Central Europe Today Ethnic German Minorities in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia
Amid the debate about the millions of ethnic Germans who were expelled from the countries of Central Europe after World War Two, it's easy to forget that there are also many hundreds of thousands of Germans who for various reasons remained in the region. It would be impossible to talk of a concrete figure - sociologists agree that national identity is something that shifts with time and circumstances. In the Czech census of 2001 some forty thousand Czech citizens described their nationality as German, a little under half a percent of the population, but the number of Czechs who have at least partly German roots probably runs into hundreds of thousands. In this programme I shall be comparing the German minority today in three Central European countries, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia.
Thomas Mann Gymnazium
Back
