Ferdinand Marek is the defining figure in interwar Austrian-Czechoslovak relations, and his writings are invaluable sources to gauge the perspectives of crisis-riddled Austria on the highly industrialised First Czechoslovak Republic. After the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, Marek was Austria’s first envoy in Prague, where he was charged with the establishment of an Austrian embassy. As historians David Schriffl and Ota Konrád stress, Marek’s excellent language skills and his outstanding personal relationship with the Czechoslovak presidents Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš made it possible for him to salvage what was possible at a time when relations of Austria – a former imperial centre now truncated from its industrial heartlands and agricultural hinterlands – with the other Habsburg successor states were dire (Marcus, 2018). Yet as Austrian policies towards Czechoslovakia became more aggressive after the rise of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg to power, Marek’s agency became more restricted. This was aggravated by the rise of the Nazis in Germany, who sought to annex Austria and regarded Marek as a representative of the Austrian corporate state.
Marek’s 1934 assessment of the long-term impact of the Great Depression on Czechoslovakia reflects this tension (TNA GFM33/3331 E642318-E642322). In summer that year, Marek reported to the Austrian Foreign Office that the Czechoslovak economy was far from consolidation and recovery, which he regarded a precondition for the pacification of Czechoslovakia’s dangerously unsettled political landscape. Standards of living continued to fall, production and consumption had hit rock-bottom. Czechoslovak propaganda was trying to mask unemployment in an effort ‘to maintain the nimbus of a healthy and viable nation to the outside.’ Marek stressed that his account did not aim to be pessimistic, but that he had ‘conducted his reporting not only on the basis of observations on the spot, but on long conversations with prominent personalities who are not ill-disposed towards the current government.’ Marek was worried that the political instability played into the hands of the radical left, but the gravest threat was on the far right:
‘The sliding of the [Czechoslovak] Germans into National Socialism is not happening under noisy and sensationalist conditions, but it is happening nonetheless, with certainty and inevitability. The public hears nothing or very little of this, but it is no longer a secret in informed circles that Prague is deeply scared of the moment when the loyalty of the military comes under a stress test.’
