Here’s a question of terminology which has been bugging me for some time. The Munich crisis in September and October 1938 is a well-known historical event. But the name ‘Munich crisis’ is misleading, because the crisis was building long before the word Munich was ever associated with it. Munich had nothing to do with the Munich crisis at all, except that it just happened to be the place where Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier met to resolve it. (So ‘Munich conference’ is fine, as is ‘Munich’ as a shorthand for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.) ‘Czech crisis’ would be better, but that’s usually reserved for an earlier flap around March 1938. I tend to prefer ‘Sudeten crisis’, which has the virtue of indicating what the crisis was actually about. On the other hand, nobody at the time seems to have spoken of the Sudeten crisis; usually they referred to the Czech crisis, and very occasionally, after the crisis had passed, the Munich crisis. And Munich crisis is certainly the preferred term today.
So what say you? Feel free to make arguments in comments.
Next up: ‘Crisis’ vs ‘crisis’. You be the judge!
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29 September 2008 at 9:53 pm
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31 July 2008 at 2:24 am
Chris Williams
Second Czech Crisis - March 39 being the Third.
31 July 2008 at 3:14 am
Heather
I’m going with Sudeten Crisis. Spookily enough I’ve been reading a couple of books I acquired a short while ago that cover this particular period. Both are recommended to those interested in why the Second World War happened.
The books are “The Dark Valley” by Piers Brendon and “The Approach of War 1938-1939″ by Christopher Thorne (part of a series called “The Making of the Twentieth Century”).
Though my particular interest is the period from the Phoney War to the start of the London Blitz, understanding the how and why the main conflict happened is fascinating.
31 July 2008 at 9:10 am
Ricardo Reis
I prefer sudent crisis and I think thats the way its called around here (Portugal). Which lead me to another question: what differences are there in terminology that result from the country where they are spoken about? Same historial events sometimes are referred by diferent names in diferent countries… so… only Anglos should answer your questionaire?
31 July 2008 at 4:48 pm
Brett Holman
Chris:
I like that, actually. But maybe it would seem a bit pretentious for me to go around in my thesis relabelling three crises like that instead of just one?
Heather:
I read The Dark Valley when it came out, it’s very vivid and covers a lot of ground (some of which often gets neglected — all the stuff about Japan was new to me, anyway). May have to have a look at Thorne, thanks for that.
Ricardo:
It’s not a very scientific survey so I think you should go ahead and fill it out if you like! It might be interesting to see a comparative list of the names for various events in different countries. In Russia, WWII is known as the Great Patriotic War (or was, or so I have been told), which presumably says something about how the contributions and activities of the western Allies were minimised.
31 July 2008 at 9:13 pm
Chris Williams
Student crisis is what happened at Eben-Emael…
(Apologies for obscure fallschirmjager pun.)
31 July 2008 at 11:49 pm
Brett Holman
Oh dear!
1 August 2008 at 4:16 am
Ricardo Reis
Probably with Putin in charge it still is The Great Patriotic War…
1 August 2008 at 5:07 am
Heather
Brett, you may find Thorne’s book covers more or less what Brendon’s does, but it does concentrate on the European events. It obviously shares sources, but Brendon’s book has a much wider scope, as you say. It really filled in may details of the global situation during the 1930s, and how it was almost inevitable that the countries that moved toward extremist political views during that period would end up in a war.
1 August 2008 at 7:57 am
Nemo
There are some great audio clips from 1938 radio braodcasts about the Sudeten Crisis (going far beyond just Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” soundbite) at the following page:
http://www.otr.com/munich.shtml
2 August 2008 at 5:18 pm
Gavin
Knowing what to call things is always difficult. I often tend to go with the one that most people know even if it’s misleading. For example, I argued (following Mark Kishlansky) that the New Model Army might not have been quite as new as many people think, but I still carried on calling it the New Model Army. I wrote a whole post somewhere about what to call the English/British Revolution(s)/Civil War(s). I usually tend to stick with English Civil War because that’s what my own work is about - south-eastern England during the First Civil War (which wasn’t the first civil war to ever happen in England).
Numbering things gets even more confusing. It seems like Gulf War numbers have got right out of sync. Back in the 80s Gulf War meant the Iran-Iraq war but then in 1991 that came to be the First Gulf War and Desert Storm the Second (or at least that’s how I thought of it). Since the present one kicked off people have been talking about Desert Storm as the First Gulf War and this one as the Second.
And I’m really confused about what to call the people who lived in North America before Columbus or the Vikings arrived.
5 August 2008 at 7:25 am
David Edgerton
Nice point Brett. If we are speaking about British responses it is worth making the point that the term ‘crisis’, much overused here now, was very clearly associated with the events of Sept/Oct 1938. So ‘crisis’ is right. As to the first term, I have been noting recently that (as Brett says) there was no ‘Munich crisis’, but lots of people referred to the ‘September crisis’, but I don’t have any sense how long this lasted.
7 August 2008 at 3:57 pm
Brett Holman
Nemo:
Thanks!
Gavin:
I agree that it’s good idea, in general, to stick with previous nomenclature if it’s well-established, even if it’s misleading. (The Big Bang is an example that comes to mind … it’s evocative but misleadingly so, and was coined by an opponent of the theory to disparage it!) But I think Sudeten crisis has about enough currency to not confuse people? Google suggests “Munich crisis” is used about 10 times more often than “Sudeten crisis”, which I thought is a surprisingly low ratio.
David:
I like ‘September crisis’ too (the fact that I like all the alternatives probably says something about how much Munich crisis annoys me!) It harks back to the July crisis of 1914. Was there an August crisis of 1939? Good point about ‘crisis’ itself. Madge and Harrisson discussed at some length the word itself and the way in which it attached to the, well, crisis in their Britain by Mass-Observation (1939).
8 August 2008 at 1:06 pm
Paul Shafer
You are correct. This is clearly pointed out in Shirer’s 1969 Book “The Collapse of the Third Republic.” However, it was really a crisis of Great Britain and France. France was too scared to act on her own and kept blaming GB. If France had acted, beyond just putting her army on alert, GB would have had no choice but to send her 130+ bombers over Germany to scare Hitler. (Of course, the US was kept abreast of the whole affair and did not help at all…the US could have sent additional bombers to GB and France in 1938). It did not help that before the “crisis” Goering wined and dined the Head of the French Air Force and even took him to see the jet engine test bench. Vuillemins told Gamelin and Daladier that “the French air force would be wiped out in two weeks” based upon the hype that he was permitted to see by Goering.
8 August 2008 at 4:24 pm
Brett Holman
Thanks, Paul.
12 August 2008 at 8:14 am
Paul Shafer
Ambassador Coulondre of France wrote in 1938 after Daladier and Chamberlain abandonned the Czechs, “Munich tolled the bell for a certain France, la grande France of former times and even 1914…..The tolling of bells do not kill a sick man! They announce his death. The accord of Munich did not
provoke the fall of France. It registered it!”
Two years later Coulondre was proven correct.