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interview // german // 4:27 Min // 18.06.2008
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My name is Lorenz Knorr; born in 1921 and grown up in Eger, now Cheb, in the German populated areas of Czechoslovakia. I am a trained typesetter and typographer. After 1945 I was active in the socialistic youth as a state and federation secretary. For 25 years I was the head of the German Union of Peace and then federation spokesman for the Association of the victims of persecution by the Nazi regime. If you grew up in a family of a labour union official, in the German populated areas of Czechoslovakia during the twenties and thirties, of the last century, you encountered the political problems and the political fights from early childhood. In Eger my father was the most popular strike-leader before the First World War and afterwards he was, although not fit for work, still speaker at demonstrations and meetings of the union. As his son, I obviously experienced this first hand, because my parents often took me with them to political activities; especially on the 1st May or on other red-letter days of the labour movement.
The moulding and forming impressions were: 1. the year 1933, when the German corpus and the German General staff shifted the power towards the Nazi leading clique and: 2. the year 1934, in Austria, when the latter gave power to the cleric-fascists who broke up the labour movement. According to our understanding the development of mankind goes from lower forms to increasing forms of living together, therefore that was obviously a heavy setback. The German labour movement was the strongest and ideologically most consolidated one in the ‘1st International’, and you could say the same about the Austrian labour movement. We learned not only of the dirty fortunes of antifascists through the immigrants, but also experienced the international effects of what happened to the setback of civilization in 1933. Up to this time in Czechoslovakia the focus of the German, as well as the Czechoslovakian labour parties, was on the class struggle, which meant the fight for better material and cultural living conditions. In 1933 this obviously didn’t stop, but the more the Nazis, the Hitler supporters in the German areas of Czechoslovakia developed, the more it amounted to a new political front status. On one side, supporters of Hitler in the German areas of Czechoslovakia, became increasingly aggressive and on the other side were the German and Czech antifascists. So it was not really the way it is now being claimed quite often, that the Germans stood side by side with the Czechs. A nationalistic perspective is a belated attempt to distract from the real problems we had at that time.
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