The Czech Prussians and the Rothschild gates
A walk around a strange little bit of central Europe
There are a few oddities along the Czech-Polish frontier that I didn’t cover in the published version of Borderlines. There is Kłodzko (Glatz), a shovel-shaped promontory of what is now Poland but before 1945 was Germany; it was the one anomalous county of Bohemia that was annexed by Prussia in the 18th Century and it was, like Teschen, a subject of dispute between the successor states in 1919 and the Czechs pressed their claims to no avail in 1945 as well. Stalin, in one of the maps he doodled new borders on in 1944-45, scored a heavy line across the neck of the Kłodzko salient indicating that he favoured the Czech claim, but he did not persist with the idea. There are tunnels under Kłodzko’s town centre, precise knowledge of which was lost when the German population was expelled in 1945. The tunnels made themselves apparent in the 1950s as buildings subsided, and had to be remapped by Polish student speleologists.
Map: Czech-Polish border region via OpenStreetMap - the Kłodzko salient is left of centre, the Hultschiner Land is further south west, half way between Olomouc (CZ) and Bytom (PL).
My favourite anomaly in this part of the world is Hlučín(Hultschin), the only bit of pre-1918 Germany that was transferred to Czechoslovakia in the Treaty of Versailles. The Hlučinsko (Hultschiner Landchen) is a small, gently hilly parcel of land, home to fewer than 50,000 people. I walked from one side of it to the other in a few hours one bright, late winter day in 2019. Its northern boundary, now with Poland but then with Germany, was drawn specially – before Versailles the area had just been the southern part of the county around Ratibor (Raciborz).
Czechoslovak forces taking possession of Hlučin/ Hultschin in February 1920 Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Allies’ decision was based on that misleading and troubling idea of ‘first language’ determining nationality; most people in the region were classified as speaking a variant of Czech while only 10 per cent were primarily German-speaking. But this was highly misleading, in that most people were bilingual or spoke some hybrid Silesian dialect as their home language, or both. People were grumpy and unenthusiastic when they were incorporated into Czechoslovakia, and their resentments increased with the clumsy closure of nearly all the German-medium schools. Despite its linguistic Czechness, Hlučín voted consistently for ‘German’ parties in inter-war elections.
Map: The division of Teschen and the Hultschiner Land 1918-20
The Munich Agreement which allowed Nazi Germany to annex German-speaking border areas of Czechoslovakia (the so-called ‘Sudetenland’) led to a large chunk of Czech Silesia changing hands. The regional capital of Opava (Troppau) went to Germany, as did the Hlučín area. Even though most people in the little region spoke Czech, they were not unwilling to be transferred into Germany in 1938 and enlisted fairly readily in the Wehrmacht in 1939. The locals were, as in most areas where Germans were incorporated into the Nazi Reich in 1938-39, lost in an ecstatic nationalist fever-dream.
The Munich agreement, under which Hultschin returned to Germany, celebrated in a Nazi propaganda postcard. Source: Tourist centre.
Violent nationalism was an aberration in Hlučín’s history. National identities were, really, always blurred in Upper and Teschen Silesia, and this meant that more of the population stayed in place during the upheavals of the 20th Century than in the Bohemian Sudetenland. Even though the people identifying most strongly with Germany would have left in the years after 1918 and 1945, there is still a unusual fondness for Germany among people in Hlučín and in Zaolzie, just as there is in Katowice, among people who would not be classified as ethnic Germans.
Hlučín’s Prussian German past is still there in its mental and cultural landscape. Its people sometimes call themselves Prajzaci (Prussians) and pride themselves on their tidiness, industriousness and neat houses. The period under the German Empire was associated in popular memory with progress and prosperity,[1] compared to the harsher times when the broader region was divided between Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia and trade barriers appeared. While primary national identities were Polish or Czech, there was often a German family connection and traces of the once widespread relationship in central Europe between using German and being a person of education and culture. Many Hlučín Prussians and Zaolzie Silesian Poles will cheer for the German football team, like their counterparts among Katowice Silesians. The town is home to a bilingual project ‘Halloradio Hultschin’, an internet radio station broadcasting in German and Czech and taking an interest in German and non-German minority communities across central Europe. German reunions and commemorations have been taking place for longer, and in a less furtive atmosphere, than elsewhere in ex-German Czech lands.
A century later, there are still some physical as well as cultural clues that Hlučín was once in imperial Germany. The giveaway is the water tower near the station, a sturdy concrete structure built in 1913 with windows in the ‘sleepy eye’ style that one sees in a lot of German buildings of that period. Wherever Kaiser Bill’s writ ran, there are these functional monuments – lumpish but pleasing and mildly ridiculous, like monsters that really want a cuddle and a snooze. They are all over places like Gliwice and even in the hinterlands of Kaliningrad.
Hlučín water tower and station (LSB, 2019)
The last village in Hlučínsko, before crossing the Polish border is Silherovice (Schillersdorf). I did not know anything about it when I first set foot in it, but it has an interesting history. Anselm Rothschild bought the castle (very much a comfortable zamek rather than a functional hrad) in 1844 and the Rothschilds made numerous improvements to the castle and the village during their tenure of the castle which lasted until they were expropriated in 1945. From 1945 until the 2000s the castle was used in the way that many stately homes were under communism – a children’s home, a training centre. It has been renovated, and is now used in stereotypically capitalist ways – a wedding venue and a golf club. The border runs along the far end of the estate. It was Prussian on both sides when Anselm bought the castle, a German-Czech border with people who identified as German on both sides from 1919 to 1938, not a border again for seven years, and then a closed border between Poland and a still slightly Germanic corner of Czechoslovakia. Now it is open and free. The gateway, with its wrought iron Rothschild monogram, has stood there throughout, sometimes forlorn and lonely and crumbling, out of favour for being aristocratic or Jewish or German, but having lasted longer than any line on the map has managed.
[1] Radio Praha 2 January 2004 Prussian Past, EU Present: The “German” Czechs of Hlucin Rob Cameron via https://www.radio.cz/en/section/ice_special/prussian-past-eu-present-the-german-czechs-of-hlucin