The turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was characterized by growing economic and political freedom for the Czechs and by outstanding acheivements on the part of Czechs in culture medicine and science Architectural trends at the end of the century were romantic copies of past styles like NeoGothic These romantic enthusiasts sometimes did more harm than good as in the case of the reconstruction of Karlstejn Castle It is because of this illfated reconstruction that Karlstejn does not qualify for the UNESCO World Heritage list today In other cases they just did silly things like build fake ancient ruins in Prague parks perhaps to go along with their ancient legend texts The Czech writers and artists Jan Neruda Alois Jirasek Mikulas Ales Bedrich Smetana Antonin Dvorak  Alfons Mucha and Frantisek Bilek all lived and worked at this time The National Theater National Museum and Rudolfinum were built at the turn of the century and the first films in the Czech Republic were made in 1898 

The battle for universal suffrage within the AustroHungarian state was won in 1907 All men in the Czech lands regardless of economic status could vote  women in the Czech lands did not get the vote until 1919 But most of the rest of the political advances made by the Czechs came into being in a sort of fuzzy grey area The constitutional status of the Czech lands within the framework of the Monarchy remained an open and  in Prague at least  a muchdebated question 

Well while Czech nationalists were busy sitting in pubs drinking beer and debating how best to effect the changes they wanted to see implemented in the AustroHungarian government members of other nations within the Empire were also pressing for reforms and for independence It was these pressures that led Serbian nationalist Gavrillo Princip to assassinate the Archduke Francis Ferdinand the heir to the Austrian throne on June 28 1914 precipitating World War I Princip was locked up for this deed and spent the rest of his days at the prison in Terezin Fortress in the Czech lands 

During the course of World War I the Czechs became unified in their opposition to Austrian rule 

Most especially AustriaHungarys alignment with Germany and the restriction of democratic rights in the Czech lands led to growing opposition to the monarchy here An organized resistance began to develop both at home and abroad 

 The Czech university professor philosopher and politician Tomas Garrigue Masaryk the same one who doubted the authenticity of the faked manuscripts and the one who was later to become Czechoslovakias first president had been an advocate of more independence for the Czech lands long before the war had even started In December of 1914 he went abroad where he continued to fight for Czechoslovak independence throughout the war He worked closely with Czech lawyer Edvard Benes and Slovak astronomer Milan Rastislav Stefanik who were also in exile in the United States throughout the conflict It was in the United States at this time that Masaryk met his wife American Charlotte Garrigue 

It was there too that Masaryk Benes and Stefanik founded the Czech National Council in 1916 Over time this organization was renamed the Czechoslovak National Council and was recognized as the valid voice of Czechoslovakia by Allied leaders Their position as the leaders of free Czechoslovakia was further strengthened with the formation of Czechoslovak military units known as the Czechoslovak Legions which fought alongside the Allies The Czechoslovak Legions earned particular distinction on the Italian French and Russian fronts  and on the last of these they actually became involved in the Russian Revolution fighting against the Bolsheviks and for a time during that revolution controlled about half of the territory of Czarist Russia 

Resistance at home grew only gradually At first it was limited to small spy groups who had contact with Masaryk who was considered an enemy of Austria on account of his subversive activities Active resistance to the monarchy was severely punished and as a result many prominent Czech cultural and political personalities spent most of the war behind bars convicted of treason While the sentence for treason at that time was actually death the Austrians were too busy to carry out the sentences Thus the executions were never carried out and these Czech leaders simply languished in jail for the duration 

By 1917 when things were quite apparantly not in AustriaHungarys favor Czech opposition to the war became much more active People began organizing strikes demonstrations and even violent protests  which had to be put down by the army Anybody who is particularly interested in this period of Czech history should definitely read The Good Soldier Schwiek by Jaroslav Hasek It not only offers a great deal of insight into the kind of passive resistance the Czechs favor but also offers many more insights into the Czech psyche 

In May 1918 the representatives of the resistance movement abroad had signed the Pittsburgh Convention which approved the formation of a joint state composed of Slovakia and the Czech lands Later  much later very recently in fact  Slovak politicians seeking autonomy for Slovakia would refer to a provision in this agreement mentioning Slovakias own administration parliament and courts of law 

While the resistance leaders abroad were planning a new state the various and sundry political forces in the Czech lands still could not agree on whether they wanted to radically reconstruct or completely abolish the political structure of AustriaHungary In July 1918 the Czech National Committee a grouping of the leaders of the chief political parties which wasnt much cooperating with Masaryks efforts in exile was reorganized and began preparing to assume power once the Central Powers were defeated 

 In October 1918 Masaryk Benes and Stefanik obtained recognition of the Czechoslovak National Council as the interim government of the Czechoslovak Republic from the Allied Powers But while they were in Switzerland with delegates from the Prague National Committee discussing details of setting up this new state a hastilyorganized third grouping the National Committee headed by Antonin Svehla Alois Rasin Jiri Stribrny Frantisek Soukup and Vavro Srobar proclaimed Czechoslovakia an independent Republic on October 28 1918 and began to assume the transfer of power from Austrian officials 

Adding to this disparity and completely independent of events in Prague Slovak political representatives issued the Martin Declaration in favor of a joint Czechoslovak state on October 30 1918 

On November 14 1918 the interim Parliament declared that the new Czechoslovak state would be a republic and named Tomas Garrigue Masaryk as the first President 

The Czechoslovak Republic CSR was composed of the historical Czech lands of Bohemia Moravia and Silesia as well as Slovakia and Ruthenia SubCarpathian Russia 

Czechoslovakias relations with its neighboring states  Germany Hungary and Poland  were complicated from the very start 

In security matters Czechoslovakia alligned itself with France and her partners in the Little Entente As Germany grew more threatening in the course of the 1930s Czechoslovakia also signed a pact with the Soviet Union which promised to help Czechoslovakia in the case of need  but provided that France fulfilled her obligations to help the nation first 

The Czechs and the Slovaks  who had used nationalistic arguments to justify their drive for independence from AustriaHungary  now found themselves at the other end of the bargaining table While these two nations were officially considered the two partners in the Czechoslovak union together they comprised less than 65 percent of the total population More than 3 million Germans  some 23 percent of the population  lived mostly in the Czech border regions the territories which were to become known as the Sudetenland Meanwhile the Tesin region in the north was inhabited by a Polish minority of 75000; South Slovakia and Ruthenia had a large Hungarian minority of about 745000; and most of the population of Ruthenia something less than half a million people were quite naturally Ruthenians 

After World War I ethnic Germans in the border regions made a halfhearted attempt to secede from Czechoslovakia which was put down by the Czechoslovak army in 1918 Over the course of the next 20 years the two largest German political parties  the Agrarians and the Christian Socialists  were won over by the Czechoslovak government and agreed to cooperate with the Czechoslovak state 

Czechoslovakia was one of the few states in Europe between the two World Wars with a genuine parliamentary democracy guaranteed by the Constitution of February 1920 Even the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which had been established in 1921 was allowed to legally exist  which was very unusual for the time The Communists even had a few members in parliament  and they were allowed to remain there even when they started to openly denounce democracy as such  and especially the democratic system in Czechoslovakia 

After dealing with postwar chaos and putting down a few radical Bolshevist uprisings the domestic political and economic situation in Czechoslovakia was basically stabilized by the beginning of the 1920s 

In the 20 years between the two World Wars Czechoslovakia was one of the worlds most advanced industrialagrarian countries In fact it was among the 10 richest nations in the world at that time as it had inherited virtually all of Austrias industrial base This early stability paved the way for a flowering of Czech literature and culture Proud of their new independence Czechoslovaks were anxious to put their new country on the map  sometimes in the craziest ways This led Czech Radio for instance to start broadcasting in 1923  despite that they didnt have a transmitter or even a microphone  They simply borrowed the former as well as a tent to protect them from the elements from the Czechoslovak Boy Scouts and manufactured the latter from a telephone receiver Why the rush? They were anxious to be the first country in Central Europe to begin regular radio broadcaste Of course a Czech  by name of Frantisek Behounek  took part in the 1928 multinational attempt to reach the North Pole in a zeppelin  and was one of the survivors to be rescued after the good airship Italia crashed discouragingly far from its destination 

Experiments with architecture in interwar Czechoslovakia resulted in Prague today having the only Cubist buildings in the world like The House at the Black Madonna which houses a museum of Czech cubist art today and a number of houses along the embankment under Vysehrad on Rasinovo nabrezi and on Neklanova Street Franz Kafka Josef Capek and his brother Karel the two coined the word robot together Jaroslav Hasek Emil Filla Max Svabinsky Otto Gutfreund Vaclav Spala all lived and worked at this time 

At the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties the Czechoslovak economy was hit hard by the world economic crisis with disastrous social and political consequences: 13 million people were unemployed Hardest hit were the soontobeknownasSudeten border regions where German inhabitants predominated 

The economic crisis and the growing influence of the Nazi movement in Germany served to politicize the ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia On Hitlers orders they called first for autonomy then for secession from the Czechoslovak state In the 1935 elections both of the traditional German parties the Agrarians and the Christian Socialists experienced a monumental decline in voter support in favor of the Sudeten German Party The Sudeten German Party with 152 percent of the vote became the largest Germaninterest political party in the Republic 

Tomas Garrigue Masaryk resigned from office in 1935 due to illness and was succeeded by Edvard Benes Benes a National Socialist had the misfortune to be a weak and ineffectual ruler during a particular turbulent time in the nations history  much as the king Wenceslas IV had been in the Hussite period centuries before 

A PE teacher named Konrad Henlein was the leader of the Sudeten German Party and he gradually became the mouthpiece of Nazi Germany in Czechoslovakia His was a separatist platform aimed at joining the Czech border lands to Germany 

Nothing less than Czechoslovakias sovereignty was at stake But this did not interest many people outside of the small Czechoslovak state 

France and Britain favored a policy of appeasement in response to Hitlers aggressive policy towards Czechoslovakia and so Konrad Heinleins wish came true in September 1938  when the four great powers of the time Germany Great Britain France and Italy decided at a meeting in Munich that extensive areas of the Czech border regions were to be ceded to Germany 

Shortly after the Munich Pact was signed the Czech border regions were indeed joined with Germany Seizing this window of opportunity Poland snapped up the Tesin region in the north and Hungary annexed the southern part of Slovakia while Hungary captured Ruthenia Overnight Czechoslovakia lost about a third of its territory