Unsettled Landscapes: Czech and German Conceptions of Social and Ecological Decline in the Postwar Czechoslovak Borderlands

Drinking from a mountain stream in the isolated Czechoslovak borderlands, Ditie ‘could taste the dead buried long ago in the graveyard [above].’ Bohumil Hrabal's antihero in I Served the King of England was sent to the recently cleansed borderlands to start anew, to escape his own sense of inferiority and the taint of collaboration with the departed Nazis. Not only the water, but also

mirrors held the imprints of the Germans who had looked into them, who had departed years ago … As with the departed in the drinking water, I rubbed shoulders with people who were invisible … and I kept bumping into young girls in dirndls, into German furniture, into the ghosts of German families. ¹

But these were not ordinary ghosts. Typical ghosts are distant memories, projections within the present of an unsettled past. ² Most of the departed Germans were still alive, however, settled just across the border in West and East Germany. Expelled in the aftermath of the Second World War, around three million Czechoslovak Germans had joined millions of other expelled Germans from the east in one of the largest waves of forced migration in history. Czechoslovakia's Germans grudgingly made new homes in a Germany scarred by war and pacified by occupation. At the same time, close to two million Czechs and Slovaks moved from the country's interior to settle the former ‘Sudetenland,’ the extensive border regions where the Germans had lived. ³

Though cut off from their former homes by international borders soon hardened by the Cold War, expelled Germans vigorously engaged their homelands. From the late 1940s until well after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Sudeten Germans gazed intently across the border at and into their lost Heimats (homelands). ⁴ This gaze was both literal, via viewing towers and Heimat tourism, and rhetorical, in Heimat journals, newspaper articles, photo-essays, poetry, and Cold War propaganda. ⁵ They wrote odes to their lost Heimats, travelogues of trips through ‘Sudeten’ landscapes, critical essays on Czech management of the borderlands, and demands for restitution or return.

Czechs knew they were being watched. Official communist publications polemicized against revanchist expellee politicians. The Interior Ministry cleared abandoned structures in border zones, to tidy up the view from across the border. And local residents of the borderlands grappled with Sudeten German ghosts and, later, tourists. For Czechoslovak settlers and communist officials, the specters of Germans past and present were persistent reminders of both the shortcomings of resettlement and the need to consolidate conditions in the borderlands.

Even after incorporation into the Soviet camp in 1948, the Czechoslovak borderlands, as both imagined and material spaces, remained an international construct. Even during the harshest years of Czech Stalinism in the 1950s, there was an implicit debate between communist officials and Sudeten German expellees over the past, present, and future of the borderlands. In the 1960s and 1970s, this informal conversation expanded to include a wider range of voices, including Czech reformers, exiles, and dissidents. By the 1980s, most parties to the conversation had come to understand the borderlands in ecological terms, stressing the inter-relationship of mental, social, and physical geographies. Though communist officials and critics largely shared a diagnosis of borderland decline, there was a wide range of prescriptions for how to restore the region to ecological and social health.

In the immediate aftermath of the expulsions, Sudeten German public memory tended to focus on the experience of expulsion more than on the landscapes of lost homelands. This reflected not only the jarring, often violence-tinged personal trauma of the expulsions, but also a broader postwar German tendency to frame the wartime experience as one of victimhood. ⁶ Sacrifice at the front (or in prisoner-of-war camps), the fire-bombing of cities, and the expulsions blended into a narrative of German suffering that obscured memory of the suffering Germans inflicted on others during the war. ⁷ Robert Moeller has argued persuasively that expellee stories became an important part of German victimhood narratives in the 1950s, which were themselves part of a conservative, anti-communist consensus under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Expulsion and the loss of Heimat in the East became emblematic of collective German suffering. The very experience of expulsion and exile helped to integrate expellees into a postwar German community of fate predicated on loss. ⁸

In the late 1940s, expellees broadened this public memory of loss to include the lost landscapes of their homelands. They founded Heimat journals and clubs, concentrically organized into local, Sudeten, and broader expellee organizations. Of these, the umbrella Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft became the most prominent, exerting significant influence on West German politics up to the 1960s. ⁹ Each layer of Sudeten German associational life had its own representations and political uses of lost Heimat. At the broadest level, the Landsmannschaft lobbied both for compensation for lost property and the right of return to former Sudeten German homes in Czechoslovakia. Regional Heimat clubs and journals focused on the memory of particular local customs and landscapes, as well as the Czech resettlement and transformation of those landscapes. ¹⁰ Heimat journals fed a narrative of German stewardship contrasted with Czech mismanagement of the borderlands, a narrative that would gain wide circulation and influence in West Germany and, by the mid-1960s, in Czechoslovakia too.

In expellee regional Heimat journals of the late 1940s through the 1950s, there were frequent invocations of natural beauty and beloved natural landscapes of lost homelands. Correspondents remembered the Elbe valley, for example, as a ‘paradise’ and ‘Garden of Eden,’ nourished by the hard work of German hands. ¹¹ Poems and essays fondly remembered particular rock outcrops, castle ruins, and townscapes. German ‘diligence’ since the thirteenth century had turned the abundant resources of the Bohemian borderlands into agricultural and then also industrial wealth. ¹² The idea, familiar from readings of earlier Heimat literature, was that local German communities had developed organically in concert with the natural landscape, over a long history. ¹³

In contrast, according to a typical formulation from 1948, ‘the regions left behind by the Germans [now] offer a miserable sight … Economic catastrophe shakes the land.’ ¹⁴ Heimat journals commonly featured eyewitness reports from lost homelands, either from visitors or from some of the few Germans remaining in Bohemia. Both bitter and melancholy, these observers described a fallow, neglected, and despoiled landscape. Once quaint and well-ordered German villages had been abandoned. Rural areas were depopulated and land uncultivated. And above all, Czech settlers had not established roots in the borderland soil. ‘The new population, insofar as it was not completely nomadic … demonstrates no inner connection whatsoever to our old Heimat soil,’ one visitor wrote. ¹⁵ ‘Yes, our Elbe Valley Heimat was once a little paradise,’ another declared, noting the disappearance of his favorite village pubs. ‘We may have lost (the Heimat),’ he concluded, ‘but our [Czech] counterparts have not won it.’ ¹⁶ In contrast to German rootedness, the narrative went, Czech inhabitants suffered from what I call a Heimat deficit. Lacking a connection to the land and respect for the natural inheritance, Czech settlers and Communist industrial planners were wrecking the landscape. ¹⁷

The dual narrative of Sudeten German rootedness and a Czech Heimat deficit spread widely during the 1950s and early 1960s. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on ‘dead villages’ and ‘total decay’ in 1956. ¹⁸ A correspondent in the Wiesbadener Tagblatt wrote of ‘dilapidated houses, ruined streets, dirt, as far as the eye can see’ in the area around Jachymov. ¹⁹ Rudolf Urban, who ran a press service on former German territories in the East, did much to reinforce the narrative of decline in the borderlands. ²⁰ Affiliated with the Herder Institute in Marburg, Urban's press service began in 1951, summarizing and quoting primarily Czech and Polish articles relating to the Polish and Czechoslovak borderlands. Drawing on this extensive source base, in 1964 Urban published a book on the ‘Sudeten German Territories after 1945.’ Thorough and well documented, the book's conclusions were highly critical. ‘The depopulation of the land and its inadequate resettlement,’ he wrote, had ‘devastated’ the human and natural landscape of the borderlands. ²¹ The Sudeten German Landsmannschaft used similar language in speeches and publications. In a typical propaganda pamphlet (with English, French, and Spanish translations), the Landsmannschaft claimed that ‘the expulsion of the Germans from the land has brought devastation and decay. A desert has sprung up in the heart of Europe.’ ²² The implications were clear: the expulsions had disrupted intricately evolved human and natural ecologies. Czechs were out of place in borderland landscapes.

Czech officials were sensitive to expellee critiques of Czech stewardship of the borderlands. Communist officials sought first to settle the borderlands and create new borderland identities that stressed both Czech historical roots and a modern, socialist productivism, which they contrasted with a romantic, reactionary German past. ²³ After the initial resettlement, though, the government turned its attention and resources to the related problems of under-population, social disarray, and structural decay, the most common subjects of expellee and other international criticism in the 1950s. The Ministry of Interior oversaw two major initiatives in the late 1950s to remedy these problems: the demolition of tens of thousands of abandoned, unsightly structures near the Czech borders with the Germanies, Austria, and Poland; and a supplemental settlement program to encourage a new wave of migration to neglected parts of the borderlands. Neither program was particularly effective at exorcizing German ghosts in these regions. Few Czechs wanted to move to or remain in what most considered cultural and physical wastelands along the mountainous borders.

Already in 1947, the Czechoslovak Interior Ministry monitored expellee lobbying efforts to gain support for a return to their homes in Czechoslovakia, and several articles in the Communist daily Rudé právo reported on Sudeten German irredentism. ²⁴ Responding to claims that Czechs were having difficulties resettling the borderlands, Rudé právo cited 1947 official statistics showing a total of 2.48 million Czechs and Slovaks inhabiting the former German regions. ²⁵ ‘In industry,’ the article continued, ‘we have not only succeeded at replacing the Germans, but we have even increased the number of industrial workers in our borderlands.’ Rejecting the criticisms coming from the ‘anti-democratic international press,’ ²⁶ Communist officials repeatedly asserted in articles, speeches, and exhibitions that Czech settlement of the borderlands was proceeding smoothly and that Czechs had successfully taken over the region's industrial infrastructure.

By the early-1950s, though, the borderlands gave a mixed impression at best. Some regions were seriously depressed, with decaying houses, cultural isolation, and poverty contributing to a rash of social problems. ‘The population has lost all optimism for a better tomorrow,’ west Bohemian officials reported in 1953. Alcoholism, fighting, and theft were widespread in the borderlands, and the ‘moral decline of the population’ was having serious effects on the workplace and general enthusiasm for socialism. ²⁷ In 1951, the Interior Ministry circulated a scathing internal memo on the failures of resettlement in areas bordering on West Germany and Austria. The government acknowledged that vast swathes of the borderlands were under-populated and dilapidated, and they took notice of continuing criticism from abroad. ²⁸ The Interior Ministry took over control of a two-kilometer wide strip and created a border security zone in 1950–1. ²⁹ The government began clearing abandoned structures from the strip in 1952, a process that expanded to other borderland areas and proceeded unevenly over the next eight years. Local and federal officials expressed lingering concern over the lack of progress and the impressions of outside observers. In 1957 and again in 1959, the Communist Party's Politburo pushed for further demolitions, noting that decaying structures were still visible from the borders and were ‘not creating a good image of socialist Czechoslovakia.’ ³⁰

The Local National Committee of Mikulov, near the Austrian border, shared this view, forwarding a blunt appeal to the Interior Ministry in 1957: ‘It certainly is not a desirable calling card for us, if a foreigner arriving in our country first sets eyes on such an extensive collection of ramshackle buildings.’ ³¹ Officials in the Interior Ministry agreed, worrying in 1959 that

Hostile propaganda is taking advantage of this situation. It has been determined that in Austria they are preparing during the World Youth Festival in Vienna excursions to the Czechoslovak border, so that participants of the festival can see with their own eyes how things look in socialist Czechoslovakia. ³²

This was not paranoia: Germans and Austrians were looking over the borders, publishing photos and written accounts of what they saw, or didn't see. ³³

Paired with the demolition and reconstruction efforts, the government undertook a series of campaigns for the ‘supplementary settlement (dosidlování)’ of under-populated parts of the borderlands. Beginning in 1954, the government began a multi-pronged initiative to make sparsely populated border regions more attractive to settlers and existing residents. Responding to a shortage of desirable homes, the government allocated funds for the renovation of existing housing and new construction in industrial areas. The Ministry of Culture sent over 100,000 books to the borderlands, as well as bookmobiles to reach isolated communities. As an article in Práce pointed out, this was only a beginning. It remained difficult to attract qualified teachers and doctors to the borderlands; there were few local cultural organizations, like dance troupes; theatres were in short supply; and many areas had a paltry selection of food and clothing for sale. ³⁴ The Minister of Education, František Kahuda, lamented in particular the low morale of borderland schoolteachers, who had little ‘contact with the land’ and ‘sought to get away as quickly as possible.’ This prevented them from doing their part to instill students with a ‘love for their homeland … [and] the creation of new traditions’ that would build local patriotism and ‘consolidate the situation in the border districts.’ ³⁵

Declaring that the 1954 settlement plan had been 87 per cent fulfilled, the government nonetheless began a second wave of investment in 1958, focusing in particular on rural districts that remained sparsely populated. ³⁶ Initiatives were to include financial incentives for settlers who remained on the land, improved roads and public transportation, and investment in small-scale industrial production in isolated regions that lacked decent jobs. But much of this investment failed to materialize, as officials preferred to funnel resources to regional centers like Ústí, Most, and Liberec. As the Finance Ministry's news organ pointed out:

Contrary to earlier practice, it is more expedient to concentrate settlement in larger communities and provide these with social and cultural organizations. It makes no sense to return to the original dispersed settlements, if that means that it would be impossible to guarantee the population the necessary living and social standard. ³⁷

Typically, the government's response to both external and internal criticism of resettlement was to devote more resources to housing, jobs, and culture. Government mouthpieces like Rudé Pravo and Práce acknowledged the value of a sense of community and regional solidarity. But contrary to Sudeten German arguments that community and social vibrancy could only develop from the bottom up, communist officials tried to do this from the top down. This led to apparently rational decisions to focus resources on larger regional centers, without regard for the intricate economic and social ties between cities and rural hinterlands that had allowed isolated communities to survive, if often marginally, before the expulsion of the Germans. A 1958 article in the Finance Ministry journal Hodpodařské Noviny indicated that at least some officials were aware of the complex natural and social ecologies necessary to the maintenance of isolated borderland communities. An initial lack of settlers and a lack of local understanding of soil conditions led to neglect and a decline of arable land. This led to a decline in cattle-raising, which in turn led to a lack of fertilizer, which was needed to revitalize the soil. The author of this remarkable article called this a ‘vicious circle,’ and could not foresee an obvious, affordable solution. ³⁸ It was not clear how central planning could recreate the intricate ecological and social web of the remoter parts of the borderlands, and the feeble efforts of the 1950s did little to reverse the decline of rural borderland communities.

By the mid-1960s, a wider range of Czechs began publicly questioning what had gone wrong in the resettled borderlands. Pollution had gradually denuded many of the once scenic mountain summits of trees. Through much of the winter, a toxic fog choked major cities and obscured the mountain views. Many of the more remote border communities remained depopulated and isolated, and even many larger cities lacked an engaging cultural and social life. In spite of Communist inducements, many settlers still migrated out of the region when the chance arose. Beyond the limited official acknowledgements of resettlement shortcomings in the 1950s, a new wave of public criticism, of both the expulsions and resettlement, spread in domestic publications during the liberalization of the mid- to late-1960s.

The discussion began with a cluster of articles on the fate of the environment and urban landscapes in north Bohemia. Starting in early 1966, the officially sanctioned north Bohemian cultural journal, Dialog, ran a multi-part series on the difficulties of establishing a sense of home (domov/Heimat) in north Bohemia. Milan Gajda, the chief architect for the city of Most, cited several reasons why residents might not identify strongly with the region. Above all, he suggested, people feel most at home where they grew up. For the settlers who came to north Bohemia after 1945, their ‘homeland remains somewhere else.’ Though he thought it possible for settlers to adapt to a new home, the bad air quality and ‘devastation’ of the landscape around Most had ‘a depressive effect on people’ and inhibited affection for the region. ³⁹ The artist Jaroslav Bejček countered that it was not just external factors, like pollution and strip mining, that made the area so grim. Many less polluted areas in the borderlands, he claimed, were as ‘joyless’ as Most, filled with ‘destroyed’ and ‘looted’ houses, in towns and villages that seemed to be inhabited by ‘barbarians.’ ⁴⁰ František Voráček, writing in Dialog in 1968, claimed that grim physical surroundings were a key factor behind northern Bohemia's high suicide rate (and alcoholism, crime, and divorce as well). Without an attachment to place (domov), he reasoned, the population was more prone to psychological unmooring. ⁴¹

The most outspoken Czech journal of the reform period of the 1960s, Literární noviny, explored similar questions in openly critical articles from 1966 to 1968. Reflecting on the expanding strip mines and power production around Most, Vladimír Karfík castigated the regime for ignoring the social, medical, and cultural costs of pollution. ‘Nor do they count in their budgets the damages to the landscape,’ he added, concluding sarcastically, ‘I wonder how much it really costs to write off an entire district?’ Karfík's broader point was that unhealthy landscapes and unhealthy societies were related. Why, he asked rhetorically, did so few local residents care about the ‘destruction of the landscape, the dying forests, or the disappearing streams?’ ⁴²

Though Karfík did not directly answer this question, several other critics in the late 1960s hinted at a connection between resettlement and a lack of concern for local landscapes. In a 1967 Dialog article, the historian Jan Křen called for a reconsideration of the history of the expulsions and their aftermath. Though Křen considered the expulsions a necessary evil in the wake of ‘a brutal and harsh war,’ he pointed to several undesirable consequences. ‘The departure of several million civilizationally advanced people,’ he wrote, ‘left sizable gaps in (the country's) economy, demographic structure, and cultural sphere, gaps that have been hard to fill and even today leave painful traces.’ ⁴³ The Czech Caritas weekly, Katolické noviny, made the critique explicit. Citing the comments of some local inhabitants, the article noted that residents ‘didn't grow up in the community’ and had little interest in affairs beyond their own immediate material interests. ‘Before the exchange of population (výměna obyvatelstva) … everything was different.’ Now, ‘the majority of the local population lacks interest in much of anything.’ ⁴⁴

And there were other hints of local insecurity about settlers’ ‘living culture’ vis a vis the expelled Germans. A 1967 issue of Dialog focused on the influx of expellee tourists that took advantage of Czech liberalization to visit their former homes in Czechoslovakia. By 1967, upwards of two million Germans had visited, Dialog noted. They tended to be polite and considerate, but often also critical. One local resident recalled that all the visitors he had encountered mentioned ‘something detracting from a good impression,’ including ‘buildings that supposedly need repairs, everything somehow a bit dusty, streets dirty, highways in bad shape, miserable services, public bathrooms in disorder …’ ⁴⁵ These subtle reminders of the borderlands’ physical decline since 1945 seemed to weigh on some of the local population, though it is hard to know how much.

Regional officials were certainly dismayed by the condition of their districts; during the Prague Spring of 1968, they openly blamed the government for neglect and exploitation of the borderlands. In April, the south Bohemian edition of the Communist Party daily, Pravda, reported on a regional conference dedicated to problems in the borderlands. One official ‘described a number of villages in his area as destroyed or deteriorating and said that many others were condemned to the same fate unless effective aid was provided. Otherwise, he said, these areas would become an uninhabited wilderness which would encroach on the interior.’ ⁴⁶ Industrial landscapes of the borderlands were even more troubling, by many accounts. Northern Bohemian officials expressed continuing concern about the effects of environmental decline not only on the ‘material conditions of life’ in the region, but also on the ‘esthetic and ethical’ consciousness of local populations. ⁴⁷

The August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion put an end to the most intense public criticism of borderland decline, but the communist government remained preoccupied with the borderlands during the repressive ‘normalization’ era of the 1970s. The government was continuously concerned about the role poor borderland morale might play in the Cold War, seeing weak borderland communities as both security and propaganda liabilities. Defensive newspaper reports excoriated German visitors for publishing pictures of dilapidated churches and houses and claiming that they were representative of the entire borderlands. ⁴⁸ Adding to the government's concerns, since the late 1960s, Radio Free Europe's Czech language service had been broadcasting reports critical of the expulsions and Czech resettlement of the borderlands. In withering attacks on Sudeten German revanchism, Czech and Slovak newspapers accused Radio Free Europe, German expellees, and Czech emigres of working together ‘as the main instrument of ideological diversion of imperialism against Czechoslovakia’ since the 1968 crisis. ⁴⁹

Though government mouthpieces continued to spout empty slogans decrying Western imperialism, there was a parallel, sometimes public, government effort to analyze and resolve borderland problems. Health officials noted with increasing alarm the prevalence of ‘social pathologies’ and a health crisis in more industrialized and urbanized regions of the borderlands. The Regional Hygienic Center in Most presented research showing that the ‘former Sudeten German cities’ of Liberec, Ústí, Teplice, and Most had unusually high rates of suicide, abortion, divorce, and children born out of wedlock. Drawing on several country-wide studies, the researchers concluded that the most important factor behind the social ‘crisis’ in borderland cities was a high rate of migration, a lack of rootedness in the borderlands that still persisted 25 years after the expulsion of the Germans. ⁵⁰ A meeting of doctors in late 1968 suggested an additional factor in the borderland social crisis. Reflecting on north Bohemia's pollution and open-pit mines, the meeting concluded, ‘The devastation of the landscape also has a psychic effect on the population,’ contributing to high rates of ‘incapacity due to mental and nervous illnesses.’ ⁵¹

In a 1969 interview with Radio Prague, Rudolf Rychtařík, an official with the Planning Ministry, spoke at length about problems in the borderlands and government attempts to fix them. ‘When people talk about the problem of the borderlands,’ he began, ‘they often understand it as a problem whose beginnings date to 1945, the expulsion of citizens of German nationality. It is undeniable that the expulsion of a large proportion of the population, which lived until 45 in the borderlands, sharpened the problem of the borderlands extraordinarily.’ But, he continued, the long-term trend before the expulsions was already towards urbanization and depopulation of remote rural and mountainous regions. The reversal of this trend required a multifaceted response that looked at the ‘entire complex’ of borderland economic functions. ⁵² At a 1970 press conference announcing new borderland investments, Jaroslav Kavka emphasized the goal of both attracting new ‘quality workers’ and keeping them in place with ‘good working and living conditions.’ This would start with settlement bonuses of 15,000 crowns and wage incentives in key sectors. But it would also include general investment in higher living standards, including culture, infrastructure, and housing. ‘Simply speaking,’ he concluded, ‘that part of our country must be for people a real homeland (domov).’ ⁵³

Concern with the borderland ‘living environment’ reflected growing communist attention to environmental problems in the borderlands during the 1970s. ⁵⁴ Tasked with generating a report on environmental decline and possible steps towards mitigation, the Geographical Institute of the Academy of Sciences wrote in 1973 that Czechoslovakia had reached a point where ‘the disruption of the relationship of man to his surroundings is starting to manifest itself in his biological essence (so called civilizational sicknesses) and in the disruption of supplies of essential natural resources.’ ⁵⁵ The report emphasized both the material and social importance of a healthy environment, concluding that a ‘socialist environment’ should ensure ‘the rational exploitation of natural resources of a landscape for economic, industrial and agricultural production (and) the healthy development of socialist man and the whole of society, including the satisfaction of its aesthetic, cultural, and recreational needs.’ ⁵⁶ Environmental policy was also political, the Institute noted. ‘Citizens … are sensitive to how state and party organs respond to (environmental problems); moreover, the environment is a fashionable issue these days in the foreign propaganda directed at our state.’ ⁵⁷

The northern Bohemian borderlands were ground zero of Czechoslovakia's environmental crisis, and they figured prominently in Academy and Communist Party deliberations during the 1970s and 1980s. ⁵⁸ As regional reports repeatedly noted, air and water quality were so bad in north Bohemia that they were having serious effects on health, agricultural production, and regional finances. Beyond the more obvious pulmonary illnesses caused by air pollution, regional officials also noted that life in a toxic fog produced ‘psychological effects with reverberations in the sphere of sociological factors.’ ⁵⁹ In other words, the health of one's physical surroundings had an effect on psychological and social health.

Other academics and government officials were more sanguine about the ‘consolidation’ of the borderlands. The heavily materialist economic historian Lubomír Slezák wrote in 1980 that integration of the borderlands was finally complete, even if the ‘path to this economic, cultural, and social integration … was longer than initially expected.’ ⁶⁰ This was usually the public line of government officials, who typically answered criticism of borderland cultural and social life with positive economic statistics, indicating both a desire to minimize problems and the regime's fundamentally materialist measure of social health. In an interview with the west Bohemian communist official Jan Šimek, the journal Tribuna noted that ‘it is often said that after the departure of the Germans in 1945, this region will never return to its original glory … its rich history, the renovation of all the towns, villages, factories, the restoration of lost markets …’ Šimek dismissed the criticisms, pointing to Czech economic achievements in the Bohemian borderlands, including an increase in coal output. ⁶¹ Even admissions of labor shortages and depopulation of rural areas called forth primarily ‘investments’ and ‘complex plans’ that emanated from the highly centralized governments in Prague. But as many critics suggested, pre-war borderland communities had been intricately evolved economic, ecological, and social niches. Though government-sponsored research and communist officials themselves sometimes acknowledged the social and political importance of rootedness and a local sense of belonging, their materialist planning arsenal was poorly suited to nurturing a sense of home.

It was this fundamental inadequacy of materialism that came to exercise many Czech dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s, and the former Sudetenland served as prime evidence of the regime's moral and social failures. ⁶² Though there were some brief reconsiderations of the expulsions and resettlement during the liberalization leading up to the 1968 Prague Spring, ⁶³ the most trenchant critique and a wide-ranging dissident debate began in 1978 with an essay by the Slovak historian Ján Mlynárik in the exile journal Svědectví. ⁶⁴ Mlynárik's scathing evaluation of the expulsions concluded that ‘by this act (the Czech nation) betrayed its most noble ideals and put the future into danger.’ ⁶⁵ Six dissidents, half of whom were signatories of the dissident collective Charter 77, used Mlynárik's article as impetus for a comprehensive reconsideration of both the causes and consequences of the expulsions. This group, using the pseudonym Bohemus, questioned what Brad Abrams has labeled the ‘morality and wisdom’ of the expulsions. ⁶⁶ Materially, the expulsions had drained Czechoslovakia of labor and expertise, and, in many areas, ‘converted the cultural landscape of the Sudetenland into a scarred, half-empty wasteland, more or less extensively exploited by rootless settlers.’ ⁶⁷ New inhabitants did not know how to manage their new property, nor did they develop a close ‘relationship to nature and the landscape of their new homelands (domovů).' ⁶⁸

One of the Bohemus contributors, Petr Příhoda, expanded on this theme in other samizdat writings in the late 1970s. Settlers ‘did not feel at home’ in the new landscapes, both because the borderlands attracted already rootless characters, and because settlers lacked a knowledge of the land and history of the former German Sudetenland. ⁶⁹ With no ‘relationship to work, nature, the landscape, not to mention the local monuments of the past,’ Příhoda wrote, Czech settlers failed to put down roots in the recently cleansed borderlands. ⁷⁰ ‘The expulsion of the original [German] inhabitants’ meant the loss of deeply rooted ‘tradition[s], attachment to the Heimat, informal human relationships, and accumulated moral and cultural values.’ This loss rendered the borderlands particularly susceptible to ‘the totalitarian reconstruction of our national community’ and the regime's relentless focus on production above all other values. ⁷¹ Příhoda blamed a persistent ‘eco- and social-pathology’ in the borderlands on the failure of settlers to build a sense of community. ⁷² Indeed, postwar Czechoslovakia had rotted from the outside in, with the borderlands providing a model for the Czech heartland of the destruction of civil society and the sacrifice of morality and nature on the altar of production (a reversal of communist portrayals of the borderlands as a model of socialism). ⁷³

To the chagrin of the Czechoslovak government, the dissident conversation about the degraded borderlands spread widely beyond Czechoslovakia's borders. In early 1979, Voice of America broadcast a large excerpt from the Danubius essay. ⁷⁴ The West German daily Frankfurter Rundschau ran a report on the debate. ⁷⁵ After Mlynárik emigrated under pressure to Germany in 1982, he published several interviews and articles in German papers summarizing his critique. ⁷⁶

Dissident assertions of a connection between social and environmental decline of the borderlands deepened in the early 1980s, when Charter 77 expanded its critique of the country's accelerating environmental catastrophe. In conjunction with a Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences internal study on the environment begun in 1981, Charter 77 published a series of letters on the environmental crisis in Czechoslovakia. ⁷⁷ A 1983 public letter argued that north Bohemia's environmental problems were a function of both the expulsions and the ‘cynical and conscious exploitation’ of the region for intensive industrial development:

On the territory of the former Sudetenland, new inhabitants were elementally settled after the Second World War. The whole region suffers from the absence of traditional social and cultural ties, inherited across the generations … Still today, one can sense everywhere an atmosphere of plundering and disdain for the material inheritance (not to speak of the spiritual inheritance) of the region. Patriotism is simply lacking … There is no active desire there to improve the environment. ⁷⁸

The ‘cynical exploitation of the environment’ in the region had profound social and health effects. Youth had little hope for the future, leading to a ‘destructive negativism’ and chronic alcoholism and drug abuse. Diseases caused by pollution and hopelessness were intertwined. ‘In the suffocating atmosphere of Czechoslovakia,’ the letter added, north Bohemia was among the most oppressive, ‘and we don't mean just the air.’

The dissidents' ecologically-informed vision of home paralleled a shift in West German Heimat discourse by the 1980s. Since the 1970s, a growing environmentalism and anti-Americanism in West Germany made Heimat attractive to a much wider constituency than its traditional conservative and expellee adherents. Advocates of a ‘new regionalism’ criticized the overextension of technology and the modern state, arguing for a rediscovery of localism, nature, and civic activism. ⁷⁹ The Heimat revival reached a postwar highpoint with the tremendously popular 1984 mini-series, Heimat, written and directed by Edgar Reitz. Though far more complex than a nostalgic rural idyll, the film portrayed forces of modernization – tied first to National Socialism and then to Americanization – as undermining the ‘authentic community of village life.’ ⁸⁰ The popular weekly Der Spiegel saw the series as indicative of a broad shift in ‘consciousness of (a) West German society … no longer enraptured with progress.’ Reitz's film ‘reveals what belongs to this new Heimat feeling: cultural history of the everyday, a sense of family, colorful dialect, and praise for the provinces.’ ⁸¹ As Klaus Kreimeier points out, the film was ‘a product of the new sensibility towards the historicity of small spaces … [tracing] patterns of consciousness in a particular landscape.’ ⁸² Prominent streams on the German left and the right now agreed on Heimat as an antidote to the ills of modernity, if not on Heimat's place in the political landscape. ⁸³

Ecology also became central to an evolving Sudeten German critique of Czech stewardship of borderland landscapes. Now ecological destruction featured prominently alongside cultural neglect in publications of the Sudetendeutscher Rat, a mouthpiece of the Landsmannschaft. A promotional booklet from 1984 warned that the ‘once flourishing natural and cultural landscape’ of the Sudetenland had exceeded even ‘the grimmest horror visions of the more insistent critics of civilization.’ ⁸⁴ Pollution-induced forest death, known as Waldsterben in German, was spreading through north Bohemia, and even across the border into Bavaria. Since the early 1980s, Waldsterben had been a preoccupation in Germany, as foresters and scientists reported that over 50 per cent of German forests had been weakened, perhaps fatally, by air pollution and acid rain. ⁸⁵ Citing the recent Charter 77 reports on the environment, the Sudetendeutscher Rat claimed that Waldsterben was even worse in the Bohemian borderlands, which the communist regime was sacrificing for energy production. ⁸⁶ The neglect and exploitation of natural landscapes went hand-in-hand with cultural neglect, the expellee council implied. Czechs abandoned or destroyed over 1000 villages in the Sudetenland, with others barely populated by indifferent settlers. According to one visitor, the Heimat landscape had been ‘profaned, laid waste, and handed over to weeds (verwildert).’ ⁸⁷ The expulsions and subsequent combination of exploitation and neglect had disrupted the fine-tuned balance between humans and nature in the Sudetenland.

Though the growing popularity of ecology and Heimat gave the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft additional rhetorical ammunition for its attacks on Czechoslovakia, the spread of localism weakened and fragmented composite Sudeten German identity. Already in the late 1960s there had been signs that the expellee rank and file was more interested in reminiscing about the Heimat than in revisionist politics. At the annual Sudeten German Rally in 1967, political speeches sparked little enthusiasm, even as 200,000 attendees ‘jammed the vast, stifling exhibition halls, seeking friends and relatives, gossiping about the good old days … drinking their beer straight from the bottle.’ This was typical of recent years, according to a Radio Free Europe report, with ‘the great majority of participants … there for social and not for political reasons.’ ⁸⁸ Though expellees still embraced the so-called right to the Heimat (Heimatrecht), this no longer meant an active desire to return to their lost homelands. ⁸⁹ As early as 1963, opinion research indicated that only 7 per cent of expellees actually wanted to return to Czechoslovakia. ⁹⁰ Even as wider, and more explicitly political, Sudeten German identifications gradually lost salience, there was a marked increase in interest in local Heimat history. ⁹¹ Indeed, following the wider German trend, expellee Heimat conceptions appear to have reverted primarily to symbolic meanings associated with local community and belonging. ⁹²

The jurist and novelist Bernhard Schlink has written that Heimat is a utopia, an imagined place whose ideal form is defined by contrast with the perceived shortcomings of real places and one's real existence. Heimat is always already lost, and we experience it only as a longing for home (Heimweh). ⁹³ We might consider Heimat, with its accompanying images of rootedness and community, as a metaphorical measuring stick for the social and ecological health of a society. This is exactly how Heimat and domov have functioned in relation to Czechoslovakia's borderlands since 1945. Sudeten German expellees contrasted the social and material decline of the borderlands with an idealized German past, marked by tight-knit communities and a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. Czech communists and dissidents concerned with the social and ecological crisis in the borderlands had a similar diagnosis of what I call a ‘Heimat deficit’ in the borderlands. The pursuit of domov (Heimat) became a common prescription for healing the borderlands.

Czech perceptions of, and policies towards, the borderlands were haunted both by the past German presence there and continuing German criticism from abroad. The borderlands as both a place and an idea were a function of an ongoing international discussion involving German expellees, Czech critics, and communist officials, a discussion inflected by international discourses surrounding ecology and modernity.

It is striking how pervasive ecological metaphors became in both Czech and German narratives of borderland health. Either explicitly or implicitly, expellees, communist reformers, and dissidents all posited a relationship between social and natural ecologies in the borderlands. Drawing terminology from the field of eco-psychology, one might add mental or psychological ecology to the mix. ⁹⁴ Petr Přihoda was the most eloquent and explicit in describing the connections between ecological, social, and individual/psychological health. But even communist officials, so relentlessly materialist in many respects, at times acknowledged an inter-relationship between the social, cultural, and ecological health of the borderlands. Even though the regime's centralist and productivist instincts prevailed up until 1989, Communist Czechoslovakia left behind not only a scarred and troubled land, but also a possible prescription for how that land might be healed.