English Translation

S/ Forgotten Insights British Opinion and the Czecho-Slovak State Problem. When I, as one of the spokespersons of the Sudeten German party Lord Runciman, discussed the sudetenGerman view of the Czechoslovak state problem in the mid-summer of 1938, the response was, as expected, diplomatically veiled. The fact that a British statesman, as valid as his official clothing was, was quickly sent as an observer and mediator to a European state, which a 2O-year-old political development had now made visible in the eyes of the world to what he was from the beginning: a bundle of nationalities, united only in the negation of the state. The unusual aspect of the Runciman mission was only the expression of the unusual situation of the state. From the very beginning, there was no lack of warners, nor of British warners who saw in Czechoslovakia, with its so many tribes, only a new reduced Austria-Hungary, but without its enormous historical clemency. Even one of the Committees of the Versailles Conference had described the sudeten- deutsche question as the central problem of the state in a report on Czechoslovakia, and added it to it prophetically, that it would probably become a question of life for the new state, whether it could succeed in winning the Germans as willing citizens.*Over the course of the 20th years, it was evident to the increasing extent of the world that the ruling Czech circle had thrown this warning into the wind, not only had not won the Germans, but had made them the most bitter opponents of that state. No less became known, however, that the sudetenGerman question was the first but not only part of the state problem.Besides the other questions of nationality, the ever-increasing bitterness of the Slovaks drove the state, which was based on the fiction of the existence of a uniform Czechoslovak nation, into a total crisis from this side as well. One suspects today the slova-