Josef Korbel

Josef Korbel (born September 20, 1909 in Geiersberg , Eastern Bohemia , Austria-Hungary as Josef Körbel; † July 18, 1977 in Denver ) was a Czechoslovak diplomat and later a university professor in the USA as well as the author of several well-known books on political topics such as the Communism .

Life

Korbel, born in the small town of Geiersberg in East Bohemia (Czech until 1950: Kyšperk , now Letohrad ) near Wildenschwerdt ( Ústí nad Orlicí ), grew up in a well-off Jewish family. His father was the director of a large construction company. At the age of twelve, the highly gifted student moved to Kostelec nad Orlicí , as he was able to receive a school education corresponding to his talent. Here he met his future wife. After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Paris before studying law at Charles University in Prague . He completed this with a doctorate at the age of 23. After completing his military service, he got a position in the Foreign Ministry in 1934. This was followed by his marriage (1935) and the birth of his daughter Marie Jana Korbelová - later US Secretary of State Madeleine Korbel Albright (1937). In 1936 Korbel was appointed press attaché of the Czechoslovak embassy in Yugoslavia and lived in Belgrade .

While parts of Czechoslovakia came into German hands after the Sudeten crisis , Korbel stayed in Belgrade. In 1938, however, the well-known liberal democrat was removed from service by a new Czechoslovak government. He moved back to Prague. Ten days after the German troops marched into the remaining Czech Republic , on March 25, 1939, he fled with his family and a few belongings via Belgrade to London. His family and his wife's family became 25 members, including three parents, victims of the Holocaust .

In London, Korbel met Jan Masaryk , the son of the former Czechoslovak president, and the last democratic president of Czechoslovakia, Edvard Beneš . He was appointed a member of the government in exile established by them. In 1941 the couple converted to Catholicism, and in 1942 their second daughter, Kathy, was born in London. During the Second World War , Korbel stayed with his family in England and worked there for the government in exile.

After his escape, Korbel was classified by the National Socialist police as an enemy of the German regime: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin placed him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who would be killed in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British islands by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos following the occupation troops were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

Ambassador of Czechoslovakia

After the end of the Second World War, Korbel moved back to Czechoslovakia, where he became head of the foreign ministry. He moved into the apartment of the German-Czech industrialist family Nebrich in Prague, which had been expropriated by the Beneš decrees .

In autumn 1945, at the age of only 36, Korbel became ambassador to Yugoslavia. Korbel also began working as a writer and published his first book in 1945 ( Tito's Communism , which appeared in the USA in 1951). In 1947 his son John was born.

On February 25, 1948, the Communist Party de facto took power in Czechoslovakia - an open coup . On June 7, 1948, President Beneš resigned. While Czechoslovakia oriented itself more and more towards Moscow, Tito's Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union. As a staunch democrat, Korbel withdrew, but without foregoing political activity. He became chairman of the so-called "Kashmir Commission", which was supposed to clarify the status of the province of Kashmir, which was claimed by both India and Pakistan .

Josef Korbel as an American

While Korbel was in Kashmir for a while, his family lived in London, where they managed to move to the USA on November 11, 1948. Due to his diplomatic status, Korbel was able to follow his family to the USA, where they applied for political asylum. He now lived with his family in Denver , where he received a full professorship at the Russian Institute of the University of Denver . Here he published his second book ( Danger in Kashmir , 1953). In 1957, Korbel was naturalized in the United States. Other books followed ( The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia , 1963, and Twentieth-Century Czechoslovakia , 1977) that further cemented his reputation in the United States. On July 18, 1977, Korbel died of pancreatic cancer in Denver at the age of 67.

Josef Korbel's influence on American foreign policy

Korbel not only exerted an influence not to be underestimated on his daughter, Madeleine Albright, who was US Secretary of State in the 1990s, but also on Condoleezza Rice , Secretary of State in George W. Bush's second cabinet. Rice studied with Korbel and sees him as her greatest mentor.

Works

• The Communist Subversion of Czechoslovakia. 1938-1948, the failure of coexistence. University Press, Princeton, NJ 1965.
• Danger in Kashmir. University Press, Princeton, NJ 1954.
• Detente in Europe. Real or imaginary? University Press, Princeton, NJ 1972, ISBN 0-691-07546-8
• Tito's Communism. University Press, Denver, Col. 1951.
• Twentieth-Century Czechoslovakia. The meaning of its history. Columbia University Press, New York 1977, ISBN 0-231-03724-4 .

literature

• Madeleine Albright : The Autobiography. (OT: Madam Secretary. ) . Bertelsmann, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-570-00729-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Josef Korbel in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Korbel on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London). .
2. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Stoldt: At that time everything was taken along , in: Der Spiegel , 17/1999