The Bell of Treason: The 1938 Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia

by P.E. Caquet,
The Jerusalem Post, January 24, 2020

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera asks whether the Czechs should have fought against the Nazis in 1938, or surrendered control of their country after England and France abandoned them at Munich. If Czech history could be repeated, Kundera suggests, the counter-factual hypothesis could be tested. Without such an experiment, only a game of hypotheses remains: “Einmal is keinmal. What happens once might as well not have happened at all. History is light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling in the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”