Mark Cornwall,The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha

Reviewed by: René Küpper, Collegium Carolinum, Munich, Germany

According to legend, the devil built a wall along the Czech-German language border south of the Jeschken mountains in northern Bohemia in order to separate the quarrelling co-habitants of the Czech lands. Not far from the mountains in question, in Bad Kunnersdorf, lived one of Konrad Henlein’s most important advisors and collaborators, Heinz Rutha (1897–1937), who strongly identified with this national separation, although, like Henlein, he had a Czech branch in his family tree. In the interwar period, this prominent Wandervogel youth movement leader launched a ‘nationalist youth program, systematically training a vanguard of male youths … who would lead the Sudeten German nation’ (5). In 1936/37 he was lobbying (as Henlein’s so-called ‘foreign minister’) with British Foreign Office officials and trying to get the League of Nations to pressurize Prague to grant more rights to the Sudeten Germans. In late 1937, Rutha was accused of homosexual interaction with underage adolescents, and during the ‘most prominent homosexual scandal of interwar Czechoslovakia’ (235) committed suicide in prison. After the scandal Rutha was quickly disowned by the Sudeten German Party (SdP) and the Turnverband, even though he had been well known and well connected in the völkisch milieu for twenty years.

Mark Cornwall reconstructs Rutha’s almost ‘forgotten life’ (1), analysing hitherto unknown documents including Rutha’s war diary from 1918 and the private correspondence that the State Police retrieved from his safe after arresting him. Cornwall’s monograph aims to provide new insights on three subjects: the history and perception of homosexuality, hitherto rather neglected by Czech historians; the character of the Henlein movement; and the SdP’s ‘foreign policy’, which met with partial success in Britain. Cornwall uses Rutha’s example ‘to rethink the Czech-German nationalist disaster in Central Europe’ (5), trying ‘to understand Sudeten German Nationalism on its own terms’ (9). He carefully shows how the German Wandervogel and Turn movements in Bohemia differed from the Reich prototypes because of their ‘specific Czech-German environment’ (44). Rutha’s political mindset, forged outside party politics, as was the case with many of his similar-minded political companions, was völkisch but not Nazi: he was no anti-Semite on racial grounds, and, after surviving the horrors of war in 1918 on the Italian front, he wanted to achieve his political aims by peaceful political means, not war. He certainly was pan-German, but not in an irredentist way. His goal was a Sudeten German corporate state within the framework of the Czech lands, maybe even Czechoslovakia – Germans would co-exist with Czechs, but would be separated from them at the same time as part of a cultural or spiritual pan-German Volksgemeinschaft, thus implying some sort of German dominance over Central Europe.

These overlapping national and regional loyalties, partly following the ideology of the Viennese philosopher Othmar Spann who inspired the élitist Kameradschaftsbund which included Walter Heinrich, Henlein and Rutha, are not easily summarized. Rightfully refusing Ronald M. Smelser’s term ‘traditionalist’ for this non-Nazi world-view, Cornwall suggests instead the category of ‘Sudeten loyalists’ (10), but this term seems ambiguous too, for it was possible to be a regional ‘loyalist’ and a Nazi at the same time. However, Cornwall convincingly points out the differences between the political thinking of Rutha, Henlein and other ‘Spannists’, and Sudeten Nazis. He also shows that the quarrel between these fractions broke out in the Turnverband a year before it started in the SdP. This indicates that the Henlein movement was not Nazi from the start but was (self-)nazified gradually, culminating in 1938. Rutha loathed local Nazi officials. Apparently, his non-Nazi stance lent some weight to his arguments while lobbying for Henlein abroad. It was also of consequence here that the British Foreign Office thought at the time that the Czechoslovak minorities policy was far from perfect and that some of the Sudeten German grievances were well founded.

Rutha did not wish to pursue a political career, he viewed himself rather as a spiritual leader and teacher of male adolescents who were to become future charismatic leaders of the Sudeten German national community. Their education was to take place in a special youth leadership school, split into three age groups. Theoretically relating his youth mission to the Classical Greek Erastes/Eromenos model (‘pedagogic sexual relationships between an older man and a male youth’ (82) as presented especially in Plato’s dialogues), Rutha did not interpret ‘acts of mutual masturbation as homosexual’ (249). He was publicly dishonoured as a ‘pederast’ or ‘pedagogic pervert’ (248). What brought him down was not a ‘complex political intrigue’ (243), but the State Police who had already been monitoring him as a political enemy, investigating hints from his personal (and political) enemies in the Sudeten German camp. The ‘classic example of how a modern homosexual scandal was manufactured and exploited unscrupulously’ (245), here by the left-wing Czech and Sudeten German press, sheds some light on homophobia in an otherwise liberal democratic society.

Cornwall’s study is meticulously researched and extraordinarily well written. It offers fresh and original insights not only on the Henlein movement and the SdP’s ‘foreign policy’, but also on the history of homosexuality in this period.