Author: Benes, Dr. Edvard
Title: Masaryk's Path and Legacy. Funeral Oration at the Burial of the President-Liberator. 21 September 1937 [Signed by President Edvard Benes]
Description: Prague: Orbis, 1937. Softcover. First edition, limited to 1000 copies; 11 x 7 3/4; pp. [8], 9-34, [6]; plain white wraps, illustrated off-white jacket, partially affixed to wraps (as published) with a second tissue jacket covering it; a few small cuts to edges of tissue jacket and two small spots; tail of spine with a small bump and a short nick; deckled page edges; illustrated with portrait frontis, a drawing, and with a wood engraving after Karel Svolinsky; very good or better condition. Signed by President Edvard Benes on the half-title page. A beautiful, fine press book, it contains the text of the oration, including the sections that were omitted during the ceremony, President Benes gave at the funeral of the first President of Czechoslovakia Tomas Masaryk (1850 - 1937). Known as "The President-Liberator" and "The Great old Man of Europe," Masaryk would be elected in 1918, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and re-elected three times - 1920, 1927, and 1934 - with a special provision to the Constitution, which exempted him from the two-term limit. Under his leadership, Czechoslovakia would become the strongest democracy in Central Europe. Edvard Benes (1884 - 1948) was a leader of the Czechoslovak Independence Movement, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the second President of Czechoslovakia from 1935 to 1938 (when he was forced to resign by the Germans) and again from 1940 to 1948. Although he was not a Communist, Benes was a skilled diplomat and, realizing that an alliance with the Soviet Union was more beneficial than an alliance with Poland, he vetoed the plans for a Polish-Czechoslovakian Confederation and signed an entente with the Soviets in 1943. Ill.: 0. 2.

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