From Greatness to Ruins: The Hundred Years Between "The German Minority in Czechoslovakia" by Wacław Junosza (1929) and the Present

This paper offers a critical reflection on the article “Mniejszość niemiecka w Czechosłowacji” [The German Minority in Czechoslovakia] by Wacław Junosza, published in Sprawy Narodowościowe in 1929. The article under discussion provides an overview of civic associations of the German-speaking minority in the interwar First Czechoslovak Republic. The present study deepens this perspective by looking at contemporaneous reflections on ethnic relations and current academic research on this period of Czechoslovak history. Referring to examples from the spheres of education and industry, which are covered by Junosza, the author examines the possibilities and limits of the coexistence of national groups in Czechoslovakia. The present work focuses on periods both before and after the 1920s: it shows how clear national categories used by Junosza were created, and how inequalities and struggles between these invented national categories led to the fall of multinational Czechoslovakia.