Alice Teichova obituary
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/21/alice-teichova Version 0 of 1. Alice Teichova, who has died aged 94, was one of the leading economic historians of modern central Europe. Her book An Economic Background to Munich (1974) marked the culmination of two decades of research on international business and its relations with Czechoslovakia in the period up to the dismemberment of the country by the Munich agreement between Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler in 1938. In it, Alice used extensive material from Czech business archives, freely available under the communist regime, to illuminate the heavy investment in Czech industry by cartels such as ICI and Unilever, and their largely successful campaign to prevent their German competitors from gaining a position of dominance. It was a model of its kind and remains a classic. Alice went on to publish a series of more general studies of the interwar economy in central Europe in English and German, including The Czechoslovak Economy, 1918-1980 (1988), and a survey of the economies of eastern-central Europe between the wars. She edited several seminal collections of essays, most recently Nation, State and the Economy in History (2003), produced with the Austrian economic historian Herbert Matis. Into their 90s, she and her husband, the Slovak historian of science Mikulás Teich, were frequent visitors to the University of Vienna and regularly attended the weekly modern European history seminar at Cambridge. Alice was the daughter of Arthur Schwarz, a watchmaker, and his wife, Gisela (nee Leist), who helped him in his shop in the working-class Floridsdorf district of Vienna. There the family, including a younger brother, all lived in a single room. Like their neighbours, they were socialists: when Alice’s school was reopened after the clerico-fascist coup of February 1934, during which the socialist resistance was overpowered in a hail of bullets, the children were given patriotic red and white Austrian flags to wave at a national youth rally: they tore out the white, so that the Floridsdorf delegation, Alice later recalled, was “a sea of red”. Alice’s parents were Jews; her mother converted herself and the children to Catholicism, and the family’s situation became precarious following the Nazi invasion of March 1938. Her mother was one of those forced by the Nazis to scrub anti-German graffiti from the streets amid curses and blows. Alice was shocked by the sudden emergence of many of her schoolfellows as Nazis, as they turned over their lapels to reveal Nazi party badges. The family decided to emigrate, Alice going first, since, through relatives, she had found employment as a housemaid in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. As the trainload of Jewish emigrants bound for the Hook of Holland halted at the Dutch border, the 18-year-old Alice got out to buy some water. A smartly dressed young SS officer saluted her and asked her if he could walk with her along the platform. She did not think it wise to refuse. As they walked, she noticed out of the corner of her eye other SS men climbing up into the train. The whistle went, her SS man clicked his heels, saluted, and escorted her back on to her carriage as the other SS men jumped back down on to the platform. As she made her way back to her compartment, it was clear that everyone on board had been brutally beaten. When her parents, who had also managed to escape from Austria, moved to Exeter, Alice joined them, working first in Woolworth’s, then as a salesgirl in a fashion store. She met Mikulás in a club for refugees in 1940 and they married in January 1944. Meanwhile, her employer had transferred her to a better position in a Nottingham textile firm. Alice took evening classes in economics, then gained entry to Leeds University, where Mikulás was studying chemistry. Both were heavily involved in student politics, Alice becoming secretary of the university branch of the National Union of Students. At the end of the war, they set out for Czechoslovakia to take part in the rebuilding of the country after the end of the German occupation. Alice brought over their two children, Eva and Peter, in 1949, learned Czech, completed her doctorate in 1952 and, 12 years later, the necessary second doctorate. She taught at the Charles University in Prague, holding on to her post despite the fact that Mikulás was denounced as a traitor and expelled from the Communist party in the Stalinist purges of the early 1950s. An enthusiastic supporter of the liberal communism of Alexander Dubček, Alice was able in the more relaxed political climate of the 1960s to travel to the world historical congresses and other international meetings where historians from the eastern bloc were able to meet their western counterparts. Her Viennese charm made her many friends, and she built up a formidable network of modern economic historians from France, Germany, Scandinavia and the US. In the Prague Spring, Alice was elected party chair of the 250-strong pedagogical faculty in the Charles University and played a leading role in the liberalisation process. The couple had just been issued with visas for a working visit to the US when the Warsaw Pact forces invaded, suppressing the Prague Spring, dismissing Dubček and putting a hardline Stalinist government into office. Roads were blocked, phones cut off, airports closed. Once more Alice found herself on a train at a border crossing, this time between Czechoslovakia and West Germany. The central railway station in Prague was closed, but the couple made their way to a suburban station and got on a train to the border. The Russians were not yet checking the railways, and after their visas had been found to be in order, Alice and Mikulás were let through. “I was probably the only person,” she liked to say later, “who got out twice.” After a year, as planned, at Yale, Alice’s contacts in England arranged for the couple to take up positions in Cambridge, where they remained, Alice as a fellow of Girton and from 1971 as a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, where she was appointed the university’s first female professor four years later. I arrived at UEA just after that, as a junior lecturer, to be introduced to a steady stream of leading historians from Germany and the US brought to the university as guest lecturers by Alice, including Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka and Gerald D Feldman. We took part in exchange seminars with the historians of Hamburg University, and Alice played a key role in establishing the university as a major centre of 20th-century central European economic and social history in the 1980s. She exercised an equally important influence over young historians in Austria and what became the Czech and Slovak republics, bringing them into contact with the international network of scholars she had built up over the years. She was an active member of the Austrian Historical Commission that met in Vienna from 1998 to 2003 to resolve, in the face of considerable controversy, the vexed problems of restitution and compensation for the victims of nazism in Austria. The formal handing back of her Austrian citizenship at a ceremony in the Austrian Embassy in London was a moving occasion. Her joint autobiography with Mikulás (2005), published as a series of interviews, tells their extraordinary story with cogency and charm. Alice is survived by Mikulás, Eva and Peter. • Alice Teichova, economic historian, born 19 September 1920; died 12 March 2015 |