The Munich Crisis, politics and the people: International, transnational and comparative perspectives

By Manchester University Press

The Munich Crisis of 1938 had major diplomatic as well as personal and psychological repercussions. As much as it was a climax in the clash between dictatorship and democracy, it was also a People’s Crisis and an event that gripped and worried the people around the world. The traditional approach has been to examine the crisis from the vantage points of high politics and diplomacy. Traditional approaches have failed to acknowledge the profound social, cultural and psychological impacts of diplomatic events, an imbalance that is redressed in this volume. Taking a range of national examples and using a variety of methods, The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People recreates the experience of living through the crisis in Czechoslovakia, Germany, France, Britain, Hungary, the Soviet Union and the USA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526138101

Book preview

Introduction

Julie V. Gottlieb, Daniel Hucker and Richard Toye

In his 1945 world-federalist manifesto, The Anatomy of Peace, the writer, publicist and literary agent Emery Reves described the events of the interwar years from the perspective of each of the major powers. His purpose was to show how viewing one’s own country as the centre of the universe created a distorted picture of reality, and his ingenious sketch illustrated how each nation self-righteously perceived its own actions as morally justified. For the USA, virtuously keeping itself out of ‘senseless internecine old-world fights’, it was obvious where the blame for failure lay: ‘Thanks to the weakness of the appeasement policy and the blindness of Britain, France and Soviet Russia, the totalitarian powers succeeded in conquering the entire European continent.’ For Britain, acting as ‘the moderator in Europe’ in line with its traditional balance-of-power policy, it was natural to seek territorial adjustments. ‘At Munich, British diplomacy was taxed to the utmost to obtain the transfer of German-inhabited Czechoslovak territories to the Reich without a violent conflict. Once again England had saved the peace.’ Meanwhile the French had staked their all on friendship with the unreliable British, but many of them realised that singlehanded opposition to a resurgent Germany was suicidal. In spite of her many internal difficulties, ‘France kept faith with her British ally and continued to follow her lead. She accepted Munich, sacrificing Czechoslovakia, her most faithful friend on the Continent.’ Germany, for its part, had arisen from defeat, and ‘Relying on the righteousness of her cause, she claimed incorporation of the Sudeten German territories in the Reich which the former enemies of Germany were made to accept without force.’ Finally, the peace-loving Soviet government was aghast at the calamitous policies of the Western democracies, and was horrified ‘when Munich came and Britain and France, without even consulting the Soviet Union, sacrificed Czechoslovakia on the altar of appeasement’. Reves concluded:

The dramatic and strange events between the two world wars could be just as well described from the point of view of any other nation, large or small. From Tokyo or Warsaw, from Riga or Rome, from Prague or Budapest, each picture will be entirely different and, from the fixed national point of observation, it will always be indisputably and unchallengeably correct. And the citizens of every country will be at all times convinced and rightly so of the infallibility of their views and the objectivity of their conclusions.¹

In many ways, Reves’s assessment was astute. Today, national memories of the World War II era remain highly ethnocentric.²

Yet the 1938 Munich Agreement, the apogee of the Western powers’ appeasement of Adolf Hitler, does not quite fit the pattern. True, there is an important strand of opinion in Russia which views Munich as an attempted encirclement of the USSR, which justified Stalin’s defensive accession to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact the following year.³ But few modern Germans regard Hitler’s claim to the Sudetenland as legitimate. In post-war France, the ‘Munich syndrome’ was something to be determinedly avoided.⁴ In the United States too it became a byword for political weakness. In Britain, many at the time felt that the Munich settlement was ‘needlessly dishonourable’, even if their feelings of shame were tinged with relief that war had been averted.⁵ There persists to this day a sense that Munich was a national humiliation (albeit one that was subsequently expiated by the sacrifices of 1940). Hence, during a special edition of the BBC’s Question Time during the Brexit referendum campaign of 2016, one audience member criticised Prime Minister David Cameron to his face: ‘Mr. Cameron, you say that your policy that you’ve negotiated with Europe cannot be overruled – it can. So are you really the twenty-first-century Neville Chamberlain, waving a piece of paper in the air, saying to the public This is what I have, I have this promise where a dictatorship in Europe can overrule it?’⁶

As Tim Bouverie has remarked recently, ‘Munich was – and remains – one of the most controversial agreements ever negotiated’, establishing a debate that ‘has raged for over eighty years’.⁷ Though fierce and divisive, this debate has taken place predominantly within well-established parameters. Most analyses focus on the policy makers, those politicians and diplomats (chiefly in Britain and France) who opted to appease. Within this framework, different stories can be woven depending on the answers provided to certain overarching questions. Were the decisions taken right or wrong? Were the policies pursued justified or unjustified? Was there a viable alternative? These questions encourage either/or responses, cultivating a binary debate that is both compelling and seductive. Although the allure of ‘taking sides’ in a clearly demarcated controversy is hard to resist, it produces a scholarship that is voluminous but one-dimensional. The patterning of this debate is not only to be detected in the scholarship, but in fiction too, with the most vivid recent example being best-selling historical fiction author Robert Harris’s novel Munich (2017).

There are signs, however, that the debate is beginning to change. Recent events in international politics have highlighted the intricate interconnectedness between diplomatic crises and public opinion, notably public expressions of emotion. An ‘emotional turn’ compels historians to attend to the role of emotions when explaining and recreating past events, just as a previous ‘cultural turn’ focused attention on factors such as (amongst others) gender, race, religion and ethnicity.⁸ Yet international (or diplomatic) history has often resisted these developments, revealing what David Reynolds has termed a ‘diplomatic twitch’,⁹ whereby scholars eschew cultural approaches in favour of a more traditional focus on the ‘high’ politics of peace and war.

Thus, the events of September 1938 aroused an unprecedented degree of public excitement and anxiety, yet the ‘public’, the ‘people’, the ‘material’ and the ‘popular’ remain peripheral within the existing literature. Bouverie’s book follows the same contours, castigating ‘Chamberlain’s defenders’ for insisting that Munich bought much-needed time for Britain to rearm, insisting instead that ‘Germany outarmed Britain in the period between Munich and the outbreak of war.’¹⁰ The many reviews of Bouverie’s book also embrace the existing historiographical framework. The Daily Telegraph’s review commends Bouverie for exposing the fallacies of ‘the standard defence of Munich’, whilst David Aaronovitch in The Times praised Bouverie for criticising Britain’s political classes who lacked the ‘honest, clear-sighted’ professionalism that was required.¹¹ Robert Crowcroft takes a rather different line in The End is Nigh (2019). He argues that it was Britain’s failure to stay clear of European entanglements, rather than its failure to take a sufficiently firm line against Hitler, that was responsible for the decline in her power. Yet he still blames politicians for their lack of statesmanship: ‘They lacked the capacity to think the unthinkable, they lacked the sheer ruthlessness that the situation demanded; and they lacked a language to tell the public the truth.’¹²

Therein lies the recurring motif of appeasement scholarship. The decisions taken by a handful of policy makers (especially in Britain) are repeatedly unpicked, refashioned and repurposed to suit arguments that fit an existing historiographical debate. A re-evaluation is thus long overdue, and this collection exploits the potential that rests in cross-disciplinary approaches and comparative frameworks. Indeed, the most neglected aspects of this ‘model’ crisis – despite the abundance of sources – are the social, cultural, material and emotional ones, as well as public opinion. The book will also internationalise the original ‘Munich moment’, as existing studies are overwhelmingly Anglo- and Western-centric. Above all, it will provide a corrective to the long-standing proclivity to consider the Munich Crisis almost exclusively from the viewpoint of politicians and diplomats (a proclivity reflected here in the well-known image of the four Munich signatories represented in the cover illustration). To be sure, things have moved on from the days of fifty years ago, when many scholars of diplomacy believed that ‘historians should not deal with the issue of public opinion’.¹³ Popular responses to the crisis, both individual and collective, will be prominent, teasing out the psychological and emotional ramifications, allowing a more holistic and ‘emotional’ history to emerge. In so doing, the collection showcases the possibilities of approaching a much-scrutinised historical episode through more imaginative and diverse lenses.

Contextualising the ‘crisis’

The term ‘Munich Crisis’ is used here to encapsulate both the particular diplomatic events of late September 1938, but also how this episode was reflected upon, internalised and used in its aftermath (both short and long term). The word ‘crisis’, therefore, has many meanings. Even before the 1938 Munich Conference, ‘crisis’ was used to describe the escalating tensions arising from the alleged mistreatment of the Sudetendeutsche minority in Czechoslovakia. On 20 September, the Daily Mail reported on the Czechoslovakian government’s response to Anglo-French initiatives ‘for solving the Sudeten crisis peacefully’.¹⁴ Despite these initiatives, the crisis only intensified over the next week, and the spectre of a European conflict loomed large before an international audience. Cinema newsreels and radio now accompanied newspapers as mechanisms for transmitting international news on a genuinely global scale. Throughout September 1938, notes Gerd Horten, ‘Americans became glued to their radios for daily and sometimes hourly updates and interpretations of the latest developments of the crisis’.¹⁵ This was a very ‘modern’ crisis, and one that, from the start, affected the ‘people’ directly.

The crisis assumed a new moniker courtesy of it being resolved at the Munich Conference of 29–30 September, and the term ‘Munich crisis’ began to appear in newspapers within weeks. The New York Times carried a story about Roosevelt’s ‘Timetable in the Munich Crisis’ on 31 October, while the Paris-Midi evoked the ‘crise de Munich’ on 5 November.¹⁶ In British newspapers, the ‘Munich crisis’ label appeared a little later. The Times first used the phrase on 27 December, whilst the Manchester Guardian, at the start of January 1939, remarked how the whole of Europe ‘had a really good look at war at the time of the Munich crisis’, concluding that ‘none of them liked it’.¹⁷

Although never used particularly widely at the time, the term ‘Munich crisis’ demonstrates how the threat of war in September 1938 was, even as it was being experienced and lived through, understood in these terms. In Britain, the Mass-Observation (M-O) organisation certainly framed it as such; an entire chapter of the Britain by Mass-Observation book, compiled by Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge in the immediate aftermath of Munich, was entitled ‘Crisis’. Noting that the ‘idea of a national or international crisis’ was an increasingly common ‘feature’ of their times, Harrisson and Madge defined a crisis as ‘a kind of melting-point for boundaries, institutions, opinions’, a time when ‘public opinion, which at other times is largely inert, becomes a real factor’.¹⁸

Public interest in foreign affairs was not, however, particularly new or unprecedented. The role of the ‘people’ had grown in prominence earlier in the twentieth century, especially when embedded as a crucial component of the ‘new’ and ‘open’ diplomacy that many hoped would become the norm after the Great War. Although an ‘open’ diplomacy subsequently failed to transpire, there was, by the 1930s, more consistent and critical public scrutiny of foreign policy making. Public interest was roused repeatedly by a cascade of newsworthy diplomatic events, including Japanese expansionism in Manchuria, Hitler’s ascent to power in Germany, Mussolini’s adventurism in Abyssinia, the Nazis’ repeated violations of the Versailles Treaty, and the vicious civil war in Spain. Anxieties were heightened further in 1938, first with the Anschluss between Germany and Austria and then with the amplified tensions stemming from the Sudeten German controversy. Meanwhile, the aspirations of the 1920s – that disarmament would flourish while League-based collective security rendered war obsolete – had begun to unravel. Instead, nationalism and militarism re-emerged, and with it disturbing echoes of the pre-1914 era. The threat of a European war, even a global war, was real and growing by summer 1938.

The Sudeten crisis unfolded rapidly after Hitler again violated the Versailles terms by incorporating his Austrian homeland into the German Reich in March 1938. The influence of Nazism within the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia had been growing for some time, Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party having been subsidised by Berlin since 1935. On German instructions, local Nazi agitation for Sudeten self-determination increased after the Anschluss, always asking of the Czechs more than Prague could feasibly deliver.¹⁹ Henlein’s 24 April Carlsbad speech outlined a set of demands that Prague could never countenance, including the complete reorientation of Czechoslovak foreign policy. At the same time, the Wehrmacht worked on ‘Case Green’, revisiting plans for an invasion of Czechoslovakia in light of the altered strategic situation post-Anschluss. False rumours of an incipient German move led to a mobilisation of Czechoslovak forces on 20 May, the resultant ‘war scare’ providing a brief but panicky foretaste of the crisis that would engulf Europe in September. Although this ‘crisis’ was resolved without war, it was clear that the Sudetenland issue would likely resurface.

The international response to Hitler’s growing belligerence was compromised from the start. Czechoslovakia had two key allies, France and the Soviet Union, but both were preoccupied with internal unrest. Édouard Daladier’s new French administration, having come to power in April, struggled to overcome the domestic fissures that were the chief legacy of the Popular Front. In Soviet Russia, Stalin’s recent purges had weakened that country militarily whilst further alienating potential collaborators in an anti-Nazi ‘grand alliance’. Meanwhile, the United States was committed to a strategy of isolation, Italy and Japan had moved inexorably into Hitler’s orbit, and various other European countries were either complicit in the territorial adjustments that followed or simply sceptical about the prospects of co-ordinated international action. Most importantly, perhaps, the British government, led since May 1937 by Neville Chamberlain, was determined to avoid war. Lord Runciman, a former Cabinet minister, was despatched to Prague on 3 August to seek a peaceful resolution to the Sudeten crisis. By the start of September, however, it was clear that Runciman’s mission had failed and it was therefore believed that a more energetic and direct form of appeasement was needed.

Chamberlain’s unilateral decision to implement ‘Plan Z’, meeting Hitler face to face in an effort to save the peace, was certainly audacious. The first meeting, at Berchtesgaden on 15 September, augured well, at least in Chamberlain’s mind. On his return to London, he declared himself satisfied with his ‘frank’ and ‘friendly’ talks with Hitler, noting that further discussions would follow. As a BBC written report from the time commented, the prime minister’s words were met with ‘laughter and cheers’ from the assembled crowd.²⁰ The next meeting took place at Bad Godesberg on 22 September, but this time the Führer adopted a more uncompromising stance that made war appear inevitable and shook Chamberlain’s confidence. This marked the crystallisation of the crisis, and much of what follows in this book focuses on this period and its immediate aftermath. At this moment of acute emotional stress and anxiety, it is no exaggeration to say that the future of the entire world hinged on the outcomes of increasingly frantic diplomatic manoeuvrings.

As diplomatic efforts to preserve the peace faltered, Europe geared for war. Czechoslovakia mobilised on 23 September, the French began to call up reservists the following day, and Soviet Russia too girded for conflict. In numerous countries, including Britain, gas masks were distributed and air raid shelters dug; even the Channel offered little protection to civilians given the new realities of modern aerial warfare. Few ordinary people wanted war, but most accepted that it might be unavoidable. Chamberlain, however, did not give up, sending his special adviser Horace Wilson to Germany in a last-minute effort to avert the calamity. Despite his efforts, Wilson was frustrated and felt compelled to warn Hitler that Britain would have no choice but to go to war should he refuse to compromise. In Rome, however, Mussolini proved receptive to pleas from Britain’s ambassador, Lord Perth, to stage an intervention. The Duce’s efforts resulted in the Munich Conference, where Italy, Germany, Great Britain and France, in Czechoslovakia’s absence, agreed to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Although, as Steiner notes, Hitler ‘got the substance of his Godesberg demands’, he had not got his war.²¹

This, in itself, was (if only superficially) a triumph for Chamberlain. A further success was the Anglo-German declaration, the piece of paper that Chamberlain famously brandished above his head on his return to London. The promise of ‘peace for our time’ was a pledge signed by both Chamberlain and Hitler positioning the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the wishes of the German and British people ‘never to go to war with one another again’. Given the inexorable build-up of tension in the prelude to Munich, it is unsurprising that ordinary people everywhere expressed unbridled relief and thankfulness. The reactions of ‘the people’ during the crisis and afterwards mattered, because, as will be shown, the ‘crisis’ was not played out in an exclusively diplomatic arena. Similarly, the crisis itself, and its repercussions, affected more than the four countries represented at Munich. In all countries, the people were more than passive participants, conscious that any resultant conflict would expose them to harm. It is imperative, therefore, that the role of ‘the people’, the significance of emotions, and the wider international aspects of the crisis be attended to in more depth than the existing historiography allows.

Historiography

Scholarship regarding the Munich crisis has been largely subsumed within an overarching appeasement framework, dominated by ‘top-down’ diplomatic approaches, with side orders of analyses rooted in political science, strategic studies, and assessments of relative military and intelligence capabilities.²² Lewis Namier’s Diplomatic Prelude (1948), which in spite of its analytical limitations should be recognised as an innovative contribution to contemporary history, helped set the tone.²³ ‘Munich’ and ‘appeasement’ thus became indelibly linked; as Zara Steiner has commented, ‘Munich’ has assumed ‘a permanent place in the vocabulary of modern diplomacy’, providing a ‘new and pejorative dimension to definitions of the word appeasement’.²⁴ (It must be remembered that although ‘appeasement’ is now generally viewed negatively, even Churchill, as late as 1950, favoured ‘appeasement from strength’.)²⁵ Its permanence is evident in the persistent use of the ‘Munich analogy’, a common feature of diplomacy throughout the Cold War and beyond, a weaponised term used to legitimise the use of pre-emptive force and condemn those who temporise in the face of aggression.²⁶ These legacies of appeasement – and Munich in particular – do not only affect professional politicians and diplomats. As Gerry Hughes has shown, Munich has, from the start, ‘represented a contested and highly politicized area of dispute in debates about Britain’s recent past’, a dispute played out amongst ‘professional historians, policy makers and the general public’.²⁷ More recently, ‘Brexit’ has prompted an intensification of debates about British national identity and memory.²⁸ And, as several of the following contributions demonstrate, the ‘Munich’ legacy has been used and abused in many other countries too, not least Czechoslovakia.

In spite of this, the overarching contours of the debate remain framed around the familiar dualistic arguments as to appeasement’s righteousness. This is unsurprising; after all, the appeasement at Munich was divisive from the start. As the following pages will show, initial responses to the saved peace were near unanimous in expressing thankfulness and relief, but it was not long before people began to question whether the price paid for peace had been worth it. After all, some observers (and not just Czechoslovakians) had maintained from the outset that the price had been too great, symbolic of the ultimate surrender of the diplomatic initiative to the fascist dictators. This was certainly how many in Spain interpreted the Munich settlement. As Helen Graham has noted, Munich represented not only the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia at ‘the altar of appeasement’, but the abandonment of the Spanish Republic too.²⁹

For those less directly affected by Munich (other than benefiting from the saved peace), the conviction that appeasement was a prudent strategy persisted for longer. In Britain and France, appeasement retained a considerable degree of public support at least until Hitler made a mockery of the Munich accords by marching German troops into Prague. As P.M.H. Bell has noted, the Prague ‘coup’ of 15 March 1939 was a watershed moment, exposing ‘as a lie’ Hitler’s earlier claims that he sought only the incorporation of German-speaking peoples into the Reich.³⁰ It suggested further that appeasement was doomed to fail from the start, and that Hitler had hoodwinked Chamberlain with his Munich promises. These arguments were prevalent at the time, but would become more pronounced as the historiography of appeasement took shape in the months and years that followed. Although the peaceful resolution of the ‘Munich Crisis’ had won Chamberlain many plaudits, his reputation soon became defined and indelibly tarnished by his association with a policy that had, by September 1939 (if not sooner), failed so spectacularly.³¹

An early and influential salvo in what Steiner has labelled the ‘battle of the history books’ came in 1940 with the publication of Cato’s Guilty Men.³² The narrative presented was crude but compelling, a cast list headed by Neville Chamberlain presented as the key actor in a dismal story with a catastrophic denouement.³³ Similar condemnations of the leaders of France’s Third Republic soon appeared, reflecting the emotional circumstances of the time.³⁴ As Anthony Adamthwaite notes, the ‘shock and humiliation of 1940 framed perceptions of war origins’, and a restitution of national honour and prestige demanded the identification of ‘scapegoats’.³⁵ The scapegoating of politicians and diplomats might have deflected responsibility for democratic weakness and passivity away from the people, but there was always a tendency to emphasise the role of a decadent, pacifist and apathetic populace. This was, perhaps, more true for France (seeking to explain away that country’s ignominious defeat) than for Britain, but even for the latter the need to re-energise the country under Churchill’s leadership in 1940 implied a certain malaise. As Patrick Finney maintains, in both France and Great Britain the orthodox reading of appeasement provided ‘an ideological foundation for the war effort and then for post-war reconstruction and renewal’.³⁶

This orthodoxy was challenged in the 1960s and into the 1970s as better access to the archival records allowed historians to identify broader structural constraints (economic, strategic, military, imperial, etc.) that made viable alternatives to appeasement either unsuitable or impossible.³⁷ Revisionism became the new orthodoxy; John Charmley even claimed in 1989 that ‘[t]he Guilty Men syndrome has run its course, and Chamberlain’s reputation stands better now than it has ever done’.³⁸ Revisionist interpretations held firm until the 1990s when a post-revisionist synthesis emerged. This synthesis welded elements of the revisionist case with some of the orthodox arguments, concluding that whilst there were constraints, individual policy makers could have made different choices. As R.A.C. Parker put it, ‘Chamberlain and his colleagues made choices among alternative policies.’³⁹

This focus on key decision makers has continued to dominate the more recent historiography. Some, like Robert Self and Andrew Stedman, defend Chamberlain by emphasising the structural constraints.⁴⁰ Others, including most recently Tim Bouverie, return to the orthodox charge. ‘[I]t is hard’, concludes Bouverie, ‘to extenuate the actions of the appeasers and, especially, Neville Chamberlain.’⁴¹ It is equally hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of historical studies of Munich and appeasement remain wedded to this traditional debate, with a concomitant focus on just a handful of actors within a handful of countries.⁴² Recent incursions into the debate have made progress by experimenting with different methodologies, conceptual frameworks, and a greater plurality of sources, yet there has been a noticeable stagnation in original research.⁴³ This tendency is not confined to the English-language literature; a recent German collection edited by Jürgen Zarusky and Martin Zückert also employs this more conventional approach.⁴⁴ Whilst ‘the people’ do feature in the historiography of appeasement, it is usually as one of several background influences affecting the realm of ‘high’ politics. This collection offers a more diverse and imaginative array of approaches to the Munich Crisis. Several chapters will foreground ‘the people’, whilst specific contributions focusing on (amongst others) Czechoslovak, Hungarian and Soviet responses to Munich provide a more ‘international’ appreciation of the crisis than has been provided in a single volume hitherto.

The chapters

The following pages are intended, without claiming to be definitive, to broaden the scope of existing studies of the Munich ‘moment’ whilst also showcasing the possibilities for future research. The assembled contributions provide a selection of fresh and innovative discussions of the Munich Crisis that endeavour to invigorate the field and demonstrate how historians can benefit from being less straitjacketed by the narrow parameters of the debates that dominated hitherto. The chapters are intentionally diverse but connected by some underpinning themes. Some do, necessarily, focus on the established ‘players’. Hence Britain, Germany and France, as well as prominent diplomats like Chamberlain, Mussolini, Churchill, Maisky and Daladier, feature prominently, albeit in the context of the emotional side of the crisis and the role of ‘the people’. Other chapters, meanwhile, shift the geographical focus to other countries, showing how the Munich Crisis (and its legacies) reverberated far and wide.

The first two chapters focus on Czechoslovakia itself, so often portrayed as the innocent and helpless victim of the entire affair. Mary Heimann challenges this narrative, interrogating interwar Czechoslovakia’s attitude towards its non-Czech citizens, as well as providing a more detailed analysis of contemporary responses to Munich. In so doing, she presents a rather different and more troubling picture of Czechoslovakia’s role. Jakub Drábik then takes the story further, evaluating the ‘long shadow’ that Munich cast over the post-war Czechoslovak state, specifically how it was used in communist propaganda, ideology and historiography until the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. Drábik contends that the Communists used Munich to legitimise their rule, the abandonment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 used to illustrate the corruptness of the capitalist democracies. Like Heimann, Drábik teases out the differences between the Czech and Slovak responses to (and uses of) the Munich episode.

Miklos Lojko switches attention to the Hungarian aspect, noting how that country was, like Germany, both a vanquished power in 1918 but a beneficiary of the Munich Agreement twenty years later. Using a fusion of primary source materials, Lojko’s chapter sheds light on more popular and widespread responses to the Munich Crisis, contending that the relative quiescence, even complicity, with which Hungarians accepted the settlement was symptomatic of a deeper political and cultural crisis afflicting interwar Hungary. Along the way, a number of synergies and contrasts with the situation in Poland are brought into focus.

Gabriel Gorodetsky then considers Soviet Russia’s ‘conspicuous absence’ from the Munich deliberations, teasing out the links between this and the final decision by Stalin to secure a pact with Nazi Germany in August 1939. His chapter takes its title (‘What, no chair for me?’) from a cartoon by David Low, published in the Evening Standard on 30 September 1938, in which Stalin wryly notes his exclusion from the Great Power deliberations at Munich. Using an array of Russian sources, notably the diaries of Russia’s ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, Gorodetsky argues that a viable Soviet alternative to appeasement was in place at the time of Munich, and that the West’s decision to eschew Soviet support at that juncture was crucial in encouraging Stalin to contemplate an accommodation with Berlin. The chapter also speaks to the cultural dimension of diplomacy, emphasising the importance of personal relations between diplomats and politicians.

One of Maisky’s prominent points of contact in London was Winston Churchill, the man frequently held up as being a lone voice of wisdom struggling to make himself heard from the political wilderness. Richard Toye’s chapter charts Churchill’s evolving attitude towards the Soviet Union, explaining how and why a man who had been virulently anti-communist in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution (sponsoring Western intervention in the subsequent civil war) emerged as such a prominent supporter of a Soviet alliance at the time of Munich and after. Churchill was also a friend of America, and the United States was, despite its avowed isolationism, an interested party as the Munich Crisis unfolded in Europe. Andrew Preston assesses the impact of a far-flung crisis on an American society that was becoming increasingly aware of its place in a shrinking world, in so doing encouraging the repudiation of isolationism and consolidating a conception of an ‘American century’.

The book then turns to the more well-known participants in the Munich drama, notably the four Powers that signed the agreement at the Führerbau. Beginning with Italy, Christian Goeschel considers the responses of the Italian people to Mussolini’s role during the crisis, comparing and contrasting ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ responses in the context of the fascist regime’s fixation with the maintenance of popular support. Karina Urbach then switches attention to Germany, using the under-scrutinised reports emanating from the exiled Social Democratic Party of Germany (the Sopade reports) to illustrate how the average German experienced and understood the crisis. These documents, Urbach suggests, portray a German population that was circumspect throughout the crisis, relieved at avoiding war but hardly elated at the outcome. For Urbach, this shows that Nazi propaganda efforts were, at the time of Munich, less successful in engineering public enthusiasm than they had been at the time of Hitler’s earlier diplomatic coups.

The next three chapters all explore responses to Munich in Great Britain, but in ways that shift the focus away from the realm of ‘high’ politics and the rather stagnant debates about Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement strategy. First, Julie Gottlieb presents a reconfiguration of the crisis as an emotional, psychological and visceral experience, both individually and collectively, affecting British people of all hues. In particular, Gottlieb assesses how the crisis was internalised and ‘lived through’ by a silent majority that has largely been marginalised within the existing literature.

Gottlieb also considers the impact of the crisis on people’s mental health, an issue explored more closely by Michal Shapira. Focusing on the notes kept by the Austrian-born British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, Shapira recreates the reactions and responses to the Munich crisis of some of Klein’s patients. The result is an innovative emotional and intellectual history of the crisis that reveals much about the fears and anxieties prompted by the likelihood of an unimaginably catastrophic future war. Another chapter with a British focus is Helen Goethals’ exploration of the poetry of Timothy Corsellis, who, as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy in autumn 1938, penned some eighteen poems that related in some way to the Munich Crisis and its legacy. Goethals focuses particularly on the poem ‘News of Munich’, written on 28 September 1938, an emotionally charged response to the promise of a reprieve that reveals much about the fraught and volatile atmosphere in which the Munich Crisis was experienced.

Emotions feature too in Daniel Hucker’s chapter that, superficially at least, return the focus to the diplomats, and in particular Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier. The focus on the diplomats is, however, far from conventional, instead framing the chapter within a more recent literature that strives to ‘emotionalise’ international history, seeing the practitioners not as dispassionate realists but as human beings, influenced by emotions and indelibly affected by manifestations of the ‘will of the people’. ‘The people’ feature prominently in the final chapter, where Jessica Wardhaugh talks us through the lived experience of the ‘Blue Light of Munich’ in France, foregrounding the ‘masses’ by showing how the crisis afforded unprecedented opportunities for popular agency and the expression of opinions. In so doing, Wardhaugh compels us to view the French experience of Munich in ways that transcend the previously dominant perception of a passive and pacifist population divided between those in favour of appeasement (the munichois) and those opposed (the anti-munichoise).

The entire collection emanates from a conference held at the University of Sheffield in 2018, marking the eightieth anniversary of the Munich Agreement. This book, like the conference that inspired it, is intended to demonstrate the benefits of revisiting the crisis of 1938 from new and innovative angles that transcend the restrictive parameters of the debates that have shaped Munich scholarship for the past several decades. The events of 1938, especially the point of acute crisis in September that year, provide fertile ground for historical experimentation, reframing what has previously been treated as an almost uniquely political and diplomatic episode as something considerably more far-reaching and inclusive. Similarly, a more comprehensive and international appreciation of the legacies of the crisis illustrates its longer-term ramifications, not only in the political and diplomatic sphere, but socially and culturally as well.

The net result will, it is hoped, demonstrate the benefits of exploring some of the hitherto under-scrutinised aspects of the Munich Crisis, moving beyond the formulaic and Anglo-centric analyses that fixate on positioning the (overwhelmingly male) practitioners of ‘high’ politics as either ‘appeasers’ or ‘anti-appeasers’. A decade has passed since Keith Neilson posited that ‘some analytical tool more precise and sophisticated than the crude division of people into appeasers and anti-appeasers must be employed if we are to appreciate the range and nature of the debate on how to deal with the revisionist powers’.⁴⁵ Neilson’s focus was on the British policy-making machine, and if, as he contended, this reductive binary is an ‘inadequate’ mechanism for assessing official positions, its crudeness and lack of sophistication is even more pronounced when one’s focus shifts not just beyond Britain but towards an approach that foregrounds ‘the people’. This volume offers a preliminary effort to embrace the opportunities provided by employing a broader array of analytical tools. The Munich settlement may have been reached by politicians above the heads of the people, yet it caused an earthquake of mass emotions, ranging from euphoria to despair – and the aftershocks are still being felt.

Notes

1Emery Reves, The Anatomy of Peace , 8th edition (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1946), pp. 3, 7, 12, 15, 19–22.

2Henry L. Roediger, Magdalena Abel, Sharda Umanath, Ruth A. Shaffer, Beth Fairfield, Masanobu Takahashi and James V. Wertsch, ‘Competing National Memories of World War II’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 116:34 (August 2019), pp. 16678–86. See also Patrick Finney, Remembering the Road to World War Two: International History, National Identity, Collective Memory (London: Routledge, 2011).

3Richard Toye, ‘Why Do We Still Fight Over the World War?’ Western Morning News , 3 September 2009; Andrew Roth, ‘Molotov–Ribbentrop: Why Is Moscow Trying to Justify the Nazi Pact?’, The Guardian , 23 August 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/23/moscow-campaign-to-justify-molotov-ribbentrop-pact-sparks-outcry (accessed 24 September 2019).

4Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882–1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 213.

5Mary Agnes Hamilton diary, 30 September 1938: Mary Agnes Hamilton Papers, HMTN 1/1, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.

6Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit (London: William Collins, 2017), p. 395.

7Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War (London: The Bodley Head, 2019), p. 293.

8A recent roundtable at the 2017 annual conference of the British International History Group tackled the topic ‘Emotions and International History’, featuring contributions from Patrick Finney, John Young and Helen Parr. The impact of the ‘cultural turn’ on international history has been scrutinised widely, a good example being Peter Jackson, ‘Pierre Bourdieu, the Cultural Turn and the Practice of International History’, Review of International Studies , 34:1 (2008), pp. 155–81.

9David Reynolds (2006) ‘International History, the Cultural Turn and the Diplomatic Twitch’,  Cultural and Social History , 3:1 (2006), pp. 75–91.

10 Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler , p. 420.

11 Lewis Jones, ‘ Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie’, Daily Telegraph , 7 April 2019; David Aaronovitch, ‘ Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie’, The Times , 12 April 2019.

12 Robert Crowcroft, The End is Nigh: British Politics, Power, and the Road to the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 237.

13 Zara Steiner, ‘Views of War, 1914 and 1939: Second Thoughts’, in T.G. Otte (ed.), British World Policy and the Projection of Global Power, c. 1830–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 174–200. Quotation at 174.

14 Ralph W.B. Izzard, ‘Czechs Accept Peace Plan But Ask for More Details’, Daily Mail , 20 September 1938.

15 Gerd Horten, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during World War II (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 22.

16 Anne O’Hare McCormick, ‘The President’s Timetable in the Munich Crisis’, New York Times , 31 October 1938; ‘Le parti socialiste va repenser sa politique extérieure’, Paris-Midi , 5 November 1938.

17 ‘French Socialist Cleavage’, The Times , 27 December 1938; ‘National Service for Youth’, Manchester Guardian , 5 January 1939.

18 Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Britain by Mass-Observation (London: Penguin, 1939), p. 30.

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