Historian Matěj Spurný: Munich Agreement fits Czech “victim narrative”

Monday marks the 75th anniversary of the Munich Agreement which granted Nazi Germany large parts of Czechoslovakia, inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. A prelude to the Second World War, the deal forged by Germany, Italy, France and the UK dealt a final blow to pre-war Czechoslovakia whose decision to accept the agreement rather than defend the country’s integrity against Nazi expansion deeply demoralized the society. Does the Munich trauma still affect Czechs today? And what lessons can be drawn from what happened in Munich 75 years ago? In this edition of Czech History, I discuss these and other issues with Matěj Sputný, a historian of Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences.