Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/433
formerly submerged has come to the surface. Now that nobody can be persecuted for speaking Czech in the streets or in public establishments, the German character of the so-called “German” territory is on the wane. But the Germans themselves appear to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They pretend to be Republicans, but in all their private houses and even in their public establishments they have a picture of the dead Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph, or of the German Kaiser. When an American journalist seeing a picture of the late Franz Joseph in a public bath at Karlsbad asked a German why they still indulged in glorifying the dead Emperor, no good explanation was forth coming, and the American turning to one of his compatriots said: “Even of the dead they seem to be afraid.”
The Bohemian Germans complain of being oppressed. If you ask them where and in what form they are oppressed, they will say that the Czechs do not allow them to have separate army command. This is very characteristic of the present German mentality. They have their own national schools and all linguistic rights, but that is not enough; they want an independent army of their own as if any state could allow its national minorities to keep and maintain independent armies. It is not only the Bourgeois element that wants an independent German army within the Czechoslovak Republic, but even the German Social Democrats include this claim in their political programme.
The same old monarchistic, reactionary and imperialistic spirit is cultivated and found everywhere among the Germans. It may take generations perhaps before the German mind will change. They consider the Paris peace treaty as a scrap of paper to be torn to pieces, whenever the first opportunity arises. The great pangerman ideas proclaimed during the war are not dead. The power of German militarism is of course broken, but the spirit that dominated Germany for generations is still alive. The western democracies ought to be well on their guard. There is as yet very little that is genuine and sincere in the so-called new German political orientation.