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Ore mountains - region and history: Difference between revisions
Ore mountains - region and history (view source)
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The blanket eviction of the German population of the Ore Mountains and the basin below had a much more devastating impact on economic and social life, culture, and people’s relationships to nature and each other in the purely German-settled areas – which was the case of a large part of the basin area – than in areas where Germans made up a smaller proportion of the pre-war population. Unfortunately, the Germans often “took away” with them their qualifications, sense of order, and attachment to the towns and village, cultural heritage, nature and landscape. The first wave of settlers from the interior of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia included lots of “gold diggers”, who plundered and burgled the abandoned German properties and soon left again. Arrivals from Carpathian Ruthenia, and Czechs and Slovaks returning from Volhynia, Hungary, Romania and other parts of the Balkans could mostly not compare to the evicted Germans with their level of knowledge and management. Under the influence of the war that had recently ended, the gradually arriving skilled settlers, too, often behaved like in a conquered “enemy territory” without the slightest respect for the heritage of another culture. Since their roots were not here, many regarded everything German – the Saxonian and Lusatian architecture and culture – as worthless and hostile. Driven by an urge to supplant the German with the “Czech”, they carelessly destroyed links and values developed over centuries, neglected maintenance and repair, causing the total decay of the housing, factories, farmsteads, transport and technical infrastructures, including a sophisticated aquaculture, public and cultural amenities, cemeteries, churches, and recreational facilities in the landscape. In many towns, they threw out official documents and papers written in German, ranging from medieval manuscripts to building authority archives.<ref name = Riha></ref> | The blanket eviction of the German population of the Ore Mountains and the basin below had a much more devastating impact on economic and social life, culture, and people’s relationships to nature and each other in the purely German-settled areas – which was the case of a large part of the basin area – than in areas where Germans made up a smaller proportion of the pre-war population. Unfortunately, the Germans often “took away” with them their qualifications, sense of order, and attachment to the towns and village, cultural heritage, nature and landscape. The first wave of settlers from the interior of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia included lots of “gold diggers”, who plundered and burgled the abandoned German properties and soon left again. Arrivals from Carpathian Ruthenia, and Czechs and Slovaks returning from Volhynia, Hungary, Romania and other parts of the Balkans could mostly not compare to the evicted Germans with their level of knowledge and management. Under the influence of the war that had recently ended, the gradually arriving skilled settlers, too, often behaved like in a conquered “enemy territory” without the slightest respect for the heritage of another culture. Since their roots were not here, many regarded everything German – the Saxonian and Lusatian architecture and culture – as worthless and hostile. Driven by an urge to supplant the German with the “Czech”, they carelessly destroyed links and values developed over centuries, neglected maintenance and repair, causing the total decay of the housing, factories, farmsteads, transport and technical infrastructures, including a sophisticated aquaculture, public and cultural amenities, cemeteries, churches, and recreational facilities in the landscape. In many towns, they threw out official documents and papers written in German, ranging from medieval manuscripts to building authority archives.<ref name = Riha></ref> | ||
=== New regional identity for north Bohemia === | |||
It is possible to understand the devastation of north Bohemia as a direct causal link to expulsion of the German population, Glassheim argues for a more complex understanding, seeking to understand the development of a new regional identity: “Rejecting romantic/pastoral German conceptions of Heimat, postwar Czechs sought to create materialist regional identities in north Bohemia that emphasized labor, productivity, and industrial modernity.” Glassheim argues that “ethnic cleansing, Communist social engineering, and late-industrial modernity were related and intertwined phenomena in postwar Czechoslovakia. All three derived from a complex that David Harvey has called “universal or high modernism,” an economic, social, and cultural order that flourished in the wake of the Second World War. With roots in the Enlightenment and more proximately in the 1920s and 1930s, high modernism “has been identified with the belief in linear progress, absolute truths, the rational planning of ideal social orders, and the standardization of knowledge and production” (Glassheim 67). | |||
=== “Utopian potential” of north Bohemia === | |||
The eviction of the German population was followed by the arrival (both forced and voluntary) of various populations: thirty-nine thousand of the settlers were Czech speakers from the now-Ukrainian region of Volynia. In 1946, forty-two thousand Magyars from Slovakia were forced to settle in the Czech borderlands, nearly two-thirds of whom returned to Slovakia by 1950. More than one hundred thousand settlers were ethnic Slovaks, sixteen thousand of which were Roma (Gypsies). Among Czechs, there were significant differences among “old settlers” and “new settlers” who arrived after 1945, who differed in religious customs, community celebrations, skills levels and work habits<ref name = Glassheim></ref>, p. 72. This lack of solidarity made regional identity building particularly challenging in the postwar years. With the old order of the German capitalist bourgeoisie gone, the lack of a common identity provided an ideal “clean slate” from which to work from. The region was considered by Communist settlement planners as a frontier laboratory for the emerging socialist order. The “Communist head of the Settlement Committee in the National Assembly saw this utopian potential as vital to the development of Czech socialism: “The borderlands . . . [must] become a model territory for the other regions of the state, a guide to the path by which the working people will find a better tomorrow””<ref name = Glassheim>Glassheim, E. 2006, Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia’s Borderlands, 1945–1989* in The Journal of Modern History 78, pp. 65–92</ref>, p. 78. | |||
=== Post War Communist support === | |||
The Communist party had strong support in north Bohemia, partly due to their role as redistributors of German property. In free elections in May 1946, the Communist Party won between 50 and 60 percent of the vote in north Bohemia, as compared to 40 percent in the Czech Lands as a whole. Throughout the subsequent years, the region was ‘rewarded’ by the high status given to heavy industry and the Communists’ power to confer and privilege on workers, particularly miners, (in providing access to recreation centres and spas) who were lauded as the heroes of the new age (Glassheim 80). “Rather than a Heimat deficit, then, north Bohemia suffered from a misguided and destructive vision of regional identity…materialism ruled in north Bohemia like nowhere else. The new north Bohemia was an experiment in national, social, industrial, and environmental engineering. It became a worst case scenario—short of mass murder and nuclear annihilation—of what Communism, indeed modernity itself, could produce”<ref name = Glassheim></ref>, p. 91). | |||
Beneš declared in a typical 1945 speech in Tabor, ''“We must de-Germanize our republic . . .names, regions, towns, customs—everything that can possibly be de-Germanized must go."''<ref name = Glassheim></ref>p. 74 | |||
==Communist heavy industry base== | ==Communist heavy industry base== | ||