Your Magnificence,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Our generation is living at a time which may well be seen one day as a time of a great historic change. It is a time when, not without difficulty, a new international order is coming into being, when many states are making efforts to redefine their character, their identity and their position on the international scene, when a quest for a whole new spirit of the coexistence of people, nations, cultures and entire spheres of civilization on this planet is under way. We can say that we have arrived at a crossroads and find ourselves confronted with a great challenge. Inevitably, the present is also a time of new reflections, including a review of history, and a new stocktaking.
It is not only that the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II invites us to think about what conclusions we can draw, in hindsight, from that war, the most atrocious one in human history. Nor is it just that the fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the end of the Cold War and the bipolar division of the world makes us think what these recent developments have brought, what they mean and what tasks they set before us. More than that is needed now: we have to place all these events in a broader and deeper historical context and try to formulate the challenges of our time against the background of such a fundamental reflection.
I should like to contribute to that with a few remarks on the Czech-German relationship. I am happy to be able to do so on a site which reminds us - more than any other place could - of the centuries of intellectual coexistence of the Czechs and the Germans: on the academic ground of Charles University.
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Our relationship to Germany and the Germans has been more than merely one of the many themes of our diplomacy. It has been a part of our destiny, even a part of our identity. Germany has been our inspiration as well as our pain; a source of understandable traumas, of many prejudices and misconceptions, as well as of standards to which we turn; some regard Germany as our greatest hope, others as our greatest peril. It can be said that the attitude they take toward Germany and the Germans has been a factor through which the Czechs define themselves, both politically and philosophically, and that it is through the type of that attitude that they determine not only their relationship to their own history but also the type of their conception of themselves as a nation and a state. Obviously, the relationship to the Czechs is not of the same kind of fundamental importance to the Germans; nevertheless, it may be more important to them than some Germans might be prepared to admit: traditionally, this relationship has been one of the tests revealing their own conception of themselves as well. Let us recall that Germany's stand toward us has many times been a mirror image of its stand toward Europe as a whole! At present, as the newly united Germany tries to find its new identity and a new position in Europe and the world, the significance of the former has particularly increased.
What does this mean for us? No more and no less than that we should talk about the Czech-German theme publicly, candidly, in a matter-of-fact way and, in so doing, be fully conscious of the fact that as we speak about it, we speak about ourselves.
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The Czech-German or German-Czech relationship acquired its dramatic, sometimes almost excruciating character only in a fairly recent past, that is, during the last two centuries when a national dimension began to carry an increasing weight in it. This modern experience has often concealed or overshadowed the much longer experience of our more ancient history which was characterized by a special kind of creative coexistence of the Czechs and the Germans within one state. It has to be admitted that even then the coexistence was not always idyllic or easy, but in the various confrontations that were later described as purely national confrontations the points at issue were in reality other things than national affiliations. Those disputes were about religion, ideas or ideologies, power, social welfare or other matters, and while factors such as where those concerned came from, or which languages they spoke, sometimes played a role as well, differing national sentiments as we perceive them today were not the driving force of the arguments then. The two elements - combined also with the Jewish element - for centuries mingled together here, inspiring and influencing one another in a wide variety of ways; we can even say that they lived together in a kind of symbiosis. Their various encounters never posed a threat to that coexistence, nor did they augur its end; on the contrary, they helped shape its history and more than once had a stimulating effect on the political and cultural accomplishments of the entire population of our country. In reality, this specific community was the actual subject of Czech history, although the Czechs always constituted the majority of the country's population. For that matter, the international status of the Kingdom of Bohemia was for a long time different from what would correspond to the position of a national state at present: it was always a special, influential entity within a universalistic Holy Roman Empire, and the weight of that entity was not determined by the size of the people that formed the majority of its population but by completely different historical factors. Its multicultural character, to put it in present-day language, undoubtedly played a role among the latter; the prominent position held by the Kings of Bohemia among the Electors who chose the Emperors clearly bears witness to that.
The unique story of the life together of the Czechs and the Germans in our country that lasted nearly a thousand years - notwithstanding the fact that it became increasingly complicated in the last two centuries, and was ultimately destroyed - remains an integral part of our history, and thus also of our present identity as citizens of the Czech Republic, and represents a value that we must not forget. We must not forget it, among other things, because it is - if we allow ourselves a little bit of an overstatement - a very modern value that can inspire us as we build a new Czech-German relationship now.
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Volumes have already been written about the era of the increasingly dramatic relationship between the Czechs and the Germans in our country, as it began to develop from the beginning of the last century due to the growing national consciousness in the modern sense of the word. I shall therefore limit myself to recalling just a few general facts that I find to be beyond dispute and that, it appears, should be once again stressed from the Czech side today.
1) If someone claims now and then that the Czechoslovak Republic - as the fruit of the ripening self-consciousness and the self-liberation efforts of the Czechs and the Slovaks and a product of the Peace of Versailles - was an error and, as such, a cause of the subsequent disasters, he or she only reveals his or her own ignorance. The birth of the republic cannot be ascribed only to the realism that paid regard to the desire of the Czechs and the Slovaks to develop their identity, to free themselves from the rule of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy that failed to offer them an appropriate status, and to build their new, viable statehood on their association in one common state. What was no less, if not even more important was the fact that a modern, democratic, liberal state was purposefully created here on the basis of the values to which the entire democratic Europe of today is committed as well, and in which it sees its future. Its founding fathers expected that - against the background of a growing stability of both the domestic and the international situation - it would develop into a true civil state, growing out of a creative cooperation of all its citizens and of their respect for one another's national character. It is true that the Czechoslovak Republic had its weaknesses - among other things, it never worked out a satisfactory solution to its nationalities problems - but the roots of these weaknesses did not lie in the values that marked its birth, and showed it the way to go. They were the result of the inability of some of its political forces to act in a broad-minded manner and in the spirit of those values so as to solve the country's minor domestic problems before enemies of freedom turned them into major international problems. All that is well known and has been recorded, but it does not change in any way the fact that Czechoslovakia - like France, today's Benelux countries, Switzerland and the Nordic nations - was one of the few truly democratic and well-ordered states of continental Europe. Voices of personages such as Thomas Mann, whom - along with thousands of other German democrats - Czechoslovakia granted asylum after Hitler came to power, have testified to that. Thus, when the Czech Republic acknowledges its ties of continuity with Czechoslovakia this can only be to its credit.
2) It would be a dangerous oversimplification if the transfer of the Germans from our country after the war were to be perceived as the only item in the tragic coming to an end of the thousand years of Czech-German coexistence here. Physically, the transfer undoubtedly was the end of our life together in a common state, because it was with the transfer that that coexistence was actually terminated. But the lethal blow that caused its death was struck by something else: the fatal failing of a great part of our country's German-born citizens who gave preference to the dictatorship, confrontation and violence embodied in Hitler's national socialism over democracy, dialogue and tolerance, and while they were claiming their right to their homeland, they in fact renounced their home country. In so doing, they negated the outstanding accomplishments of the many German democrats who had helped build Czechoslovakia as their home. Whatever the deficiencies of the solution of the nationalities issue in pre-war Czechoslovakia may have been, they can never justify that failing. Those who committed it turned not only against their fellow citizens, against Czechoslovakia as a state and their own status as citizens of that state; they turned against the very foundations of humanity itself. They embraced a perverted racist ideology and began immediately to apply it in practice. It is marvellous that many descendants of our former German fellow citizens have understood that and are now working selflessly and patiently for a reconciliation between our peoples.
We can have different views on the post-war transfer of the German population - my own critical opinion is widely known - but we can never take that step out of its historical context, nor can we fail to see the connection between the transfer and all the preceding horrors that led to it. While until recently I believed this to be self-evident and therefore felt no need to stress it, I do have to say it clearly at present, now that people who ignore this fact or even call it in question are again taking the floor in Germany. I have already stated more than once in the past that evil is of an infectious nature and that the evil of the transfer was only a sad consequence of the evil which preceded it. There can be no dispute about who was the first to let the genie of national hatred out of the bottle. And if we, that is, the Czechs, are to recognize our share of responsibility for the end of the Czech-German coexistence in the Czech lands, we have to say, for the sake of truth, that we let ourselves become infected by the insidious virus of the ethnic concept of guilt and punishment but that it was not us who brought that virus, at least not its modern destructive form, into this country.
3) My third remark on the end of the Czech-German coexistence concerns the Munich Agreement. I am not sure whether certain people, especially on the German side, are sufficiently aware of the fact that Munich was not simply an unjust solution of a disputable minority issue but the last and, in a way, crucial confrontation between democracy and the Nazi dictatorship. At that time, democracy capitulated and thus paved the way for the dictatorship to launch its inconceivable assault on all the fundamental values of civilization and on the very essence of human coexistence - possibly the most severe such assault ever made in human history. To Hitler Munich was the final test of democracy and its ability to defend itself; he took the Munich capitulation of the democrats as a sign that he was free to unleash a war. His calculation proved to be wrong and democracy prevailed in the end, but only at a great sacrifice that could most probably have been avoided if democracy had not given in to the delusion of appeasement and had resisted Hitler at the time of the Munich crisis. Again, two different aspects of the matter should be distinguished: while in military terms World War II began with the attack on Poland, there is no doubt that the Munich dictate was its political beginning. Did a great German politician not say many years ago that Munich meant the moment from which everything plunged into the abyss? The part that many of our German-born fellow citizens played in the preparations for Munich and in its aftermath cannot be narrowed to a struggle for their minority rights. The issue then was not the Germans from the Czech lands, nor merely the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia as a prelude to its subsequent occupation. At that time, war was declared, in no uncertain terms and at the international level, upon human freedom and dignity. Were not the German opponents of Nazism the first victims of Nazi vengeance in the Czech lands? Even now, admitting this may not be easy for many Germans, especially for those who were affected by the population transfer, just as it is not easy for many Czechs, handicapped by the decades without freedom when this subject was taboo, to admit the damage they did to democracy and thus to themselves by adopting after the war the idea of expelling the Germans from their home.
4) Nazism was once described as one of the most horrible manifestations of the tribal concept of state as a blood community, in contradiction to the idea of an open society that has for two and a half thousand years been challenging the former and standing up to it. If we accept this interpretation we should develop our thoughts about the Czech-German past, present and future, including a Czech-German understanding or conciliation, on the basis of an agreement to the effect that the only alternative for the future, and the only alternative that can lead to a final reconciliation, is to join forces in building an open society and fighting for it against all those who - despite all the horrifying experience of modern tribalism - would wish to spread the spiritual fruits of nationalism again. Such enemies of an open society can be found, regrettably, on both sides of our frontier. The alternative which they offer us would ultimately always result in a confrontation in which everyone would suffer. The only way that the democratic Czech Republic and the democratic Germany - and not just the two - can go is not to be afraid of them, and not to yield. Occasionally, even democrats have to say: "That's enough!"
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What should be our starting points as we build a new relationship between our peoples ? What are the courses open to us ?
First and foremost, we should try to reach agreement on what place we shall give to our past. There is no way we can forget it. Just as a consistent personality that lives in harmony with itself and takes responsibility for itself could never fail to be aware of its own past and continuity and to take a responsible attitude toward them, it would be equally unthinkable - even though in a different manner - that a responsible community, be it defined on a national or on a political basis, should lack this kind of consciousness. We have to know our past history and form our opinions on it. This does not mean, however, that we should move back into our past, try to live the lives of our ancestors, time and again reconstruct the situations which they were confronted with and copy their behaviour, suffer their agonies or be moved by their successes and draw political consequences from such sentiments. The past cannot constitute our programme. If we were to transplant ourselves into our past history forever and existentially identify ourselves with it, we would lose the ability to look at it from a distance, to judge it with the due sense of responsibility and to learn from it. In the end, such a complete self-transplantation into the past would amount to a specific way of restoring the tribal concept of nation as an entity with its own "superhistorical" collective "supersubjectivity". We know full well what the ultimate product of this concept is: the principle of a never-ending blood vengeance which again and again drives generations of grandchildren to punish other grandchildren for wrongs done by the grandfathers of the latter to the grandfathers of the former.
Agreement on this would have many important effects. Primarily, it would mean that the time of apologies is over and a time of a matter-of-fact pursuit of the truth begins. The words of apology which representatives of the democratic Germany offered to all nations as well as to their own citizens for what Nazism had done to them were of great significance and paved the way for a new life together. All that we have said on the post-war population transfer has been aimed to serve the same purpose. By now, I think, we have progressed further than that. What is needed at present is a substantive, unbiased analysis and the ability to gain useful knowledge in this way.
In a word, it has to be said clearly, once for all, what belongs to history and should be treated as such.
Our future really does not lie in our past. To reawaken the past means to bring back to life all the demons that have lain dormant there. That is not the way for us to go. The way is to recognize at last how dangerous such demons are.
This attitude toward the past brings other practical results as well.
From the Czech point of view, these include, as an important and logical consequence, an unequivocal rejection of any attempts to extract from long bygone events or injustices a whole set of present-day political or legal demands or claims that call in question the very ground on which the post-war order of Europe has been built. The voices advocating that have been marginal and not very numerous, but the Czech public has been very sensitive to their emergence. I therefore deem it my duty to say here in the clearest terms that the Czech Republic is a direct co-heir of the Czechoslovak statehood born out of two dreadful wars in the unleashing of which the Czechs had no part. Our republic will therefore never negotiate about a revision of their outcome, about any infringement of the continuity of its legal system, about any corrections of history at the cost of our contemporaries.
If there is a debt in the form of compensation for the surviving victims of the Nazi tyranny, let it be paid. But no sum of money in any currency will ever recompense all that we or our ancestors had to go through because of Nazism. There is no compensation for the tens of thousands of the murdered or those tortured to death, or for the moral, political and economic losses that we had to suffer as a result of Munich, the Nazi occupation, the war and all its political consequences. And we are not so foolish as to send the present generation in the democratic Germany bills for all the wrongs committed long ago by some of their fathers, grandfathers or great-grandfathers, just as we do not present the nations of the former Soviet Union with bills for all the damage done to our country as well as to our souls by the decades of Communism. Consequently, we find all demands for either material or other reparations for the post-war population transfer to be all the more absurd. Nazism, Munich, the war and all its bitter fruits belong to history, and all that we can and are prepared to do is try to understand that history and do everything in our power in order that it never happens again. Representatives of the democratic Germany long ago publicly admitted the German guilt for Nazism, without attempting the impossible, that is, to return history somewhere before World War II. We too have made an effort to describe our share of responsibility for all the bad things done after the war, but we do not have the slightest intention either to turn history backwards or to annul legal acts lawfully approved by our parliament years ago - acts on which whole layers of other acts have since been piled up. We are not prepared to let new storms wreak havoc in the area of property rights, and thus open the door to all the evil spirits of the past. The past can never be changed, nor can we erase from our historical memory the Thirty Years' War, the two World Wars or the consequences of the last of these. It is, however, our duty to the world as well as to ourselves to tell the truth about all these developments; this is essential to our sanity as a nation and a state. As far as the transfer of the German population is concerned, we must also admit the inconvenient truth, regardless of any erratic conclusions certain people might possibly draw from our words. Our self-reflection is namely a further, even more consistent way of rejecting the principles underlying the actions of all the present enemies of an open society as they come up with claims in an effort to set the vicious circle of never-ending tribal retaliation in motion again.
Those who were once expelled or transferred from our country as well as their descendants are welcome here now like all Germans are. They are welcome as guests who esteem the lands where generations of their forefathers once lived, who tend sites to which they feel bound and work together with our citizens as friends. Perhaps we are not so far away from the days when Czechs and Germans - once they come together in the inwardly open land of the European Union - will be free to settle anywhere in its territory and take part in building the home of their choice. A good relationship of nations, and thus also our reconciliation, can only be generated by the cooperation of free citizens who resist the temptation to rally under collectivist banners and, in the shadow thereof, to call up the spirits of tribal feuds.
Just as the time of apologies and of sending bills for the past should end, and a time of objective debate on the subject begin, it is time that monologues and isolated proclamations give way to dialogue. Actually, dialogue has already begun - among the people, local self-government bodies, historians and even politicians. I am an advocate of its constant widening and intensification. However, it has to be a true dialogue. That is, we have to exchange information, experience, knowledge, analyses, suggestions and programmes, compare them, seek understanding and put into practice whatever good things we shall agree upon, without either of us feeling - not even by way of insinuation - like a hostage of the other, or like a hostage of our sinister history.
In other words: the time of confrontation must end once and for all, and be replaced by a time of cooperation. The more clearly the parties to such joint efforts commit themselves to the idea of a civil state and civil society, the better equipped they will be to work together. Germany is way ahead, not only economically but also because of the fact that at least its western part could for years live in freedom and build a liberal democratic state based on all the time-tested values of Western civilization while pursuing a truly European course; that is, it has subscribed to the ideal of Europe as a political body governed by the principle of equality of large and small alike and their peaceful cooperation on the basis of equal rights and in the spirit of their shared respect for human rights and liberties, democracy, rule of law, market economy and the concept of civil society. In the Czech Republic, time stood still for many years, but we certainly can make up for the delay quickly, especially if we draw on the potential of our good traditions from the pre-war period that even fifty seven years did not completely eradicate. Thus, the preconditions for good cooperation are there. If disturbing tones, voices or sentiments should make themselves felt, much more energy should be given on both sides to efforts aimed at dealing with them. On the German side, the former take the form of voices, fortunately rather rare and isolated, that try to rehabilitate the intellectual roots of the past German catastrophe, voices of secret nostalgics who are unable to part with the concept of a national state as the zenith of human endeavours and with the feeling that Germany has been entrusted with a special mission that would entitle it to a position of superiority vis-a-vis other nations. On the Czech side, we find an awkward, essentially provincial combination of fear of the Germans and servility to them, and also the inability of a part of our population to cast off the straightjacket of the prejudices that had so long been nurtured in our society. Sometimes it seems to me as if the state of mind that was characteristic of the period immediately after the war somehow persisted here, strangely counterbalanced by a desire to "get something out of the Germans". Thus, we can meet people who - in the spirit of the Communist propaganda - frighten those around them with talk about the German threat but at the same time hang out signs saying "Zimmer frei" on their houses and collect rent in deutschmarks even from Czech tenants. On the one hand strong words marked by a nationalist blindness of the mind and xenophobia, on the other a total lack of an elementary civic pride.
It is the same thing again: the wish to replace the Communist collectivism with a national one, to lie one's way out of one's own civic responsibility and hide behind anonymity in a pack that barks at all those who do not belong to it - this is one of the variations of the phenomena we have to systematically combat. The occasional signs of a subconscious belief in an infallible voice of the blood, of fate, Providence and national myths, and in a right to demand the impossible, that is, a correction of history that is perceived as a continuous series of wrongs against one's own tribe, are another variation of the same misconception.
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Ladies and Gentlemen,
Having mentioned all the various dangers lurking along the path toward an auspicious future of the Czech-German relationship, and described those who - possibly without being aware of it - are enemies of such a future, I should like to profess my optimism.
I believe in the democratic, liberal, European Germany. I believe in the Germany of Theodor Heuss, Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Schumacher, Ludwig Erhard, Willy Brandt and Richard von Weizsäcker. I believe in the millions of German democrats. I believe in Germany's sincere desire to develop and intensify the process of European unification based on the universal validity of the fundamental values of Euro-American civilization, and I believe in its readiness to work for Europe to be a continent of peace, freedom, cooperation, security and just relations among all its states, nations and regions. I therefore believe also in Germany's sincere readiness to support a speedy integration of Central Europe into the North Atlantic Alliance as well as into the European Union. I simply believe in Germany's preparedness to be an influential party in building an increasingly united Europe and, in this context, to put its friendly relations with Poland, the Czech Republic and other young democracies on a new footing, just as it once succeeded in reshaping its relations with France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark.
I am not alone among my fellow citizens in holding this belief. The unequivocal support given by our state from the very beginning - unreservedly and without suspicion - to Germany's democratic reunification testifies to that. Already during our dissident years many of us said - often meeting even among Germans with a lack of understanding of this opinion - that there would be no united Europe without a united Germany and that the Iron Curtain would never fall unless the Berlin Wall collapsed first.
I also believe in the favourable development of the democratic Czech Republic. I trust that it will speedily overcome the sad legacy of Communism as well as of its more ancient historical traumas and that it will gradually become a full-fledged and responsible member of the family of European democracies.
I trust that already during this year many things will be done in order to strengthen confidence between our countries and peoples, gradually eliminating the obstacles and barriers that strain our relations and helping to remove all the layers of prejudices, misconceptions, illusions and suspicions we are confronted with. I trust that we shall be able to build on the solid foundations that we have laid for our coexistence since 1989, make use of the opportunities offered by the Treaty between our states and develop our cooperation with a renewed vigour and at all levels.
I trust that our shared commitment to the fundamental values of civilization on which the Europe of today is being built will facilitate these endeavours and that we shall find within ourselves enough courage to stand up against all those whose political orientation draws on the calamitous past and who would wish to stroke out our positive future.
I believe in the power of truth and good will as the principal sources of our mutual understanding.
Thank you for your attention.

Translation from the Czech