Edvard Beneš, Czechoslovakia and Thomas Mann’s Vision of Democracy
On March 15, 1939, Prague was occupied by German troops. The same day, Thomas Mann met former Czechoslovakian President Edvard Beneš in Chicago. Historian Jan Vondráček tells the story of the friendship between Thomas Mann and Edvard Beneš. The sociologist and politician Beneš not only played an important role in granting Mann Czechoslovakian citizenship, but also had an often overlooked impact on Mann’s understanding of democracy.
In recent years, Thomas Mann has been increasingly perceived as an important champion of democracy. Texts such as The Coming Victory of Democracy and his fight for democracy and against Nazism in American exile have been the subject of numerous studies. Yet it is often overlooked that Thomas Mann, who emigrated to the United States with a Czechoslovak passport, was also significantly influenced by this democratic state and its second president, Edvard Beneš.
On March 15, 1939, Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, was occupied by German troops. This was the last act in the gradual destruction of Czechoslovakia, which had been founded only 20 years earlier and from 1933 on, this democratic state served as a refuge for thousands of victims of political and racial persecution from Nazi Germany, including numerous intellectuals.
On that March 15, 1939, thousands of miles away from Prague, two important personalities met at Hotel Windermere in Chicago. Both of them had a strong relationship with Czechoslovakia: Thomas Mann and the former president of Czechoslovakia Edvard Beneš. It would be no exaggeration to say that, without the help of Edvard Beneš, Mann would never have been able to emigrate to the USA.
Before 1939 for German intellectual émigrés, Prague offered what Paris and Amsterdam did not: a German-speaking readership and an environment in which they could exchange ideas in German. After all, Czechoslovakia was also home to a strong German minority of about three million people. The majority lived in the area bordering the German Reich, but thousands of German-speaking citizens also lived in Prague and Brno. Of these, many classified themselves under the laws of Czechoslovakia as of Jewish nationality. Young émigrés had the opportunity to continue their studies in German at the German university in Prague. Unlike in Switzerland, the emigrants in Czechoslovakia could also continue their political activities. For this reason, hundreds of communists fled into Czechoslovakia. The Social Democratic Party of Germany also moved its headquarters to Prague after the Nazis took power; the important party newspaper Neuer Vorwärts was published in Prague until 1938, as were other important journals and newspapers like Neue Deutsche Blätter.
After the Austrian Civil War in February 1934 and the establishment of the “Austrofascist” regime, many Austrians also came to Czechoslovakia, making Czechoslovakia the most important country for German-speaking emigrants in Europe.
The Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 drastically affected life in Czechoslovakia as well, leading to severe tensions between the German, Czech and Jewish ethnic populations. The Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia increasingly sympathized with the Nazi regime, and this affected the lives of the between 10,000 and 20,000 German émigrés, who often lived in the border regions because life in Prague was too expensive. As early as the late nineteenth century, this region of Bohemia was a center of völkisch, anti-Slavic, anti-Semitic movements, and it was here that the precursors to the National Socialist movement had their roots.
The political orientation of the Sudeten Germans represented one of the most serious problems of the young state. In Liberec/Reichenberg, the unofficial capital of the Sudeten German minority, the Sudeten German Henlein Party had ruled since the mid-1930s, preventing émigrés from obtaining domicile there, which was a precondition for applying for a Czechoslovak passport. Heinrich Mann tried to obtain a domicile and passport and failed due to the political mood in the city council.
Since the process was widely reported in the press, the Jewish Czech entrepreneur and admirer of Thomas Mann Rudolf Fleischmann became aware of the strive of Heinrich Mann and it was thanks to him that the entire Mann family received the right of domicile in the small town of Proseč and subsequently, through the action of President Edvard Beneš, Czechoslovakian citizenship in 1936.
At that time, Thomas Mann was living in Switzerland, where he had failed to receive citizenship, and the Nazi regime had revoked his German citizenship, rendering him stateless. Without the new passport from Czechoslovakia, Thomas Mann would not have been able to leave Switzerland, and he and his family would not have been able to emigrate to the United States. He expressed his gratitude publicly in his lectures The Coming Victory of Democracy in 1938:
Even more do I owe thanks to the Republic of Czechoslovakia, which most generously made a gift of its citizenship to me who was robbed of my German nationality. Especially at this moment, when the heavens of central Europe are darkening so threateningly, it is a heartfelt necessity to give expression to my faithful loyalty to this courageous and lovable democratic republic.
Mann came to Prague and Czechoslovakia several times to vocally support the democratic Czechoslovak state and government against the German nationalist Sudeten German movement. For Edvard Beneš and his government, this support was worth its weight in gold, as he desperately needed popular allies who also represented an international authority to stay in control of the situation: On the one hand, the Sudeten German minority was pushing for autonomy from Prague and annexation by Nazi Germany; on the other hand, conservative Czech forces accused Beneš of bringing German communists into the country, and Czech national forces in turn accused him of courting German émigrés instead of taking care of Czech problems. Considering these extreme political tensions, the question arises as to how this democratic system could withstand such pressure.
As is well known, at that time Thomas Mann was deeply concerned with the question of the functioning of democracy, and it is hardly surprising that the debate about democracy in Czechoslovakia also left its mark on him. What is new however, is that Thomas Mann’s concept of democracy was influenced by Edvard Beneš’ work, as I have recently discovered in archival materials.
Edvard Beneš is typically perceived more as politician than as thinker, political theorist and originator of the concept of socializing democracy. Edvard Beneš had been the co-founder of the state of Czechoslovakia in 1918, then foreign minister and head of government, and finally president of Czechoslovakia from 1935. But Beneš also studied in Prague, Paris, and Dijon and received his doctorate in law in 1908 with a thesis on Austria and the Czech Question. In 1912 he received his Habilitation in Prague in sociology under Masaryk, later president of Czechoslovakia. During the First World War, he lectured at the Sorbonne in Paris alongside his political activities. Beneš then became a professor of sociology and throughout the 1930s wrote extensively on democracy, including publications in German.
On December 3, 1937, he received a typewritten letter from Thomas Mann:
“It may not be seemly to write too often to one’s head of state, but it becomes me to express my great appreciation for your last letter and the extremely valuable gift that accompanied it, and to express this appreciation most emphatically. I have been reading a great deal of late in the three silver volumes. They are a true fount of political wisdom and powerful moderation, and will be a refreshment to everyone who desires to be strengthened in the conviction of the human primacy of democracy as a form of state and society above all other solutions of the social problem.”
From the first lines we can conclude that Mann and Beneš often exchanged ideas. The gift mentioned in the letter refers to the work Thought and Action (Gedanke und Tat), a three-volume work published in 1937 by Beneš, which included numerous collected speeches and publications by Beneš (Politics as science and art, The construction and life of the state, The cooperation of the nations/ Die Politik als Wissenschaft und Kunst, Vom Bau und Leben des Staates, Die Zusammenarbeit der Nationen). Mann continues:
I find the German title of your writings, “Gedanke und Tat”, extraordinarily well chosen, because this combination of words is indeed the formula for all spiritual democracy. It is the shortcoming of undemocratic and democratically untrained nations that in them thinking takes place, as it were, in a vacuum, without any relation to reality, without responsibility to reality and without sense for the consequences of reality which result from thoughts. Goethe once said: “One who acts is always without conscience; only the observer has a conscience.” This is true, and precisely because it is true, the observer must also have a conscience for the one who acts, whereby the happiest case is, of course, when the one who thinks and the one who acts are one and the same person, as was the case with your great predecessor, esteemed Herr Präsident, and is the case with yourself.
The remark by Mann linking the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, with Edvard Beneš illustrates the importance he attributes to both personalities for the functioning of the democratic state. Indeed, many features of the state, such as the militant suppression of anti-Semitism, which was also a problem in Czechoslovakia, especially in the early 1920s, were due to Masaryk’s energetic political work.
Both figures played a central role in the establishment of Czechoslovakia. The importance of Beneš’s writings for Thomas Mann can be seen from the further text of the letter.
“Early next year I will embark on a lecture tour through the United States, during which I am to speak on the “Coming Victory of Democracy.” I may assure you that in the preparation of this address the study of your writings has been a great stimulus and moral help to me.”
From February to May 1938, Thomas Mann was on his reading tour, with his lectures and speeches broadcast by radio throughout America. They were published in September 1938. Reading the book, one notices that the quotation of Goethe quote invoked a half year earlier in the letter to Beneš now reappears in a broader context. We also find arguments that Mann recorded in his letter to Beneš in the context of the title Thought and action:
We call the recently deceased founder and first President of the Czechoslovak Republic a great democrat. Why? Because he embodied a new and modern relationship between mind and life, because he represented the organic association of the philosopher and the statesman — a philosopher as statesman, and as a statesman a philosopher. Plato’s insistence that philosophers should rule the state would create a dangerous Utopia if it merely implied that the ruler should be a philosopher. The philosopher must also be a ruler — for that, primarily, creates the relationship of mind and life which we call democratic.
Although it is hard to summarize the argumentation of Edvard Beneš’ discussion of democracy in a few sentences, it can be said that the integration and consideration of social and economic issues played a crucial role for him. The idea of social democracy also forms the core of Thomas Mann’s political thinking. What is certain is that for both of them the Aristotelian principles of democracy, humanism and the social question represent central points of their argumentation. The crisis of democracy, including National Socialism in Germany and the danger of fascism in general, are of course central themes, but how democracy should defend itself against these phenomena is met with philosophical and cultural arguments.
The now Oxford political scientist Giovanni Capoccia concludes that while cultural and social factors are crucial for the long-term stability of a democracy, they play little role in resolving short-term or spontaneous political crises. In this context, the structure of the political system, the constitution and the state institutions and their actors — first and foremost the government and the head of state — become much more important. In states that have a strong democratic tradition and self-image, with a political system built on a broad social foundation and with a basic democratic consensus, institutional responses to short-term political strategies and methods-such as fascism-will only be effective if these extremists are weak. At the same time, however, this renders state responses useless. By contrast, if the extremists are strong, none of these strategies can achieve their intended goal. If we look instead at the short term, we are forced to ask what conditions must be created for political and institutional responses against anti-democratic and anti-state extremists to be successful.
It is precisely these conditions and institutional and political responses to the multifaceted threat of fascism to the European states that analyzed an old acquaintance of Thomas Mann from his time in Munich, the German-Jewish political scientist and jurist Karl Loewenstein. Loewenstein was one of the few who had been able to correctly interpret the signs of the times as early as 1933 and emigrated to the United States, where he soon taught political science and law, first at Yale and then at Amherst College. Thomas Mann met Loewenstein several times in the USA. In his articles written in the 1930s, Loewenstein analyzed the ability of European democracies to protect themselves from the danger of extremist parties, but above all fascism as a “political method,” by means of special legislation and constitutional interventions. In doing so, he addresses all European states whose democratic systems he examines in a comparative perspective under these aspects. In his eyes, no European state had such a model character as Czechoslovakia: “In Czechoslovakia, the postulate of democracy at war is fulfilled to the letter.”
Loewenstein modeled his concept of Militant Democracy on the example of Czechoslovakia, which was to become groundbreaking for all Western democracies after 1945.
The state structure of Czechoslovakia worked until the betrayal of Munich in September 1938 by the Western powers that Thomas Mann addressed in his essay This Peace. Munich was thus not only a foreign policy disaster for Czechoslovakia and Europe, but above all an international rejection of democracy.
How could Beneš defend democracy against his domestic opponents, when even the states that stood at the cradle of this political system, England and France, were sacrificing it? He resigned and all anti-democratic forces took advantage of the moment and democracy crumbled only two months after the Munich Agreement. In the days after Munich Beneš received a telegram from Thomas Mann asking him to join him in the United States:
“In this tragic moment I and my house would like to offer you our heartfelt homage to the venerable victim of foreign weakness and disloyalty we have suffered with you in these horrible weeks and admired you and your people more and more, come to this country where high-mindedness is still known and where you will be celebrated and honored.”
Edvard Beneš followed Thomas Mann to the United States, where from February to July 1939 he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Here he lectured on democracy. His lecture was published later that year under the title “Democracy Today and Tomorrow.”
Meanwhile on December 15, 1938, an authoritarian, anti-Semitic regime was installed in Prague by Beneš’ political enemies. Although the destruction of democracy in Czechoslovakia received some international notice, it was soon overshadowed by the invasion of German troops three months later on March 15, 1939.
While Thomas Mann fought in literature against Nazi Germany after the outbreak of World War II, Beneš did so politically. He moved to Great Britain and became president of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. On the orders of Beneš, Reinhard Heydrich was killed in Prague by Czechoslovak special forces, which, after brutal retribution and the destruction of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky by the Germans, led to the annulment of the Munich Agreement in 1942 by Great Britain.
The German emigrants in Hollywood also reacted: Already in the winter of 1943, the film Hitler’s Madman by Douglas Sirk was shot, which dealt with the Heydrich assassination, the same year Hangmen Also Die! by none other than Fritz Lang was produced, the story was co-written by Bertolt Brecht, the Music composed by Hanns Eisler.
The international recognition was bought by the blood of about 2000 people murdered by the terror of the German occupiers in the aftermath of the Heydrich assassination. The Sudeten Germans paid a catastrophic price for their alliance with Nazi Germany: between 1945 and 1948 they were almost completely expelled from Czechoslovakia.
Although it was undoubtedly to Edvard Beneš’ credit that Czechoslovakia re-emerged as a democratic state after 1945, his naïve policy led to growing Stalinist influence of the Soviet Union. After not even three years of democracy, which included many of the features of the socializing democracy discussed in Beneš’ writings, the Communist coup of February 1948 put an end to these democratic ideas.
Beneš died a short time later, and with him democracy in Czechoslovakia.
Due to his central role in the acceptance of the Munich Agreement in 1938 and the decision not to fight against Hitler, the assassination of Heydrich in 1942, the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in 1945, and his role in the Communist takeover in 1948, Edvard Beneš is perceived very differently and controversially today in the Czech Republic and in Germany. His role in the above mentioned events led to his writings and influence on Thomas Mann and others being forgotten. As the correspondence between Thomas Mann and Beneš that I have discovered shows, it is well worthwhile to study Beneš’ sociological and political writings, because they can contribute a great deal to the debate about democracy that was being conducted in the United States at the end of the 1930s.
Jan Vondráček is a postdoctoral fellow at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences and teaches history at Charles University in Prague. His award-winning dissertation on the everyday life in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was recently published in German and Czech. He is currently working on his second book on the transatlantic history of Czechoslovak democracy.
