The Life of Edvard Beneš 1884–1948: Czechoslovakia in Peace and War
Zbynék Zeman and Antonín Klimek
Abstract
Edvard Beneš was a key figure in the history of Czechoslovakia in the first three decades of her existence. He helped Thomas Masaryk to found the state in World War I, and in the 1920s he worked on foreign policy and was briefly prime minister before being elected president in 1935. His presidency saw the loss of the Sudetenland in Munich in 1938, and this was followed by the German occupation in 1939, which forced Beneš to form a London-based government-in-exile for the duration of the war. He lived to see a brief period of restored independence (1945–8), and died in 1948, in the year when Cz ... More
Edvard Beneš was a key figure in the history of Czechoslovakia in the first three decades of her existence. He helped Thomas Masaryk to found the state in World War I, and in the 1920s he worked on foreign policy and was briefly prime minister before being elected president in 1935. His presidency saw the loss of the Sudetenland in Munich in 1938, and this was followed by the German occupation in 1939, which forced Beneš to form a London-based government-in-exile for the duration of the war. He lived to see a brief period of restored independence (1945–8), and died in 1948, in the year when Czechoslovakia became another satellite state in Stalin's Soviet Union. Beneš regarded himself as having been supremely successful in World War I and during the peace conference. He was a fair-weather politician, at his best when things were going well for him. Munich was a blow which deeply upset him, though he staged a remarkable come-back for himself and Czechoslovakia in World War II. After the conclusion of the treaty with Moscow in 1943, Beneš briefly recovered his self-confident optimism, only to lose it gradually in the subsequent years. President of a country he'd helped to create, Beneš was finally broken by the stresses imposed on him by international circumstances in a central Europe dominated first by Hitler and then by Stalin. He died a disappointed, broken man in 1948.
Keywords:
Edvard Beneš,
Czechoslovakia,
Thomas Masaryk,
president,
Munich,
satellite state
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 1997 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198205838 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198205838.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Zbynék Zeman, author
University of Oxford
Antonín Klimek, author
Institute of the History of the Czech Army, Prague
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