Manifesto "Věrni zůstaneme"
The appeal " Věrni zůstaneme " (German: "We remain loyal") is a manifesto by over 300 Czech national and leftist intellectuals and writers as well as other personalities from culture and science from 1938. It was created during the time of growing threat to Czechoslovakia through the Third Reich and achieved extremely broad approval among the population.
meaning
On May 15, 1938, several Czech daily newspapers published a manifesto in which the government and the population were called upon to defend the independence and cohesion of the entire state and to reject the ever increasing threat from the German Reich. The manifesto was of particular importance in view of the annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938 and the increasingly provocative actions of Konrad Henlein's Sudeten German party .
The central idea of the manifesto was the principle of free civil society regardless of political or religious beliefs and origins. The political parties were called upon to subordinate their interests to the general interests of society. This appeal is often associated with a similar manifesto by Czech writers of May 17, 1917, which was addressed to the Bohemian deputies in the Imperial Council in Vienna and encouraged them to fight for the independence of the state.
The petition had the signatures of 308 public figures. However, a large signature campaign was immediately prepared and started. It was coordinated by a petition committee "Věrni zůstaneme", and on the day the Munich Agreement was signed on September 29, 1938, it had over a million signatures. Already at the end of 1938 women from the women's group Ženská národní rada signed the manifesto .
Only a short time later, one of the most important resistance organizations in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , the Petiční výbor Věrni zůstaneme , emerged from the committee that led the signature campaign .
swell
- Věrni zůstaneme, a lemma of the online encyclopedia CoJeCo, online at: www.cojeco.cz / ... , accessed on July 15, 2012
- Kalendárium: 15. května 1938 (Calendar 15 May 1938), online at: www.svornost.com / ... , accessed on July 15, 2012
- Texts of some manifestos in the journal divadelni.noviny 2/2009, online at: http://host.divadlo.cz/noviny/clanek.asp?id=18428 , accessed on July 15, 2012
Individual evidence
- ↑ Květa Jechová: Emancipace shora , in: Paměť a dějiny 4/2013, ÚSTR publications , online at: ustrcr.cz / ...