Konrad Henlein was born in Maffersdorf (present-day Vratislavice nad Nisou) near Reichenberg (Liberec), in what was then the Bohemian crown land of Austria-Hungary. His father, Konrad Henlein Sr., worked as an accounts clerk. His mother, Hedvika Anna Augusta Dworatschek (Dvořáček), was the daughter of a family of Czech and German Bohemian origin. At the time when Henlein was growing up, Reichenberg was a center of tension between the long-established German community against newly arrived Czechs from the countryside who had come to work in the town's factories. The ethnic Germans of Reichenberg greatly disliked the Czechs for their willingness to accept lower wages than German workers, and for being "ignorant peasants" whose cultural level was considered much lower than that of the German community. In 1912, the German community of Reichenberg attempted to leave the Austrian Crown land of Bohemia and to set up their district as a new Crown land which would not accept any Czechs, only to be overruled by Vienna which insisted that Bohemia was not divisible. It was in this atmosphere of German-Czech tensions that Henlein grew up and which shaped his views.