Ing. Karel Stein

“[Q: When you made some local history discovery, did you make it public somehow, or did you just store it in your own archives? For instance, Míla Nevrlý wrote books, other people wrote articles in magazines...] No one was interested in that kind of subject back in the days, and you couldn’t write about them - every periodical has some designation, and these matters didn’t fit into their scope. I wrote it down on my type writer, and I used carbon paper and gave the copies out to my friends, for example, to Míla Nevrlý or Engineer Bienert, that is, to people whom I thought might be interested. But to be honest I found out that most people aren’t all that bothered about it, that I’m the one who’s interested the most. Then I published a book called Pomníčky Lužických hor a Českého Švýcarska [Memorials of the Lusatian Mountains and Bohemian Switzerland], where I used the most interesting parts of my notes.”

“If we’re talking about German-Czech relations, an interesting thing is that my grandmother, who was born in the year 1900, used to say that Sudeten Germans distinguished between Old Czechs and New Czechs. But not in the sense as it’s taught at school [vernacular terms for two rival Czech political parties in the later 19th century - trans.]. Old Czechs were those who came before 1918, who came to find work. The mostly married German women, at home they spoke German or a mix of Czech and German. She said that there was absolutely no problem coexisting together before 1918 or in the early days of the First Republic, and that it wasn’t until during the First Republic, when important positions were taken by Czechs and Germans were forced to leave their jobs, that the German inhabitants, who had lived here for centuries, felt to certain extent threatened by the Czechs, some kind of Czechisation, so they were afraid. And this was aggravated by unemployment, that’s how my grandmother explained the rise of nationalistic tensions to me.”