 about the thick, sickening expectation of violence on the night of the referendum, when it seemed to me that it had, as the separatist campaign slogan promised, all become possible.
T
JLhe surreal calm in Montreal after the referendum only hid the sense of dread among Anglophones and Allophones. In January, two months after I spoke to the English businessman, 1,200 Montrealers held a rally in support of the idea that the city should be partitioned from a sovereign Quebec and attached to what would be left of Canada, ignoring the fact that 2 million of the city s 3 million people are Francophone. The Cree, who have a land claim to most of the north of the province, repeated their long-standing demand to remain in Canada and not be  kidnapped  by separatists. Chretien, once again resorting to scare tactics^ replaced the economic threats he had made during the referendum campaign with a territorial threat.  If Canada is divisible, Quebec is divisi-
ble too,  he said.  It s the ic.  Bouchard s comment i and cutting:  Canada is dit cause it is not a real count are two people, two nation! territories. And this one is <
Bouchard s words were   to many Canadians precise they now rang so true. Perh da no longer was a coun come to Montreal in Octo ing that the separatists wou and that Canada would di< erendum failed, and the i dia s attention moved else1 in the months since the s seemed to me that Canac anyway. The country was paradox: what united Cana divisions. The conflict of 1 and English, two dominant isting cultures what Can: elist Hugh MacLennan c solitudes  created a tol< mopolitan nation. And M< always its centerpiece, uniquely Canadian city, that Montreal had offere there was a peaceful, con way to live with differen difference as profound as Now, in a few short week endum had replaced the 1 of compromise and tolei the abstractions of us and t
A month after the refe the Spanish restaurant or St-Laurent, ghosts and snow drifted along the st: the window. Sylvia, wh raised by a Quebecoise i an Anglophone fathe: identified herself as Engli that she had seen grai painted on walls all arou al: ANGLOS GO HOME.  D< alize this is my home?  And that, 1 thought, is will fall apart in Montt the shouts and curses < and divisive political c that will come with the r dum but in the quiet between fights, when S) of us are left to wonder ' thing, the word  home to mean.
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Germania Irredenta
Renouncing a provision of the 1945 Potsdam Declaration, Germans are looking more than wistfully at lands they lost in the war and suing to get them back. Do some things never change?
Hans Koning
Hans Koning is at work on a novel, Night and Day, to be published next year.
1 CLEARLY remember a newsreel of the state memorial ceremony for Reinhard Heydrich, which I saw in
late 1942, when I was a very young sergeant in the British army. (Germany exported movie news to Sweden and Switzerland, and some got to England.) Heydrich, the German governor of Bo-Hemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic), had been killed by two Czech resistance fighters that spring. The service was in a dark hall in Berlin, li* by torches; a heathenish, Valhalla-
effect had been achieved. In his oration Hitler screamed that if the Czechs would not  co-exist peacefully  in the Corman Reich, they would at some fu-hire date be resettled in the Polar Cir-c'e- His audience shouted its approval. Earlier Hitler had picked the small town
Lidice, near the spot where the Czechs attacked Heydrich s car, as the focal Point for immediate vengeance. Its adults were killed, its children shipped to camps and German orphanages and given German names.
Heydrich had not only been the ruler of Bohemia and Moravia; he had also been given the task of organizing the extermination of the Jews of Europe. The invitations to the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, where the logistics of the gas chamber were worked out, had been sent out by him from Prague.  Mit anschliessendem Friihstiick,  his letters said  With breakfast to follow. 
Hitler s Polar Circle plans have, fifty-four years later, attracted unexpected new interest. Several Sudeten Germans have sued in Czech courts for the restitution of lands and property that were appropriated after the Sudetens were expelled from what is now the Czech Republic, at the end of the Second World War. The government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, which wants an apology from the Czechs for those expulsions, announced last year through its Foreign Minister, Klaus Kinkel, that approval of the expulsions as part of the 1945 Potsdam Declaration by the Big Three (the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union) did not make them legal. Kinkel sided with the Sudeten Germans, who assert that the declaration is in conflict with the United

Nations Charter. (He uses the more circumspect phrase  in conflict with international law. )
A shiver must have gone through Ger-many s neighbors at this argument, which questions the very foundation of their states. Last February the ambassadors of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia published a statement in Prague reaffirming the Potsdam Declaration. But a feeling persisted that, just maybe, we were going back to square one.
As far as 1 could see, the U.S. media gave very little attention to this. It made me decide to take a trip, early this year to southern Germany.
THE Second World War really start ed with those Sudeten Germans Some two to three million of them live, in  the Sudetenland,  as the German called a Czech region along the borde In 1938 Hitler declared that the Sude tenland was Germany s last irredenta-the last foreign territory that really b< longed to Germany and that to get was his  last demand  in Europe. A through the summer he fought a war  
2
From The Atlantic Monthly, July I"6  PR
8. ETHNIC FACTOR: INTERNATIONAL
nerves against the West, raving about the perfidious Czechs and their  stage actor President,  Eduard Benes, who were terrorizing Germans, beating German women and children who wore white stockings (the German  uniform ) and murdering Germans in isolated villages. The circus of provocation was orchestrated for him by the leader of the Sudeten Germans, the Nazi Konrad Henlein. The United States was looking away at that time; England and France caved in and forced the Czechs to cede the Sudetenland. This was  Munich  the
After 1945 maps continued to show the 1937 borders. East Germany was called  Middle Germany. 
shameful surrender led by the English Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, in the fall of 1938. Czechoslovakia lost its fortified border with Germany and its important armaments factories, and some six months later the rest of the country was taken by the Germans without a shot. Hitler came to Prague and slept in the government Hradcany Castle under the swastika flag.  I saw our enemies at Munich,  he told his followers later.  They are little worms. 
When one rethinks this story and the terror of the six-year German occupation that followed, in which some 350,000 Czechs lost their lives, one cannot be surprised that after the German surrender in 1945 there were numerous acts of local vengeance in which Sudeten Germans were killed. The bulk of those who remained were deported by the Czech government with a minimum of consideration not to the Polar Circle, though, but
CHALLENGES
back to their fatherland. These Germans and their descendants now want their lands and houses back. Meanwhile, the Czech survivors of the German concentration camps, some 17,000, still have not received any compensation from Bonn.
I learned on my visit that there is a specifically political angle to this: the Sudeten Germans have a pressure group within Germany, the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft, with political clout that the millions of German deportees from Poland never had. Bavaria, where most of them live, is one of the sixteen Lander (states) in reunited Germany; it has a lot of autonomous power. A 1954 act of its government established the Sudeten Germans as one of the four population groups that make up Bavaria (with the Swabians, the Franconians, and the Old Bavarians) and guarantees them Schirmherrschaft  high protection  or  guardianship.  This gives the Sudetens a direct channel to the Bavarian government and through that to Bonn. Bonn s conservatives are particularly nervous right now about being outflanked on the right.
What is happening could be nothing more than a war of words. (Indeed, in a May speech Kinkel spoke of compensation for the Czech  victims of Nazi injustice. ) It points, though, to a basic dilemma: either united Germany is an established country like any other, with all the egotism and arrogance of a major power, or it is still in a kind of quarantine. Europe s politicians and businesspeople have long accepted the first alternative, although I was often told that Kohl himself promotes a united Europe so fervently because he does not trust his country to be left on its own. He has called Germany s integration into Europe  a matter of life or death  for the twenty-first century.
One of the people who stressed this point of view to me was an editor of the Stuttgarter Zeitung, a serious and liberal south-German newspaper. The day we first met he wrote in his paper,  He who tries to demand certain rights based on the past prepares a European catastrophe. Those words were directed at the Sudeten Germans in Bavaria. Thoughtful as they sound, they gave me the feeling that even he still didn t  get it. 
It s not a matter of the f claiming their property on ti past records. It is a matter of not being a source of any kii man rights. If Germany had I tor, even for a limited time, tions and many old and fan would have been wiped off The best that reunited Germa for, it seems to me, is a cleai no stretch of emotion or lav expect a court to study the def the Sudetens or any other st outside their contexts.
When my discussion with turned to united Germany s 1 Poland, he called it a Wohlst  a line between poor and w pie. He was, perhaps unco downgrading a national be affair of economic zoning, i West German maps and atlase to show the 1937 borders. Ea was usually called  Middle The Potsdam demarcations, tl dicated, were but  temporal they were but no one in th, dieted that they would chan Germany s advantage. Amon who played along with this postwar political reality was can oil company Esso, as Exx called; when one had to driv checkpoint, the East German fiscated Esso road maps and t with great gusto. A conferei German education ministers schoolbooks  the loss of Ger the East is to be established the entire civilized world. 
When I traveled this sprin to Frankfurt on an evening to my horror that the railroa corridor showed no bordt tween Germany and Polar two-inch-long dotted li Szczecin. With the first da covered that there was indi marked, so thin as to be alrr against the blue of the < which it followed. I am st man railroad officials would done unthinkingly. The tow border were shown with bt ish and old German names.
I had a few years befort train from Berlin to Warsa
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partment full of what are called here feimwehtouristen  homesickness tourists.  At each stop they stood at the window and discussed what this or that town was  really  called. A German atlas from the time between the two world wars shows Strasbourg as a German town and omits the Polish corridor. One might say that German cartography is always one war behind.
Nothing in this is so very surpris-1 ing. I cannot think of a single historical example of a country s voluntarily giving up on its irredenta. That Gemiany is now as strong as it was in 1914, and Russia perhaps as weak as it was in 1914, does not make it any likelier that Germany will be the exception. The best chance for lasting peace would be if Germany under the Nazis was a historically unique situation.
A German historian