in fact addressing, were – at least as far as their strongest public voice, the Sudetendeutsche Landsmanschaft (SL), was concerned – incapable of a similarly generous gesture. Instead, Havel’s words were interpreted as a Czech “admission of guilt”, which must be followed by practical steps *) Due to lack of space, part of the original text of this article was excluded. This part described and assessed the typology of moral discourses (e.g. the Christian ethic of forgiving, the ‘ius talionis’ ethic, discourse from the point of view of the victim, the sceptical use of morality and war as the end of morality, empathetic discourse on morality), which are found in many studies and articles on German-Czech relations. This text is based on a study entitled Moralischer Diskurs und die Deutsch-tschechischen Beziehungen carried out at the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universitat Bremen (Research Institute for Eastern Europe at the University of Bremen). A German version (Moralisch-politischer Dissens in den deutsch-tschechischen Beziehungen) was published in WeltTrends 19, Sommer 1998, pp. 67-68. **) Direct all correspondence to: Dr. Jan Pauer, Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universitat Bremen, Osteuropa-Gebaude, Klagenfurter Str. 3, D-28359 Bremen, e-mail: pauer@osteuropa.uni-