Czechs, with Britain acting as referee. Not long afterward, Hitler would talk about it in these terms:
“Why should I care about the British being involved? The filthy old dog is mad if he thinks he can con me like this!”
Wilson is surprised:
“If Herr Hitler is referring to the prime minister, I can assure him that the prime minister is not mad. He is simply interested in the outcome of the peace talks.”
Hitler then really lets loose:
“I’m not interested in what these ass-lickers say. The only thing that interests me is my people in the Sudetenland; my people who are tortured and assassinated by that vile queer Benes! I won’t take it any longer. It’s more than a good German can bear! Do you hear me, you stupid swine?”
So there is at least one point on which the Czechs and Germans were in agreement: Chamberlain and his clique were a bunch of ass-lickers.
Curiously, however, Chamberlain was far less offended by the German insults than by those of the Czechs. With hindsight, you’d have to say that’s a shame.
60
On August 21, 1938, Edouard Daladier, the French council president, gives an edifying speech on the radio:
Faced with authoritarian states who are arming and equipping themselves with no regard to the length of the working week, alongside democratic states who are striving to regain their prosperity and ensure their safety with a forty-eight-hour week, why should France—both more impoverished and more threatened—delay making the decisions on which our future depends? As long as the international situation remains so delicate, we must work more than forty hours per week, and as much as forty-eight hours in businesses linked to national defense.
Reading this transcription, I was reminded that putting the French back to work was the French right’s eternal fantasy. I was deeply shocked that these elitist reactionaries, understanding so little the true nature of the situation, would use the Sudeten crisis to settle their scores with the Popular Front. Bear in mind that in 1938, the editorials of the bourgeois newspapers shamelessly stigmatized those workers whose only concern was enjoying their paid holidays.
Just in time, however, my father reminded me that Daladier was a radical Socialist, and thus part of the Popular Front. I’ve just checked this, and staggeringly, it’s true: Daladier was the defense minister in Leon Blum’s government! I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. I can hardly bear to tell the story: Daladier, former defense minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defense not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week—one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. At this level of political stupidity, betrayal becomes almost a work of art.
61
On September 26, 1938, Hitler must deliver a speech to the crowds gathered at the Sportpalast in Berlin. He practices his speech on a British delegation who come to tell him that the Czechs have refused to evacuate the Sudetenland. “They treat the Germans like blacks! On October 1, I will do what I please with Czechoslovakia. If France and England decide to attack, let them go ahead! I couldn’t care less! It’s pointless to continue negotiations—they’re going nowhere!” And he leaves.
Then, on the podium, in front of his fanatical supporters:
For twenty years, the Germans of Czechoslovakia have been persecuted by the Czechs. For twenty years, the Germans of the Reich have watched this happen. They were forced to watch it: not because they accepted the situation, but because, being unarmed, they couldn’t help their brothers fight these torturers. Today, things are different. And the democracies of the world are up in arms! We have learned, during these years, not to trust the world’s democracies. In our time, only one state has shown itself to be a great European power, and at the head of this state, one man has understood the distress of our people: my great friend Benito Mussolini. [The crowd shouts
Mr. Benes is in Prague, and he thinks nothing can happen to him because he has the support of France and England. [Prolonged laughter.] My fellow countrymen, I believe the moment has come to speak clearly. Mr. Benes has seven million people behind him, and here we have seventy-five million. [Enthusiastic applause.] I assured the British prime minister that once this problem has been resolved, there will be no more territorial problems in Europe. We don’t want any Czechs in the Reich, but I tell the German people this: on the Sudeten question, my patience is at an end. Now it’s up to Mr. Benes whether he wants peace or war. Either he accepts our offer and gives the Sudeten Germans their freedom, or we will go and free them ourselves. Let the world be warned.
62
It’s during the Sudeten crisis that we have the first positive indications of the Fuhrer’s madness. At this time, the merest mention of Benes and the Czechs would send him into such a rage that he could lose all self-control. He was reportedly seen throwing himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Among people still hostile to Nazism, these demented fits quickly earned him the nickname Teppichfresser (“Carpet Eater”). I don’t know if he kept up this habit of crazed munching, or if the symptom disappeared after Munich. [3]
63
September 28, 1938: three days before the Munich Agreement. The world holds its breath. Hitler is more menacing than ever. The Czechs know that if they give up the natural barrier they call the Sudetenland, they are dead. Chamberlain declares: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”
64
Saint-John Perse belongs to that lineage of writer-diplomats, such as Claudel or Giraudoux, who fill me with disgust. In his case, this instinctive repugnance seems to me particularly justified. Consider his behavior during September 1938:
Alexis Leger (his real name, fittingly, as
