Word from the Editors

Jan Bečka, Vít Smetana

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):5-6  

The Czech Twentieth Century?

Vilém Prečan

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):7-19  

This was the Opening Address at "Fateful Eights in Czech History: Historical Anniversaries of 2008 and Their Significance for the Czech Republic Today", an international conference organized by the Czech Embassy in Washington, held at the George Washington University, Washington, D.C., on 23-24 October 2008. In this essay the author provides a basic overview of twentieth-century Czech history, weighing the gains and losses, the victories and defeats, the ups and downs of the Czechs, the Czech nation, Czech society, on the way from gaining independence in a democratic state to loosing it, and the German occupation, to the renewal of Czechoslovak independence...

Tepluskas and Eshelons. Czechoslovak Legionaries on their Journey across Russia

Dalibor Vácha

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):20-53  

Using specialized sources such as legionary literature (a vast sub-genre of Czech fiction between the two world wars), memoirs, diaries, photographs, and personal effects, the author seeks in this article to portray the everyday life of the Czechoslovak legionaries in Russia from 1918 to 1920. To a considerable extent their lives were linked to their being moved about by train. At the centre of this were the tepluskas, furnished and heated box cars, part of the eshelons (troop trains), which served as the makeshift homes in which they spent most of their time. The Czechoslovak volunteers boarded the tepluskas in the spring of 1918, after retreating...

Resistance, Collaboration, Adaptation… Some Notes on the Research of the Czech Society in the Protectorate

Stanislav Kokoška

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):54-76  

In this article the author raises several theoretical questions connected to an insufficiently researched topic, Czech society in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (15 March 1939-8/9 May 1945). He considers, on the one hand, possible theoretical starting points, which he sees as residing in the thorough application of sociological approaches to historical research, and, on the other hand, the debates over the terms "collaboration" and "resistance". The term "collaboration" (kolaborace) was imported into the Czech milieu, and is generally used to mean dishonourable work with, or for, the enemy. The author therefore sees the use of this term as...

"Getting Around to the Human Being in the Next Quarter." Leisure Time in the Czech Lands 1948-1956

Martin Franc, Jiří Knapík

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):77-100  

The authors consider the changes in the conception, organization, ways of spending, and forms of leisure in the Czech Lands from the establishment of the Communist monopoly on power in early 1948 to the second half of the 1950s. (After this point leisure time here began strikingly to change under the influence of consumerist trends.) They consider the topic in the context of the dominant ideology and changes in economic, social, and arts policies. The authors take into account gender differences, contrasts between town and country, and special features of social groups. They pay particular attention to leisure amongst young people and children. The...

The Stigma of the Past and the Bond of Belonging. Czech Communists in the First Decade after 1989

Michal Kopeček

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):101-130  

This article is concerned with the attitude that the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy - KSČM) has had towards its own past. It examines the subject from the perspective of the internal development of the Party and its search for a political and cultural identity in the Czech political system. The interpretation of the past and the role of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa - KSČ) in Czech and Czechoslovak history were key elements in the ideological development of the Party in the first ten years of Czech democracy after the changes beginning in November 1989. And they...

An Unending Story with a Sudden End - and Its Immediate Consequences for East-Central Europe. The Numerous Impulses from the Prague Conference on the Cold War

Vít Smetana

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):131-148  

The author returns to the history conference Dropping, Maintaining and Breaking the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe Twenty Years Later, which took place in the Straka Academy and in the Lichtenstein Palace, Prague, from 19 to 21 November 2009. He provides a detailed report on the conference proceedings. It was organized to mark the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, by the Institute for Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, together with the Office of the Czech Government and with the assistance of the students from the Institute of International...

The Sudeten Germans and the Twilight of the First Republic

Petr Kaplan

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):149-154  

Brandes, Detlef. Die Sudetendeutschen im Krisenjahr 1938 (Veröffentlichungen des Collegium Carolinum, vol. 107). Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008, xvi + 399 pp.In his latest monograph, Brandes, an important German historian, focuses on the position of the Sudeten Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia and their role in breaking apart the country. The reviewer praises Brandes's extraordinarily thorough work with primary sources. He sees the fundamental contribution of the book in its observing the lives of the Sudeten Germans as the history of many social groups and their mutual relations and interactions with the outer milieux (Czechoslovak and German), rather...

An American Monograph on the Protectorate

Francis D. Raška

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):155-158  

Bryant, Chad. Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007, 378 pp.This monograph by a young American historian is, according to the reviewer, a solid depiction of the history of the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, viewed as the brutal result of the conflict-fraught relations between the Germans and Czechs. His arguments are thoroughly convincing, precise, and founded on analysis of original archive records as well as knowledge of the broad spectrum of the relevant secondary sources. The main contribution of the work, the reviewer believes, is the author's balanced view of the situation in the Protectorate...

Czechoslovaks on the Battlefields of Indochina

Jan Bečka

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):159-164  

Kudrna, Ladislav. Bojovali a umírali v Indočíně: První vietnamská válka a Čechoslováci v cizinecké legii [They Fought and died in Indochina: The first Vietnam War and Czechoslovaks in the Foreign Legion]. Praha: Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů and Naše vojsko, 2010, 400 pp.The book under review is about Czechoslovaks in the French Foreign Legion fighting in Indochina against the movement for national independence in the first half of the 1950s. The book presents this historic episode by discussing the fates of twenty-one Czechoslovaks in the Foreign Legion, which the author discusses in the context of the war in Indochina and relations between...

In Praise of Roots

Karel Hrubý

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):165-175  

Kopeček, Michal. Hledání ztraceného smyslu revoluce: Zrod a počátky marxistického revizionismu ve střední Evropě [In Search of the Lost Meaning of the Revolution: The Birth and Beginnings of Marxist Revisionism in Central Europe]. Praha: Argo, 2009, 386 pp.In a detailed review-essay of Michal Kopeček's book, the reviewer assesses the theoretical roots of Kopeček's interpretations, the subtlety of his analysis of terminology, and his broad range of sources. He notes that "revisionism" already had a long history in the 1950s, and points out that in addition to the author's analyses of revisionist tendencies in philosophy and sociology one could trace...

Rock and Politics in Communist Czechoslovakia

Přemysl Houda

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):176-179  

Vaněk, Miroslav. Byl to jenom rock'n'roll? Hudební alternativa v komunistickém Československu 1956-1989 [Was It Only Rock'n'Roll? A Musical Alternative in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1956-89]. Praha: Academia, 2010, 639 pp.This book provides, according to the reviewer, a comprehensive discussion, including the international context of the field of rock music and the music and subculture developing out of it in Communist Czechoslovakia, covering a large span of time and topics. Rather than a musicological analysis, the publication is a purely historical interpretation in which the author draws on a wide range of primary sources and deftly combines...

A Crazy Century of Memories

Doubravka Olšáková

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):180-185  

Klíma, Ivan. Moje šílené století [My Crazy Century], vol. 1 and 2 (Series Paměť [Memory], vols 17 and 32). Praha: Academia, 2009 and 2010, 526 + 369 pp., illus.The reviewer first acquaints the reader with the extraordinary publishing project called Edice Paměť [The series Memory], which has not only published a great many remarkable memoirs, mostly by important Czechs in the arts and sciences, but has also inspired them. In the two volumes of his memoirs, Ivan Klíma (b. 1931) provides a vivid account of his life as a Jewish boy deported to a concentration camp, an enthusiast young builder of socialism, an intellectual reformist in the 1960s, and...

Ideological Literature in Non-Ideological Perspective. The First Modern History of Czech Literature of the Socialist Era Comes Out Twenty Years after 1989

Alessandro Catalano

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):186-196  

Janoušek, Pavel et al. Dějiny české literatury 1945-1989 [A History of Czech Literature 1945-1989]: vol. 1, 1945-1948; vol. 2: 1948-1958. Praha: Academia, 2007.This thorough review is mostly concerned with the first two volumes of the four-volume history of Czech literature in the years 1945-85, which was published in 2007 and 2008. The history is the culmination of a ten-year project at the Institute of Czech Literature, Prague, in which more than fifty authors took part, led by the director of the Institute, Pavel Janoušek. As the reviewer notes, in this collective work of 2,500 pages the ups and downs of Czech literature from the end of the...

A British View of the Czech Right

Adéla Gjuričová

Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2013, 1(1):197-202  

Hanley, Seán. The New Right in the New Europe: Czech Transformation and Right-Wing Politics, 1989-2006. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, xiv + 276 pp.This work by a political scientist is, according to the reviewer, in many respects the best book to have been written on the development of Czech right-wing politics since it emerged at the beginning of the 1990s. The author shows himself to be well informed about the Czech political environment, with a remarkable knowledge of the literature. He successfully pokes holes in some Western theoretical models of the post-Communist transformation, and offers his own well-considered, sometimes surprising,...