When in Rome...

[sidoze]

Yes, who can forget Professor Higgins in that opening scene of My Fair Lady!

I can, thankfully

[karlhenning]

The irony is, though, that if you say "thankfully," you haven't forgotten, have you? 

[PSmith08]

Yes, who can forget Professor Higgins in that opening scene of My Fair Lady!

But how will people know where the rain in Spain mainly stays if they can't speak English? They could go to the coast and expect a nice Summer storm, but never get it. Alas!

Everyone must learn English so they can find the rain in Spain.

[greg]

You should try living in London mate. When out you hear a different language every few minutes. And that's not from tourists, it's from people who live here.

i know what you mean, though here it's mainly just Spanish. Other than that, I've had a friend who used to speak Chinese during lunchtime (with his other friends), an old boss i had spoke some language, whatever they speak in Yugoslavia, and then you'll have restaurants with mainly Italian or Chinese people. But basically, it's rare to hear anything but English or Spanish here.
But my opinion is that if you know English and you're around a crowd, speak it. Practice it, it'll only do good. People should out of respect for those around them, though i'll admit it sure is fun listening to people talk and trying to guess what language they're speaking, or if you know it, what they're saying.


oh wait..... when i mean around here, i don't mean around the tourist areas. That's where EVERYONE in the world visits. A few weeks ago at SeaWorld there was this little kid with this fan, with his family who was Indian or something. But they were speaking I have no idea what, i'd say statistically it was likely to be Hindi. So the kid blows the fan in my face, but i don't say anything, i just smile at him since i don't even know if he knows English. I think they did say a little in English though... a lot of people in India do know English, don't they? They just have a strong accent, like the people who take your phone calls and you can't understand them.

[Kullervo]

You should try living in London mate. When out you hear a different language every few minutes. And that's not from tourists, it's from people who live here.

Blech, no thanks.

[JoshLilly]

The United States has no official language as a whole. Congress, and - likely - the American people, through a Constitutional amendment, would have to mandate English as the official national language before any requirements are made. Also, with the meteoric rise of Spanish in the American southwest (and in parts of states like Indiana), who's to say English will be the majority (or even plurality) language of the future? Shouldn't we just let the "linguistic market" determine the regional or even national linguae francae? To me, that seems less intrusive and more tolerant of social diversity. One can, to my mind, furthermore, create a base-line "American culture" without mandating language. I would rather have people who respect American cultures and tradition, and want to be part of that, regardless of language. Languages come and go. Cultural identity, once created, is hard to destroy.

I'm not sure I can agree with HedonismBot completely; perhaps it depends on when you ask. For example, if you asked even as recently as the early 1980s I would have said that a single "official" language was a good idea. How many countries on Earth have one? Even now, there should be official language(s), I think. Keep in mind that you aren't restricted to one, though. For example, Switzerland has four (German, Frenc, Italian, and Rhaeto-Romansch). I think it makes sense to do this, and always have. How can you function in your society, or it with you, if you don't even speak the local language?

By the way, in the United States, I think technically the Congress would not be able to do anything about this without a full Constitutional Amendment... each state is able to handle this on its own. Indeed, of the 49 states several have already passed laws making English their official language, and of those several have two official languages: Hawaiian in Hawaii, French in Louisiana, Spanish in New Mexico, and Yorkese in New York.

[M forever]

Yorkese?

[Bonehelm]

I'm with M forever on this, immigrants could/should preserve their cultural traits and whatnot (including language) when they move...it is what makes a place diversified...if the black slaves forgot everything about their music there wouldn't be jazz or even rock in USA.

[PSmith08]

I'm not sure I can agree with HedonismBot completely; perhaps it depends on when you ask. For example, if you asked even as recently as the early 1980s I would have said that a single "official" language was a good idea. How many countries on Earth have one? Even now, there should be official language(s), I think. Keep in mind that you aren't restricted to one, though. For example, Switzerland has four (German, Frenc, Italian, and Rhaeto-Romansch). I think it makes sense to do this, and always have. How can you function in your society, or it with you, if you don't even speak the local language?

It depends on how you define your society. If your society is a Spanish-speaking neighborhood (or French, or German, or Dutch) and you are employed there, live there, and can attend to all your needs there, then knowing English would be useless. Language, without a proper context, which America does not have, is useless. It means nothing without context. Speaking in soul-crushingly boring terms, Deleuze and Guattari have shown in their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature how the use of a majority language in no way guarantees cultural unity and cohesion. In fact, with context, it can be seen as a deeply subversive act. A Jewish Czech using German is a tenuous situation, speaking from a semiotic perspective. If you look at language and its uses as socially constructed, then you see how it is impossible to think of language as a unifying factor. As long as different cultures exist, there will be different languages, or dialects, at the least. America is built on plurality. You see my thrust, then. That is, by its nature, America lacks the necessary conditions for a "national" language. Bureaucracy needs a unified language, but confusing bureaucracy with culture is a mistake which will destroy utterly the latter.

[JoshLilly]

Yes, which is why I don't completely disagree with HedonismBot, either. It's these pockets of pulled cultures that band together and become so large that many of their members need not even speak English. This is hardly unique to the United States, but it appears that in other places where this is heavily common, the people end up learning the local language at a higher rate. Hmm... now someone's going to ask my source on this statement, but I can't recall any. Maybe it just seems that way to me for some reason, like the person I worked with who lived 20 years in Brazil talked about it. He was originally from Taiwan, and in the big Brazilian cities there's "Little Germany", "Little China", so on. Maybe being legally "forced" to learn the language would change things, I don't know. I'm not advocating anything one way or another, but I do think it makes sense if everyone within a country could speak to each other. Of course, some countries like Switzerland can't reasonably expect this. Technically, the United States shouldn't either, considering what it gobbled up during its expansions over the years (French, Spanish, and who knows how many various languages of the mostly-vanished natives).

[MishaK]

...an old boss i had spoke some language, whatever they speak in Yugoslavia, ...

That would depend on which part of the former Yugoslavia. The old Yugoslavia had three official languages: Serbo-Croatian (these days known officially as Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian - same thing, four main dialects, two different alphabets), Slovene and Macedonian and two recognized minority languages, which, however, weren't "official" languages: Hungarian and Albanian.

As to the main topic of the thread, having been an immigrant in two different countries, I see absolutely no reason why one shouldn't learn the local language. It's an intellectual enrichment one way or another.

As to MT's point, I disagree with the "leaving baggage behind" and blending in. It's a very American perspective in that in the US it is actually possible to just forget one's heritage and completely blend in - at least if you're white - because it is not an ethnic nation, but a political nation. In most other countries that simply doesn't work. You are always identified by your ethnicity and even if you are born there and speak as good or better than the locals, you are always considered something separate and in most places you have to work twice as hard as the locals to gain recognition. So forgetting your native tongue and just blending in is just not a realistic possibility in most places. Never mind that by rejecting your native language you are depriving yourself and your offspring of a rich cultural and intellectual experience that can give you a perspective the locals lack.

[mahlertitan]

Since we are talking about Immigrants, people who for one reason or another is immigrating to a new country for good.

then, it is imperative for him/her to assimilate ASAP, because he/she is going to live in this place forever. Of course, no matter how he/she "drop" their culture, it's only on the surface; if you lived in Japan for a long time, it is doubtful you can just drop your Japanese heritage. But, for your best interest, when you are going out and meeting new people and interacting with locals, it is imperative for you to "Drop" your heritage at these circumstances. You can still teach your children your mother tongue, your heritage.

I am just speaking from a practical point of view, i have nothing against multi-culturalism. Suppose a newly immigrated person comes up to me ask for advice on how to fit in, this is the advice that i would give him/her.

[MishaK]

then, it is imperative for him/her to assimilate ASAP, because he/she is going to live in this place forever. Of course, no matter how he/she "drop" their culture, it's only on the surface; if you lived in Japan for a long time, it is doubtful you can just drop your Japanese heritage. But, for your best interest, when you are going out and meeting new people and interacting with locals, it is imperative for you to "Drop" your heritage at these circumstances. You can still teach your children your mother tongue, your heritage.

I fully understand what you're saying, but you are presenting a very American perspective. Except perhaps in Australia, Canada and maybe Chile - and even in those cases, mostly for white people only - that process can't be replicated. You are treated differently on the basis of your ethnicity in most places around the globe, since most places are ethnic nation states, where nation is defined through blood line.

You also forget that many immigrants don't immigrate with the intention of staying forever. Apart from places like the US which have built up a whole national mythology around attracting immigrants to stay forever, many people move temporarily at first, for better job prospects, to earn some money to build a house in their homeland etc. Often the temporary move turns into a permanent one more as a result of the inertia of the new lives they have started than as a result of any long term planning. So, psychologically a lot of immigrants don't approach immigration with the idea that the move is for good and that they therefore have to blend in and assimilate.

[Larry Rinkel]

Yorkese?

Zum Beispiel:

[mahlertitan]

yes, i do have a heavy American Bias, because i really haven't been living in other nations. So, consider my comments only valid in America, other countries i don't know.

[M forever]

Speaking in soul-crushingly boring terms, Deleuze and Guattari have shown in their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature how the use of a majority language in no way guarantees cultural unity and cohesion. In fact, with context, it can be seen as a deeply subversive act. A Jewish Czech using German is a tenuous situation, speaking from a semiotic perspective.

Huh? I don't know how boring that is, but it's just simply wrong. Kafka wasn't Czech, he was Bohemian German. Bohemia and Moravia were part of the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy during most of his life. The region was inhabited by both "ethnic" Czechs and Germans for centuries until the Germans got kicked out after WWII.

I know it's a little complicated. People often confuse modern political configurations with historical ones. And it really is very complicated once you get down into the detail. I think Bohemia at that time was something like a kingdom and the Habsburg Emperor in Vienna simply had it as part of his massive collection of territories. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was really more the private possession of the Habsburg dynasty than a coherent state. Actually, since 1867, it was technically two states since, at least in theory, Hungary then became something like an equal state to Austria. That's why it was called the "double monarchy". But more in theory than in reality. The status of all the dependent territories was more defined by what role the Habsburg dynasty played there than that they were technically part of Austria. Which they weren't. The Habsburgers had a serious collecting habit.

Which means, BTW, it is also wrong to identify Mahler as "Austrian". He wasn't. No more than Dvořák who wasn't "Austrian" either. But they were both subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But Mahler shared his mother language with all the Austrians and Germans. Seeing himself as part of a Jewish minority in a German minority among a Czech majority in a region which was itself a minor part of a big multi-national empire, his sense of "national identity" was a complex question for himself, to say the least.

Anyway, there is nothing deeply subversive about Kafka writing in German. That was simply his mother language and it also was more practical because there was a much bigger potential readership for literature in German than in Czech (and still is). But he also spoke Czech, apparently completely fluently.

It would have been more "interesting" if he had chosen to write in Czech, as part of a German minority in a region in which at that time a strong desire to become independent of the (German speaking) Austrian existed - a desire mostly felt by the Czech speaking part of the population.
But he didn't.

[lukeottevanger]

Huh? I don't know how boring that is, but it's just simply wrong. Kafka wasn't Czech, he was Bohemian German. Bohemia and Moravia were part of the Austro-Hungarian double monarchy during most of his life. The region was inhabited by both "ethnic" Czechs and Germans for centuries until the Germans got kicked out after WWII.

I know it's a little complicated. People often confuse modern political configurations with historical ones. And it really is very complicated once you get down into the detail. I think Bohemia at that time was something like a kingdom and the Habsburg Emperor in Vienna simply had it as part of his massive collection of territories. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was really more the private possession of the Habsburg dynasty than a coherent state. Actually, since 1867, it was technically two states since, at least in theory, Hungary then became something like an equal state to Austria. That's why it was called the "double monarchy". But more in theory than in reality. The status of all the dependent territories was more defined by what role the Habsburg dynasty played there than that they were technically part of Austria. Which they weren't. The Habsburgers had a serious collecting habit.

Which means, BTW, it is also wrong to identify Mahler as "Austrian". He wasn't. No more than Dvořák who wasn't "Austrian" either. But they were both subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But Mahler shared his mother language with all the Austrians and Germans. Seeing himself as part of a Jewish minority in a German minority among a Czech majority in a region which was itself a minor part of a big multi-national empire, his sense of "national identity" was a complex question for himself, to say the least.

Anyway, there is nothing deeply subversive about Kafka writing in German. That was simply his mother language and it also was more practical because there was a much bigger potential readership for literature in German than in Czech (and still is). But he also spoke Czech, apparently completely fluently.

It would have been more "interesting" if he had chosen to write in Czech, as part of a German minority in a region in which at that time a strong desire to become independent of the (German speaking) Austrian existed - a desire mostly felt by the Czech speaking part of the population.
But he didn't.

Just FWIW, and not sure how or if it really relates to what you are saying, my mother's parents, who both came from the exact same German-speaking-Jewish-Bohemian-Czech millieu you describe Kafka coming from - in fact my Grandfather's uncle was Max Brod himself (Brod, btw, being situated in both 'worlds' very strongly) - considered themselves to be Czech even though they hardly knew the language.

[M forever]

That doesn't seem to make too much sense though, does it? Especially when they didn't really speak Czech.
But it starts to make more sense when you start looking at it from a post-1918 perspective. Which means it has very little to do with the situation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire I described. In fact, it illustrates what I said, namely how later terminology becomes confused with earlier uses.

In 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and the CSSR was created. The Czech independence movement, like similar movements in other places, was fiercely nationalistic because that was what mostly set them apart from the (German speaking) Austrian "overlords" and it provided a "justification" to have their own state - remember, in monarchic times, nationality didn't really matter as "argument" for a state to be united since it was the monarchic rulership configurations that mattered) as well as a common bond for the new citizens in their new state.

That meant that Germans now found themselves in the role of second class citizens, and they were often treated like that. Which is the main reason why later, most of these wanted to be part of Germany and welcomed the annexion of the Sudetenland by Hitler, no matter if they agreed with NS ideologies in general or not.

While the new Czechoslovakian state was under way, radical nationalists in Germany decided that it was somehow not possible to be Jewish and German at the same time. You may have heard about that. You may also have heard that these differences in definition were not left at discussions about terminology, but that they became a matter of life and death and world war (among other factors, of course). Parts of the Czech and especially Slovakian population were also rather more enthusiastic in helping the German occupiers round up and deport Jews than they were later ready to admit. Then after the war, all the remaining Germans were driven out of the CSSR, and that ended centuries of German-Czech coexistence in that area.

But it did not make "terminology" any easier. Especially immigrants to other countries (which your grandparents may have been) found that being somehow German, from Bohemia or anywhere else, Jewish or not, was simply not cool anymore, especially when they emigrated to countries which had been at war with Germany (which may have been your grandparents' case) and they often found that their new fellow countrymen did not really make a distinction between Jewish Germans who were clearly victimized, Germans in general who may or may not have supported the dictatorship, and nationalist Germans who clearly were victimizers. All Germans were just bad, period.

So it was not at all uncommon for people of that generation with that background to just reject their background completely and stop explaining that they were German, but had been CSSR citizens at one point and had been treated as second class citizens, but then they were persecuted by their fellow Germans who had decided they weren't really German after all, so they weren't the bad Germans who started the war. And then after the war, they were the bad Germans anyway, so they were driven out.

That's waaaaaay too much explaining to do, and a lot of people just got tired of it. And after all, had they not been told by other Germans they weren't really German? Had they not been told that they were second class citizens before that by their Czech compatriots, and that should rather assimilate with the Czech population? And now they lived in a new country and got put down again, after all, they were Germans, so the war and all that must have been their fault.

A lot of people from this kind of background lived through several major breaks of their ethnic and cultural identity, so much that they didn't really know anymore at the end what they were "supposed" to be.

I have no idea if that, or something similar to that, is what happened to your grandparents, you would have to tell us more about that. But it was a very common reality for many millions of people in those dark times.

Still, that doesn't have that much to do with the pre-1918 reality I described. Well, of course, things didn't change from one day to the next. All these conflicts had been slowly brewing for a long time before that, and elements of that can be seen everywhere. And the basic situation also continued in many respects for a while after 1918 before everything blew up.

Which you can see by the fact that Brod, AFAIK, mostly wrote in German, and he continued to do so after 1918, and even 1939.

[lukeottevanger]

That doesn't seem to make too much sense though, does it? Especially when they didn't really speak Czech.
But it starts to make more sense when you start looking at it from a post-1918 perspective. Which means it has very little to do with the situation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire I described. In fact, it illustrates what I said, namely how later terminology becomes confused with earlier uses.

In 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and the CSSR was created. The Czech independence movement, like similar movements in other places, was fiercely nationalistic because that was what mostly set them apart from the (German speaking) Austrian "overlords" and it provided a "justification" to have their own state - remember, in monarchic times, nationality didn't really matter as "argument" for a state to be united since it was the monarchic rulership configurations that mattered) as well as a common bond for the new citizens in their new state.

That meant that Germans now found themselves in the role of second class citizens, and they were often treated like that. Which is the main reason why later, most of these wanted to be part of Germany and welcomed the annexion of the Sudetenland by Hitler, no matter if they agreed with NS ideologies in general or not.

While the new Czechoslovakian state was under way, radical nationalists in Germany decided that it was somehow not possible to be Jewish and German at the same time. You may have heard about that. You may also have heard that these differences in definition were not left at discussions about terminology, but that they became a matter of life and death and world war (among other factors, of course). Parts of the Czech and especially Slovakian population were also rather more enthusiastic in helping the German occupiers round up and deport Jews than they were later ready to admit. Then after the war, all the remaining Germans were driven out of the CSSR, and that ended centuries of German-Czech coexistence in that area.

But it did not make "terminology" any easier. Especially immigrants to other countries (which your grandparents may have been) found that being somehow German, from Bohemia or anywhere else, Jewish or not, was simply not cool anymore, especially when they emigrated to countries which had been at war with Germany (which may have been your grandparents' case) and they often found that their new fellow countrymen did not really make a distinction between Jewish Germans who were clearly victimized, Germans in general who may or may not have supported the dictatorship, and nationalist Germans who clearly were victimizers. All Germans were just bad, period.

So it was not at all uncommon for people of that generation with that background to just reject their background completely and stop explaining that they were German, but had been CSSR citizens at one point and had been treated as second class citizens, but then they were persecuted by their fellow Germans who had decided they weren't really German after all, so they weren't the bad Germans who started the war. And then after the war, they were the bad Germans anyway, so they were driven out.

That's waaaaaay too much explaining to do, and a lot of people just got tired of it. And after all, had they not been told by other Germans they weren't really German? Had they not been told that they were second class citizens before that by their Czech compatriots, and that should rather assimilate with the Czech population? And now they lived in a new country and got put down again, after all, they were Germans, so the war and all that must have been their fault.

A lot of people from this kind of background lived through several major breaks of their ethnic and cultural identity, so much that they didn't really know anymore at the end what they were "supposed" to be.

I have no idea if that, or something similar to that, is what happened to your grandparents, you would have to tell us more about that. But it was a very common reality for many millions of people in those dark times.

Still, that doesn't have that much to do with the pre-1918 reality I described. Well, of course, things didn't change from one day to the next. All these conflicts had been slowly brewing for a long time before that, and elements of that can be seen everywhere. And the basic situation also continued in many respects for a while after 1918 before everything blew up.

Which you can see by the fact that Brod, AFAIK, mostly wrote in German, and he continued to do so after 1918, and even 1939.

Thanks, M, for that detailed response. I suppose I was too close to the particular situation of my grandparents to be able to take a longer view, as for instance the one you propose here. I just always accepted that as far as nationality and allegiance went they were 100% Czech, to be more precise, western-Czech (Bohemian). I know that this identification with the Czech nation was deep and predated WWII - I recall, for instance, that one of my Grandmother's earlier memories was of the joy and anticipation that she felt around her at the rise to power of Masaryk . However, certainly there must have been some kind of disjunction - they certainly didn't feel 'ethnically' Czech, and part of their love for the country was that as (non-religious) Jews they felt safer and more protected in an independent Czechoslovakia, I think.

Culturally, of course, they were Bohemians, in the geographical sense of the word, if one extends it somewhat to cover both the western Czech lands and the adjacent areas of Germany and Austria - their musical lives, for instance, were centred around Mozart, Schubert, Dvorak. But essentially they felt rooted in the small area of Czechoslovakia defined by my grandmother's hometown of Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) and my grandfather's hometown, Prague.

Of course, they had to leave Prague, which they managed to do, just, in 1938. The many members of their families who they had to leave behind were all killed. They settled in Yorkshire and it too became home for them, in a very deep and genuine sense (they learnt English very quickly, FWIW!). They were eternally and fervently grateful to Britain, and more specifically to the people who took them in and helped them through their hard first years here, becoming almost substitute families in their turn.

Which you can see by the fact that Brod, AFAIK, mostly wrote in German, and he continued to do so after 1918, and even 1939.

Very true. But he's an interesting figure because he was very open to Czech-speaking and Eastern Czech culture too - witness the important role he played for Janacek and for Hasek, for instance.

[M forever]

Sure, being deeply rooted in and actively contributing to one culture does not necessarily mean not appreciating another. On the contrary, people who do have a deep understanding of and relationship to their own culture usually have much more appreciation for other cultures than those who don't. There already were a lot of people Brod back then who were able to look over their own garden fence - but unfortunately not enough by far. Simplistic and fanatic nationalism was the flavor of the day. And not just among Germans or Czechs or Slovaks - basically everywhere. I guess it had to take one more world war for the majority of people to figure out that all that simply doesn't make sense.
Although then nationalist fronts were replaced by ideological ones for yet another round of staring each
other down - this time in a relatively cold war, fortunately.

Thanks, M, for that detailed response. I suppose I was too close to the particular situation of my grandparents to be able to take a longer view, as for instance the one you propose here. I just always accepted that as far as nationality and allegiance went they were 100% Czech, to be more precise, western-Czech (Bohemian). I know that this identification with the Czech nation was deep and predated WWII - I recall, for instance, that one of my Grandmother's earlier memories was of the joy and anticipation that she felt around her at the rise to power of Masaryk . However, certainly there must have been some kind of disjunction - they certainly didn't feel 'ethnically' Czech, and part of their love for the country was that as (non-religious) Jews they felt safer and more protected in an independent Czechoslovakia, I think.

Obviously, I have no idea what your grandmother thought, and we are not discussing individual opinions and fates here, but the relationship of immigrants to host countries and ethnic and cultural diversity within one political country - for which all this is actual a great and highly complex example -, so I don't want to get too fixated on details here, but I have to tell you there *may* have happened some extensive rewriting in her mind - completely understandable after all that people like her had to go through.


Fact is (and it actually an amazingly little known fact) that the *vast* majority of Germans in the Bohemian and Moravian crown territories as they were known during the Austro-Hungarian did not want the areas in which Germans were the majority to become part of Czechoslovakia.

In fact, extensive areas, mostly the province Deutschböhmen (99+% Germans) in which Karlsbad in located, the Sudetenland in central Bohemia and Moravia (95% Germans), extensive territories along the Bavarian border (at that time still part of Oberösterreich, but later taken away and added to Czechoslovakia - 99+% Germans there, too) and some smaller areas declared themselves *not* part of Czechoslovakia and desired to be part of the newly proclaimed Republik Deutschösterreich.

That was ignored in Versailles and these areas were given to Czechoslovakia where, despite the sizeable German population and contrary to given promises, Czech became and remained the only official language.
Equally ignored was the desire of a strong part of the Austrian population to become part of the new German republic. That made sense to a lot of people, if everybody else gets their national state, and now that the Austro-Hungarian Empire is gone, why not unite Germany and Austria? These had never been seen as too entirely separate things anyway.
Austria was not Austria as opposed to Germany, but Austria was seen as one of many German states - not in the sense of belonging to the German Empire - although that had been the first proposition after the revolution of 1848, in fact, many demanded that the new German Empire should be led by Austria - but in the sense of one of many states with a German speaking population, like Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, etc, not something somehow entirely separate.

So, I think it is unlikely that your grandmother felt a whole lot of joy and anticipation around her when Masaryk came to power. Certainly not from fellow German speaking people, Jewish or not. Jews were not systematically persecuted in Austria or the German Empire, so here was nothing concrete for them to fear at that time. In fact, Jews were more integrated in Prussia than probably anywhere else and could rise to very high and respected positions, and in the Weimar Republic, too. At that time, nobody could have foreseen what happened after 1933.

Masaryk tried to moderate, but it was his clear aim to keep the German majority territories instead of respecting their own wishes, and he did not come through with promises to give them more say in Czechoslovakia, including making German an official language. Plus he made some rather anti-German comments which did not sit too well with them and Czech troops occupied part of those territories. There is no reason at all to think that German speaking Jews in Czechoslovakia had any more love left for their new homeland which was forced on them just as on the non-Jewish Germans.

Later, after 1933 and especially after 1938 (annexion of Austria), that situation obviously changed, and the idea that those territories could and most likely would become part of Germany - which indeed happened in 1939 - must have been a terrible prospect for Jews in Czechoslovakia, and that most likely caused a strong but new found allegiance to the Czechoslovakian state among German Jews in those areas. I guess that very conveniently played towards Nazi desires to alienate German Jews and non-Jews - the vast majority of which wanted to become part of Germany. What a messy situation. And obviously, you know what happened later.

I can completely understand that people who were in the midst of all this and who got out just in time and eventually found a new and safe homeland somewhere else (for instance in England) would feel the deep need to distance themselves from their German connections. All the more since they were then living among people who had fought against Germany in the war and who most likely had no understanding of or time for the complexity of the situation.

Although the idea that an assumed Czech identity and declared allegiance to Czechoslovakia would solve that problem is really just a fantasy, sorry. In fact, during the occupation, many national Czechs were only all too willing to help the German occupiers to get rid of the Jews and confiscate their property. In Slovakia, the SS was actually *paid* to deport the Jews because they didn't want to take them at first. I kid you not.
And the very few Jews from those regions who survived the death camps returned after the war only to find that the Czechoslovakian state was more interested in making them climb over bureaucratic hurdles than to help them get their property back.

But these horrible events are not at all representative for the German-Czech situation in general as it applied to the majority of the population there for a very long time.

BTW, the percentages given above are based on censuses done before and after the war and the numbers reflect not what bureaucrats decided people were "supposed" to be, but as "what" people declared themselves.

Culturally, of course, they were Bohemians, in the geographical sense of the word, if one extends it somewhat to cover both the western Czech lands and the adjacent areas of Germany and Austria - their musical lives, for instance, were centred around Mozart, Schubert, Dvorak. But essentially they felt rooted in the small area of Czechoslovakia defined by my grandmother's hometown of Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) and my grandfather's hometown, Prague.

There is actually no need to overextend the definition of Bohemia to cover the adjacent areas of Germany and Austria in order to explain the cultural affinities felt by them. In fact, it just confuses more.
Bohemia was and is what it is, the connecting factor between these areas in a cultural sense is the common language spoken and the culture shared by people in Bohemia, Bavaria, Saxony, Austria, Prussia, and all the other places where German people lived and/or live. These were actually very diverse cultural microclimates under one "umbrella" culture, and that is one of the factors which explains the very broad spectrum of cultural achievements, for instance of music, from those German speaking areas.

In Bohemia, that microclimate was particularly complex because of the close co-existence of two different "ethnic" groups with two very different languages, yet largely a shared culture. Bohemia and Moravia were the areas in which "German" and "Slavic" cultures touched most closely and flowed into each other, a fascinatingly rich and complex cultural relationship which got brutally torn apart by nasty political upheavals. But there are still so many elements which appear in both cultures and now that hopefully all that nastiness is over, it is particularly interesting to rediscover all that.

Although the continuity never completely stopped, because of the close association of Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia during communist times. One element which I grew up with, for instance, were the wonderful Czech children's and fairy tale movies which we could watch on East German TV (I lived in West Berlin) and which preserved a lot of the ages old local traditions of Bohemia, a place which is fairy tale country like no other, full of deep forests and old castles. It is also that complexity which is mirrored in many aspects of Mahler's music and the literary material he took inspiration from, one of he many reasons I find Mahler so interesting - his musical worlds allow us a look into a rich and complex cultural past which almost got destroyed.
And so does Dvořák's music, I absolutely love his fairy tale tone poems for that exact reason - and BTW, Mahler totally dug them, too.