The author of The Devil's Wall, Mark Cornwall, is professor of modern European history at the University of Southampton, specializing in Czech and Sudeten German as well as Austro-Hungarian history. In his latest book, Cornwall analyzes the Nationalist Youth Mission in interwar Czechoslovakia pioneered by Heinrich “Heinz” Rutha. Among other things, Rutha was founder of a modern youth crusade in the form of a “Männerbund,” a politician of the Sudeten German Party, and “foreign minister” or ambassador-at-large to Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten German Party. Cornwall dissects Rutha's life and uses the results to rethink the Czech-German relationship during the 1930s, thus challenging many standard histories of the “Sudeten problem.”

Cornwall begins to retrace Heinz Rutha's life with a detailed account of the ethnic surroundings in northern Bohemia in the former Czechoslovakia. Bohemia had been inhabited by both Germans and Czechs, the Czech population representing about 60 percent of the population. The Habsburg Empire provided the political framework. The German language was therefore the prevailing language of administration, culture, and politics. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the German ethnic border region had been nationalized through outside intervention. It was in a nationalistically intoxicated environment that Heinz Rutha was born in 1897 in the village of Bad Kunnersdorf near Oschitz. (Although born in different years, he shared a birthdate with Adolf Hitler.) The Ruthas were a middle-class German family with some Czech ancestors. Heinz, however, embraced the völkisch mindset of his father. By the time World War I was in full swing, Heinz had begun to engage himself enthusiastically in the regional youth movement: the German Wandervogel.

The disintegration of the Habsburg Empire at the end of World War I brought about the creation of Czechoslovakia that incorporated Bohemia. Nationalists like Rutha reacted with a crusade for the Germans in Czechoslovakia. Since the Wandervogel during the 1920s no longer satisfied his needs, he turned to the Turnverband. In Konrad Henlein, later the leader of the Sudeten German Party, he found a new leading figure. Together with his colleague Walter Heinrich, Rutha created the Arbeitskreis für Gesellschaftswissenschaften, later renamed Comrades' Union, Kameradschaftsbund (KB). The KB drew on the völkisch teachings of Othmar Spann and concentrated on the creation of an independent Sudeten German state. Henlein, Heinrich, and Rutha were among the founding members of the Sudeten German Heimatfront, later Sudeten German Party (SDP) in 1933. Rutha became one of the closest friends and allies of Konrad Henlein and rose quickly in the party's hierarchy; he was soon internationally recognized as the “foreign minister” of the Sudeten Germans.

While the creation of the party had drawn strength from the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the “catalyst for change did not just emanate from the Third Reich. It was homegrown, long nurtured on Bohemian soil […]” (152) and signified a struggle both to conform to the Czechoslovakian political reality and to create the desired Spannist utopia of national independence. With this central thesis Cornwall introduces a more detailed explanation of the role of the Sudeten Germans during the highly controversial 1930s. By portraying Rutha's life and role within the party before the Munich Agreements in 1938, he gives Henleinists credit for struggling to “challenge Czech dominance by demanding at least substantial self-government” (154). Challenging the existing master narrative, Cornwall depicts them as more than a Nazi puppet.

The Sudeten German Party, however, was disrupted by the rivaling forces of the National Socialists, such as the members of the “Aufbruch” and the “traditionalists” or “Sudeten loyalists,” as Cornwall calls them. The parliamentary elections in 1935 turned the SDP into the strongest of all Czechoslovakian parties. Rutha as the “foreign minister” of the party spent considerable time abroad, especially in Great Britain. Cornwall's evaluation of his activities there sheds new light on the long-criticized British appeasement in the Czechoslovakian crises of 1938. Cornwall gives evidence of rather successful Rutha missions that seem to have led to a belief in a Sudeten German path independent from Nazi Germany.

For Nazi Germany this was unacceptable. It, as well as the “Aufbruch,” identified Rutha and some other confidantes around Henlein as a serious threat. In 1937, Czechoslovakian media published stories about Rutha's alleged homosexual behavior with youths in his mill. This led to the arrest of Rutha and twenty other leading personalities of the KB by Czech police. Rutha, however, never faced trial because in the night from 4 to 5 November he committed suicide in prison. The subsequent investigations into the youth movement and the use of the Rutha-affair by the Nazi-wings within the party against unwilling Sudeten Separatists left Konrad Henlein quite isolated, and he soon began making political sacrifices and concessions to the National Socialists. The result is well known: In the Hossbach Memorandum, on 5 November Hitler declared the Sudetenland part of the German state. After the Austrian Anschluss in March 1938, he met with an unresisting Henlein to discuss the future of the Sudeten Germans. In September 1938, Germany annexed the Sudetenland according to the Munich Agreement. Rutha was first stigmatized as the head of a homosexual complex in Sudetenland and later deleted from the history books.

Cornwall's book therefore challenges the historiography of the Czech-German relationship during the 1930s in various ways by bending the historiographical spotlight from the antagonism between Nazi-Sudeten Germans and nationalistic Czechs and focusing instead on the detailed interpretation of the Sudeten German movement and its development prior to 1938. In addition, Cornwall analyzes Heinz Rutha's sexual life, a study that has not previously been made by historians and was only possible because of unique primary sources and contemporary witnesses. The author, therefore, is able to explain Rutha's unique concept of Eros within, as well as apart from, his homosexuality. In this aspect, he is in a line of scholars who, during the past two decades, have called for a growing awareness for more sensitive topics such as (homo)sexuality and Eros in the Third Reich. Overall Mark Cornwall's book will, it is hoped, spark discussion in every aspect. It is well written, as well as convincing, and as such has the potential to make the Sudeten German question known to a wider public.