Testament of a Czech Liberal
GRIFFITH, WILLIAM E.
Testament of a Czech Liberal EASTERN EUROPE IN THE POST-WAR WORLD By Hubert Ripka Praeger. 266 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by WILLIAM E. GRIFFITH Research Associate in Eastern European...
...But Ripka's work is far from a complete survey of postwar Eastern European developments...
...He also failed to properly distinguish between the Germany of Weimar and of the Third Reich...
...In many respects, too, the book is already out of date...
...Given the bitter after-taste of the West's capitulation at Munich in 1938, this is not surprising...
...In this and other respects, Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Soviet Bloc (now available in a revised paperback edition) is far preferable...
...Quite naturally, it concentrates on Czechoslovakia—which since 1948 has not played anywhere near a central role in the area's affairs—and says very little about East Germany or the Balkans...
...Writing about Czechoslovakia in the West has varied from liberal British, French and American praise of the "brave little Czechs,' to the much worse German nationalist—and particularly Sudeten German—denunciation of Benes and Ripka as persecutors of the Sudetens and accomplices of the Communists...
...Hugh Seton-Watson stresses this point in an extremely perceptive introduction...
...With greater insight and balanced judgment, he says more about Czechoslovakia in five pages than Ripka and most other writers put together...
...He wrote this book, which has now been published in this country by Praeger, shortly after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution...
...This complex problem badly needs study...
...For example, its concluding "grand design" for a Western policy toward Central and Eastern Europe, essentially one of disengagement, seems far from realistic in the '60s...
...It also makes the very valid point, too often forgotten, that Yugoslavia, with all its economic boom and partial cultural liberalization, is still an authoritarian dictatorship...
...He rather cavalierly passed over the human injustices and suffering which marked the "transfer" of the millions of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia to Western Germany in 1945...
...Like William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Ripka's book incorrectly equates both periods as part of the inevitable course of German history...
...It is unfortunate that Ripka did not devote more space to the question of why, relatively speaking, so little has happened in Czechoslovakia since 1948...
...Reviewed by WILLIAM E. GRIFFITH Research Associate in Eastern European Studies, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Hubert Ripka, who died in 1958, was one of the leading Czech journalists and statesmen of the 1930s and '40s...
...It is easy to criticize Benes and Ripka, as Seton-Watson points out, but criticism, valid as it may be, should always be restrained by the thought that Czechoslovakia was the only functioning democracy in interwar Central and Eastern Europe...
...It is a summing-up of his political views and, in a way, a testament of Czech liberal thinking on foreign affairs...
...In addition, Czechoslovak aid to and operations in underdeveloped areas have now reached such a peak that the country must be considered, after the Soviet Union and Communist China, the most dangerous enemy of the United States...
...Ripka was anti-German and far from enthusiastic about Western policy, as almost all liberal Czech intellectuals were and are...
...A close associate of President Eduard Benes, he spent World War II in exile in London, and returned to exile in 1948 when Czechoslovakia fell to the Communists...
...Neither point of view is accurate, though the former is much closer to the truth...
...The author's treatment of East European affairs is too much that of an "outsider...
...Ripka foresaw, but in 1958 when he completed his work could not cover (as Brzezinski's revised edition does), the implications for Eastern Europe of the intensified Sino-Soviet dispute and the Albanian affair...
...Far too little is said, for example, about the ferment among Communist activists and intellectuals between 1953-56...
...As such, it is well worth reading...
...Indeed, Seton-Watson's brief section is by far the best thing in the book...
...But the book has some refreshingly sound observations about the profound forces of nationalism and liberalism in Eastern Europe, and it correctly ties up German reunification with freedom for the area...
Vol. 45 • April 1962 • No. 7
