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by Laurent Binet

  But in the long term, you’d have to say it was a very bad idea.

  56

  The day after the Anschluss, Germany, showing uncharacteristic prudence, sends messages of appeasement to Czechoslovakia. The Czechs shouldn’t have the slightest fear of being the next victim, they are told, even if the annexation of Austria and the consequent feeling of being encircled might seem a legitimate source of anxiety.

  To avoid any needless tension, orders are given that no German troops in Austria should approach within ten to fifteen miles of the Czech border.

  But in the Sudetenland, news of the Anschluss provokes an extraordinary enthusiasm. Suddenly people talk only of their ultimate fantasy: being reunited with the Reich. There are protests and marches everywhere, political tracts and propaganda pamphlets. The pervading atmosphere is of conspiracy. The Czech government gives orders aimed at suppressing this agitation, but they are systematically sabotaged by public workers and German employees. The boycott of the Czech minority in German-language zones is enforced on an unprecedented scale. Beneš will write in his memoirs that he was stunned by this mystical romanticism that seemed to suddenly seize all the Germans of Bohemia.

  57

  The Council of Constance is guilty of having called on our natural enemies—all the Germans who surround us—to fight an unjust war against us, when they have no reason to rise up against us except their unquenchable hatred of our language.

  (HUSSITE MANIFESTO, C. 1420)

  58

  Once, and once only, France and Britain said no to Hitler during the Czechoslovak crisis. And even then, the British “no” was rather halfhearted.

  May 19, 1938: reports of German troop movements at the Czech border. On May 20, Czechoslovakia orders a partial mobilization of its own forces, sending out a very clear message: if the country is attacked, it will defend itself.

  The French, reacting with a firmness we hardly expect of them anymore, immediately declare that they will honor their commitments to Czechoslovakia. In other words, that they will come to the military aid of their allies in the event of a German attack.

  The British, unpleasantly surprised by the French attitude, nevertheless fall into line with their ally’s position. With this small qualification: that they will under no circumstances guarantee a military intervention. Chamberlain makes sure that his diplomats do not promise more than is contained in this muddled phrase: “In the event of a European conflict, it is impossible to know if Great Britain will take part.” Not the most decisive of statements.

  Hitler will remember these weasel words, but at the time he takes fright and retreats. On May 23, he makes it known that Germany has no aggressive intentions toward Czechoslovakia, and withdraws the troops massed at the border as if nothing had happened. The official line is that these were simply routine maneuvers.

  But Hitler is mad with rage. He feels that Beneš has humiliated him, and the urge to make war is rising within him. On May 28, he summons the Wehrmacht’s field officers and barks at them: “It is my staunch desire to wipe Czechoslovakia off the map.”

  59

  Beneš, worried by Great Britain’s reluctance to honor its commitments, calls his ambassador in London for the latest news. The conversation, recorded by the German secret service, leaves no doubt about the Czechs’ disillusionment with their British counterparts—beginning with Chamberlain, who gets it with both barrels:

  “The dirty bastard just wants us to lick Hitler’s ass!”

  “You have to talk him around! Make him get his wits back!”

  “The old bugger hasn’t got any wits left. All he does is sniff the Nazis’ shit.”

  “So talk to Horace Wilson. Tell him to warn the prime minister that England, too, will be in danger if we don’t show ourselves resolute. Could you make him understand that?”

  “How do you want me to talk to Wilson? He’s just a jackal!”

  The Germans rush to get the tape recordings to the British. Apparently, Chamberlain was dreadfully upset and never forgave the Czechs.

  This same Wilson, Chamberlain’s special advisor, made a bid for conciliation between the Germans and Czechs, with Britain acting as referee. Not long afterward, Hitler would talk about it in these terms:

  “Why should I care about the British being involved? The filthy old dog is mad if he thinks he can con me like this!”

  Wilson is surprised:

  “If Herr Hitler is referring to the prime minister, I can assure him that the prime minister is not mad. He is simply interested in the outcome of the peace talks.”

  Hitler then really lets loose:

  “I’m not interested in what these ass-lickers say. The only thing that interests me is my people in the Sudetenland; my people who are tortured and assassinated by that vile queer Beneš! I won’t take it any longer. It’s more than a good German can bear! Do you hear me, you stupid swine?”

  So there is at least one point on which the Czechs and Germans were in agreement: Chamberlain and his clique were a bunch of ass-lickers.

  Curiously, however, Chamberlain was far less offended by the German insults than by those of the Czechs. With hindsight, you’d have to say that’s a shame.

  60

  On August 21, 1938, Edouard Daladier, the French council president, gives an edifying speech on the radio:

  Faced with authoritarian states who are arming and equipping themselves with no regard to the length of the working week, alongside democratic states who are striving to regain their prosperity and ensure their safety with a forty-eight-hour week, why should France—both more impoverished and more threatened—delay making the decisions on which our future depends? As long as the international situation remains so delicate, we must work more than forty hours per week, and as much as forty-eight hours in businesses linked to national defense.

  Reading this transcription, I was reminded that putting the French back to work was the French right’s eternal fantasy. I was deeply shocked that these elitist reactionaries, understanding so little the true nature of the situation, would use the Sudeten crisis to settle their scores with the Popular Front. Bear in mind that in 1938, the editorials of the bourgeois newspapers shamelessly stigmatized those workers whose only concern was enjoying their paid holidays.

  Just in time, however, my father reminded me that Daladier was a radical Socialist, and thus part of the Popular Front. I’ve just checked this, and staggeringly, it’s true: Daladier was the defense minister in Leon Blum’s government! I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. I can hardly bear to tell the story: Daladier, former defense minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defense not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week—one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. At this level of political stupidity, betrayal becomes almost a work of art.

  61

  On September 26, 1938, Hitler must deliver a speech to the crowds gathered at the Sportpalast in Berlin. He practices his speech on a British delegation who come to tell him that the Czechs have refused to evacuate the Sudetenland. “They treat the Germans like blacks! On October 1, I will do what I please with Czechoslovakia. If France and England decide to attack, let them go ahead! I couldn’t care less! It’s pointless to continue negotiations—they’re going nowhere!” And he leaves.

  Then, on the podium, in front of his fanatical supporters:

  For twenty years, the Germans of Czechoslovakia have been persecuted by the Czechs. For twenty years, the Germans of the Reich have watched this happen. They were forced to watch it: not because they accepted the situation, but because, being unarmed, they couldn’t help their brothers fight these torturers. Today, things are different. And the democracies of the world are up in arms! We have learned, during these years, not to trust the world’s democracies. In our time, only one state has shown itself to be a great European power, and at the head of this state, one man has understood the distress of our people: my great friend Benito Mussolini.
[The crowd shouts Heil Duce!]

  Mr. Beneš is in Prague, and he thinks nothing can happen to him because he has the support of France and England. [Prolonged laughter.] My fellow countrymen, I believe the moment has come to speak clearly. Mr. Beneš has seven million people behind him, and here we have seventy-five million. [Enthusiastic applause.] I assured the British prime minister that once this problem has been resolved, there will be no more territorial problems in Europe. We don’t want any Czechs in the Reich, but I tell the German people this: on the Sudeten question, my patience is at an end. Now it’s up to Mr. Beneš whether he wants peace or war. Either he accepts our offer and gives the Sudeten Germans their freedom, or we will go and free them ourselves. Let the world be warned.

  62

  It’s during the Sudeten crisis that we have the first positive indications of the Führer’s madness. At this time, the merest mention of Beneš and the Czechs would send him into such a rage that he could lose all self-control. He was reportedly seen throwing himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Among people still hostile to Nazism, these demented fits quickly earned him the nickname Teppichfresser (“Carpet Eater”). I don’t know if he kept up this habit of crazed munching, or if the symptom disappeared after Munich.[3]

  63

  September 28, 1938: three days before the Munich Agreement. The world holds its breath. Hitler is more menacing than ever. The Czechs know that if they give up the natural barrier they call the Sudetenland, they are dead. Chamberlain declares: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

  64

  Saint-John Perse belongs to that lineage of writer-diplomats, such as Claudel or Giraudoux, who fill me with disgust. In his case, this instinctive repugnance seems to me particularly justified. Consider his behavior during September 1938:

  Alexis Leger (his real name, fittingly, as leger means “lightweight”) accompanies Daladier to Munich in his position as general secretary of the Foreign Office. A hard-line pacifist, he has worked tirelessly to convince Daladier to give in to all the Germans’ demands. He is there when the Czech representatives are shown in to be informed of their fate, twelve hours after the Munich Agreement, drafted without them, has been signed.

  Hitler and Mussolini have already left. Chamberlain yawns ostentatiously, while Daladier tries and fails to hide his agitation behind a façade of embarrassed haughtiness. When the Czechs, crushed, ask if their government is expected to make some kind of declaration in response to this news, it is perhaps shame that removes his ability to speak. (If only it had choked him—him and all the others!) It is therefore left to his colleague to speak, and he does so with such casual arrogance that the Czech foreign minister says afterward, in a laconic remark that all my countrymen should ponder: “Well, he’s French.”

  The Agreement being concluded, no response is expected. On the other hand, the Czech government must send its representative to Berlin this very day, by 3:00 p.m. at the latest (it is now 3:00 a.m.), to attend a meeting of the commission responsible for enforcing the Agreement. On Saturday, a Czechoslovak official must also appear in Berlin to settle the details of the evacuation. The diplomat’s tone hardens with each command that he utters. In front of him, one of the two Czech representatives bursts into tears. Saint-John Perse, irritated by this, and as if to justify his own brutality, adds that the situation is beginning to get dangerous for the whole world. He’s not joking!

  Thus it is a French poet who pronounces, almost performatively, the death sentence of Czechoslovakia, the country I love most in the world.

  65

  At his hotel in Munich, a journalist asks him:

  “But, Mr. Ambassador, in the end this agreement must be a great relief, no?”

  Silence. Then the Foreign Office secretary sighs:

  “Oh yes, a relief… like when you do it in your pants!”

  This belated truthfulness, coupled with a clever joke, is not enough to salvage his reputation. Saint-John Perse acted like a big shit. Or, as he would have said—with the ridiculous affectation of a stuffy diplomat—an “excrement.”

  66

  The Times wrote of Chamberlain: “No conqueror fresh from victory on the field of battle has come back adorned with more noble laurels.”

  67

  Chamberlain, on a balcony in London: “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”

  68

  Krofta, the Czech foreign minister: “They have put us in this situation. Now it’s our turn; tomorrow it will be their turn.”

  69

  Out of some kind of childish pedantry, I have scrupulously avoided using the most famous French quotation to come out of this whole sad affair. But I can’t not cite Daladier, who after getting off his airplane, cheered by the crowd, said: “Oh, the fools! Those fools, if they knew what was coming…”

  Some people doubt whether he actually spoke these words, whether he had enough clarity of mind, or enough wit. In fact, this apocryphal quotation became widely known because of Sartre, who used it in his novel The Reprieve.

  70

  Churchill’s words, spoken in the House of Commons, are distinguished by their greater perceptiveness and, as always, their grandeur:

  “We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.”

  (Churchill has to stop speaking for some time while he waits for the whistles and shouts of protest to die down.)

  “We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude. The road down the Danube Valley to the Black Sea has been opened. All those Danubian countries will, one after another, be drawn into this vast system of power politics radiating from Berlin. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning…”

  Not long afterward, Churchill sums it all up with his immortal phrase:

  “You had to choose between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor. You will have war.”

  71

  It rings, it rings, the bell of betrayal.

  Whose hands set it swinging?

  Gentle France, faithful Albion,

  And we loved them.

  (FRANTIŠEK HALAS)

  72

  On the half-corpse of a nation betrayed, France went back to belote and Tino Rossi.[4]

  (MONTHERLANT)

  73

  Faced with Germany’s arrogant pretensions, the two great Western democracies keep their mouths shut—and Hitler can gloat. Instead of which, he goes back to Berlin in a really bad mood, cursing Chamberlain: “This person deprived me of my triumphant entry into Prague!” By forcing the Czech government to make all their concessions, France and Britain—these two cowardly countries—briefly prevented the German dictator from realizing his true goal: not only taking a slice of Czechoslovakia, but “wiping it off the map.” In other words: turning it into a province of the Reich. Seven million Czechs, seventy-five million Germans… to be continued…

  74

  In 1946, at Nuremberg, the representative for Czechoslovakia will ask Keitel, the German chief of staff: “Would the Reich have attacked Czechoslovakia in 1938 if the Western powers had supported Prague?” To which Keitel will reply: “Definitely not. Militarily, we weren’t strong enough.”

  Hitler can curse all he likes. The truth is that France and Britain opened a door to which he did not have the key. And, obviously, by displaying such servility, encouraged him to start again.