Mark Cornwall

HEINRICH RUTHA AND THE UNRAVELING OF A HOMOSEXUAL SCANDAL IN 1930S CZECHOSLOVAKIA

In a quiet cemetery on the c outskirts of Osečná, in northern Bohemia, at one with nature and overlooked by Mount Ještěd, lies the plot of the Rutha family. Two black metal plaques bolted to a stone wall commemorate Heinrich Rutha (1897–1937), with an inscription in German: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15.13). For those who erected this memorial, the meaning was undoubtedly clear. Heinz Rutha (as he was usually called) had died as a martyr to a higher cause, in service to the Sudeten German people—the German minority in Czechoslovakia who were struggling in the 1930s to secure greater autonomy for themselves. Rutha was a prominent Sudeten German leader and ideologue. Indeed, he was the unofficial “foreign minister” of the Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei; SdP), led by Konrad Henlein, which had won 63 percent of the German vote in the parliamentary elections of 1935. Early on the morning of 5 November 1937 Rutha was found dead in his prison cell in the town of Böhmisch Leipa (Česka Lípa).1 Although all the evidence pointed to suicide, rumors spread immediately that he had been murdered, either by the Czechs or by some other (Nazi) political opponents. The inscription on Rutha’s grave, however, also has a cryptic significance, especially if we assume (as seems possible) that Rutha himself left instructions as to the wording. It hints at his philosophy of life and his vision for a new type of

Traitors and the meaning of treason in Austria-Hungary's Great War

Treason is a ubiquitous historical phenomenon, one particularly associated with regime instability or wartime loyalties. This paper explores the practice and prosecution of treason in the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy with a special focus on some notorious wartime treason trials. It first sets the rhetoric and law of treason in a comparative historical context before assessing the legal framework supplied by the Austrian penal code of 1852. Although the treason law was exploited quite arbitrarily after 1914, the state authorities in the pre-war decade were already targeting irredentist suspects due to major anxiety about domestic and foreign security. In the Great War, the military were then given extensive powers to prosecute all political crimes including treason, causing a string of show-trials of Bosnian Serbs and some leading Czech politicians. By 1917–18, however, this onslaught on disloyalty was backfiring in the wake of an imperial amnesty: as loyalties shifted away from the Habsburg regime, the former criminals themselves proudly began to assume the title of ‘traitor’. The paper is a case-study of how regimes in crisis have used treason as a powerful moral instrument for managing allegiance. It also offers a new basis for understanding instability in the late Habsburg monarchy.

The Construction of National Identities in the Northern Bohemian Borderland, 1848-71

It was in 1855 that there appeared the first detailed ethnographic map of the Habsburg Monarchy. Based on a systematic investigation by Karl Freiherr von Czoernig, head of the Austrian bureau of administrative statistics in Vienna, it seemed to show a precise division between the nationalities of the Empire. Visually, the divide was accentuated through the colours used on the map. Northern Bohemia was clearly dominated by ‘Germans’. They were coloured in red, sharply distinguishing them from ‘Czechs’, coloured in yellow, who seemed to cover most of the territory of the crownland.l The map was based largely on linguistic data meticulously gathered by Czoernig just before the 1848 revolutions. Yet, its precision was deceptive if language and local culture were taken as synonymous with ‘nationality’. For national allegiance or consciousness was a fluid concept in the late 1840s, and only by the 1870s might it be argued that Czoernig’s map illustrated more accurately the Czech-German national picture across northern Bohemia. The intervening period was a crucial one in offering a range of ‘national’ paths which both Czech and German-speakers might follow. These paths were influenced by revolt and constitutional upheaval both inside and outside the Habsburg Monarchy.

The First World War

A study of Franz Kafka in the context of the First World War, using the social, economic and military context to explain his perspective. Other chapters of the volume study other contexts of Kafkas life

The End of the War in Northern Bohemia: A New Diary

Analysis of the newly discovered diary of Ewald Mayer from the local archive in Liberec (Czech Republic). It sheds vivid light on the mentality of the Germans of Liberec in the last stages of the Second World War.

Elizabeth Wiskemann and the Sudeten Question: A Woman at the ‘Essential Hinge’ of Europe

A Study of the work and views of the historian Elizabeth Wiskemann in central Europe, using her writings to explore the Czech-German relationship in the 1930s and 1940s.

Austria-Hungary and the Control of Wartime Morale

In the days after 28 July 1914, when the Habsburg Empire declared war on Serbia, three million men were called to the colours. They represented 11 different nationalities, with their homes in regions of Austria-Hungary which had witnessed bitter national tensions in the prewar period. Yet, there seemed a good deal of truth in the Hungarian Prime Minister’s observation on 4 August that ‘the atmosphere prevailing in the whole Monarchy is very good’.1 Whether in Vienna or Budapest, in Prague or Ljubljana, in Innsbruck or Krakow, the publicized image in the principal cities seemed to be the same, of a spontaneous enthusiasm for war against Russia and Serbia, and of troops marching off to the railway stations bedecked in garlands and surrounded by cheering crowds. In ‘loyalist’ memoirs written after the war this image was naturally sustained. In Vienna, one kaisertreu officer recalled how the mayor, Richard Weiskirchner, had suddenly interrupted a music concert in order to make the announcement of general mobilization; it was greeted with brief silence followed by stormy applause and a burst of the national anthem. In Budapest, another observer recalled how a crowd of 20000 swept through the streets, waving black and yellow (Habsburg) flags, all inspired by ‘love of country, the intoxication of the hour, the flame of national instinct’.2

A Theory of Front Propaganda

During the four years of the First World War, both sides gradually introduced an armoury of weapons which had never been seen or even imagined in previous conflicts. Warfare, as one Intelligence officer observed with admiration in 1918, was constantly taking new forms of which neither civilians nor soldiers, nor even generals, were fully aware.1 Most of the professional military had begun in 1914 with long-held preconceptions about the way that their war would develop. It would be short and sharp as in 1870 and include a major role for the cavalry. Four years later, it was clear that the type of warfare previously conducted had been dramatically re-shaped by the technological developments of the previous half-century, by the need to mobilize all corners of society for an idealistic struggle to the end, and by the lessons steadily learnt on the battlefield about how different techniques or types of weapon could mesh together. Aeroplanes, first used during Italy’s war against Turkey in 1911–12, became a regular sight over the trenches; their reconnaissance activity was woven into the fabric of each belligerent’s Intelligence network, even if parachutes were still in their infancy and flying was still something to be marvelled at as a dangerous business. The coordination of war from the air with war on the ground was matched by a gradual harmonization of other new types of weaponry with the traditional ‘material’ of warfare, the infantry: of machine guns; of artillery, which replaced the horse; of chemical weapons; and of front propaganda or psychological warfare.

Morale and Patriotism in the Austro-Hungarian Army, 1914-1918

The threats to morale in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and the vain efforts made too late to bolster morale.

Dr Edvard Beneš and Czechoslovakia’s German Minority, 1918–1943

Compton Mackenzie begins his very complimentary biography of Edvard Benes by comparing him with Adolf Hitler. Such a contrast was made by others, not least by Benes himself who on numerous occasions presented his own intellectual rationalism as the antithesis of Hitler’s ‘animalesque instinct’. Benes was proud to be considered as a human symbol of peace and democracy in Central Europe while the German dictator was to be seen as the embodiment of war and totalitarianism.1