I agree that depopulation and communist neglect are at the core of the Czech Sudetenland’s plight. But the former more than the latter: the glaring gap between the two sides is no less apparent across the old Czech-East German border, suggesting that communism is only part of the answer. The contrasts between the adjoining towns of Vejprty, Bohemia, and Bärenstein, Saxony make a telling illustration of this. Petr Mikšíček’s book “Sudetská pouť aneb Waldgang” explores many aspects of the expulsions and resettlement of the mountainous border districts, in a very readable narrative.

Bavaria may have absorbed most of the Sudeten Germans which may excite some concentrated anti-Czech emotions in Bavaria but Bavaria and Bohemia may represent the pair of most similar regions of a similar size in all of Europe, at least among those that speak different languages. It’s the countryside music, the beer, dumplings, and so on which make us so similar. And at the end, both Bavaria and Bohemia etymologically boil down to the “home of Boii”, the Celtic tribe that had lived “somewhere over here”.

Most of the continuing underdevelopment on the Czech side is due to 42 years of communism and West Germans surely remember similar contrasts they experienced when they visited East Germany for the first time. The depressed population density also hurt but you know, it was the Germans who made the key steps that made the 1945 expulsion inevitable and right.

It’s silly to demonize the “cultural shock” which has obvious reasons.

The sentence “But more than that, the people should be almost the same on both sides: hard-working, mostly Catholic and German-speaking.” is really irredentist if not hatefully nationalist in character. People on the Czech side are pretty much as hard working as those on the German side, something people know very well in lots of industries starting from the carmakers, and it is not true that people “should” be Catholic over here. We’ve had religious freedoms in Austria-Hungary for 200 years. Moreover, the territory of the Czech Republic has belonged to the Czech Kingdom and later Czechoslovakia for 1000 years or so and the Third Reich was the only semi-exception.

The German folks were invited as a cherry on a pie by several Czech kings and they enriched the lands by their skills and culture. It has worked for many centuries but a part of the contract was always that as an ethnic group, they’re guests over here and their number would always be kept as a minority in the kingdom. They have never been an “overwhelming majority” in the German-populated region, either. The Czechs have had inclinations to atheism for several centuries, for various reasons, and they’re the most “godless” nation in the world today, a fact that many people in other countries are jealous about (although they don’t really have to be). You should get used to it; it is simply a fact.