Evening star., 1941-02-20
New Volume Tells
About Aspiring Nation
Twenty-Five Writers
CoIIoborute in Book
On Bohemia
Bp BLAIR BOLLES.

J. Kerner, professor of modern Euro
pean history. University of California.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press.
This book serves to remind us, as we
| give ourselves over to wonder about
| the Germans next move against Eng
land and Berlin's intentions regarding
the Balkans that buried in the center
of Europe are a people who tried for
two decades to conduct a state which
was dedicated to the wisdom, the in
| tegrity and the virtue Of the individual
man. In the eastern half OF Europe there
was no country in the post World War
years of which it truly could be said that
| it was q democracy except Czecho-Slo-
| vakia. There the plain man howered.
There no resort was had in exigency to
deSpotic measures. There popular gov
ernment f1ourished. There, today, Adolf
Hitler permits no foreign observers, lest
they learn how many German soldiers
1t takes to hold down the Czechs.
The Republic of Czecho-Slovakia was
wounded fatally at Munich through q
SldFC CllBlISll 'AA VAAN
republic be revived at the peace con-
ference which adjudicates the issues of
the present war? If England wins, we
already have signs that it will be.
England Is haven for a Czech exile
government (Which the United States
does not recognize) And the late Neville
Chamberlain, the man who was duped
at Munich, said that "the independence
of the - . Czechs must be secured" as
one of the aims of the war.
The book edited by DR.. Kerner, the
collaboration of % men and women,
calls forcibly to our attention reasons
why Czecho-Slovakia should be revived
1t begins with an essay on Czech
anthropology by DR.. Ales Hrdlicka of
the Smithsonian Institution. 1t carries
US to that awful night of March IA,
1899, when President Hacha, an old man,
was chased about a table in the Berlin
Chancellery by Nazis who at last forced
country into German protectorate. 1t
ends with the words Of the greatest OF
modern Czech prose writer's, Karel
Capek: "Never can nation be called
small whose faith is great enough to
build a greater future"
mo more difficult problem will con-
front the makers of peace" DR.. Berna-
dotte Schmitt of the University of
Chicago writes in his chapter, than TO
devise an arrangement by which these
gifted and heroic people can obtain
political independence and economic
security, play their part in the cultural
life of Europe, and at the same time
achieve satisfactory and friendly rela-
tions with their German, Magyar and
Polish neighbors."
DisSension between Czech and Ger
man is as old as the fifth century. The
Slavic wanderers from the Vistula basin
who entered then into what we call
Bohemia had to dispute that land with
the Marcomanni a Germanic tribe
which in time was wiped out in the
defeat of Atilla. the Hun. From the
Battle of White Mountain in 1920 to
the arnistice of 1918 the Bohenians
the Moravians, the Slovaks and the
Ruthenians, who formed the Czech
Republic. were subiec: to Austria and
Austria Hungary. Versailles freed them
from the German yoke, which now is
reinstituted-from Berlin instead of
Vienna.
Hans Kohn OF Smith College writes
that for Frantisek Palacky, the Czech
nationalist historian Q7e8-1876) the
essence and meaning of Czech history
was the opposition between the CZechs
and the Germans not in the sense so
much of political struggle, and GER
talnly not in the sense of Warlike con-
f1ictS, but as a differentiation based upon
moral ideas and national PSYCHOLOGISTS.
Roughly, 1t may be said that the Ger
mans represented the authoritarian and
aristocratic principles, the Czechs the
liberal and the democratic"
Palacky wrote about a century ago.
Will some great man come forward to
show the world how the opposition is to
be resolved? Germany now represents
'the authoritarian principles with inf
nitely more intensity than was true in
1910. 1t is easy to hope that the
millennium's arrival only awaits a de-
cisive English triumph.
Some men think that CZechs are
truculent and bellicose in their personal
relations with each other and with nom
CzechS. But DR.. Hrdlicka, a Czech him.
self, holds that his fellows are worthy
of enlisting our sympathy on the ground
on personableness as well as for their
faith in mankind. This is his summation
of the Czech personality:
Their principal mental characteristics
are cordiality, sensitiveness, idealism,
valor, love of family. love of country, love
of music and the dance, love of friendly
social amenities. Also, they exhibit con-
siderable individualism, ingrained love of
the soil and all that goes with it, of
order and cleanliness. And there is a
universal hunger for knowledge, which
leads to higher education of many of
the children.
"The Czecho-Slovaks are industrious
and thrifty. Their sense of humor and
their idealism are above the general
average, their criminality is virtually re-
stricted to the mentally abnormal. They
are not good money makers, nor in
general good politicians, or largescale
traders, having but infrequent inclina-
tion in this direction; but they excel
in music, art, science and literature.