Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1)
Studie a eseje
Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of the Welfare State in Czechoslovakia (1918-1956)
Jakub Rákosník
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):5-30 
This article focuses on the long-term trends in the development of social policy between the First World War and the mid-1950s. The author begins by summarising the main ideas of his own previous articles and books. He emphasises the continuity and discontinuity in the general conception of Czechoslovak social policy in this period. He also considers conceptual questions, particularly those that would help to explain how the basic terms are employed in historical analysis. The article moves between the two poles of the construction of causality - structural explanation and voluntaristic explanation. The content of the article can be aptly summed up...
"It Will Not Work without a Social Policy!" Research on Social Policy Practice on the Territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
Radka Šustrová
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):31-56
Social policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, from mid-March 1939 to early May 1945, is a key topic in contemporary research on the history of this brief period. The article is concerned with the possible approaches to research with regard to the latest trends in research on National Socialism. It begins with an outline of the historiography of social policy in the Protectorate, which is marked chiefly by a predominant uniformity of argumentation, a lack of systematic approach to interpretation, and Czech and Czechoslovak historians' limiting themselves to the ethnically Czech population. Research conducted so far has completely failed...
Unwanted Silesia. Czech "Silesian Identity" in Postwar Czechoslovakia (1945-1969)
Jiří Knapík, Zdeněk Jirásek
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):57-76
The Czech "Silesian identity", obvious throughout the twentieth century, was based on a mixture of strong regional, even local, patriotism, which was determined by historical developments. This patriotism developed on the ethnically mixed territory of Czech Silesia (formerly Austrian Silesia). After the Second World War, this phenomenon was quickly revived, but unlike in the pre-war period, it took a clearly Czech national form. The territorial factor, by contrast, receded into the background. Behind this activity and new interpretation stood intellectual circles and institutions in Opava, some leading figures from Ostrava, and the Silesian Cultural...
Lessons from the Crisis Development. The Picture of the Prague Spring in "Normalisation Prose"
Alena Fialová
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):77-100
The article considers the picture of the year 1968 and what is popularly known as the "Prague Spring" as it appears in establishment prose fiction from the "Normalisation" period (that is, the return to hard-line Communism with the defeat of the reform wing of the Party and the years of the Soviet occupation, 1970-89). Normalisation fiction - in accord with the government publication Poučení z krizového vývoje ve straně a společnosti po XIII. sjezdu KSČ [Lessons from the Crisis Development in the Party and Society after the 13th Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia] - tried to legitimise the policy of Normalisation as a new stage in the...
Political Games with the "Unfinished Revolution". Settling Accounts with Communism in the Times of the Civic Forum and after its Disintegration (1989-1992)
Jiří Suk
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):101-136
This article discusses the birth and early dynamics of Czech post-Communist anti-Communism. It is based on the recognition that during the political takeover in November and December 1989 the policy of radical discontinuity remained a marginal, practically invisible and inaudible phenomenon in the mostly restful period of civil unrest. In the generally shared atmosphere of "national understanding," which led to the historic compromise between the old, Socialist regime and the new, democratic regime, there was no room for a policy of radically settling scores with the Communist Party and the past. It was all the more surprising, therefore, when demands...
Prague Chronicle
Chronicler of Communist Czechoslovakia. Karel Kaplan and the Study of Contemporary History
Vítězslav Sommer
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):137-152
The author attempts to pinpoint the place of the historian Karel Kaplan (b. 1928) in the context of Czech historiography of the last half century, to show the changes in the basic tendencies characterising his work, and to consider his role in the formation of the field of contemporary history in the Czech Republic. Kaplan is perhaps the most prolific and most translated Czech historian living today. His career is emblematic of the path taken by Czech research on contemporary history and its writing.As a historian he began to publish in the 1950s when he worked in the apparat of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. At that time he devoted himself...
"The Past is the Battlefield of Contemporaries." A Conference Organised on the Occasion of Vilém Prečan's 80th Birthday
Jiří Hoppe
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):153-158
Organized chiefly by the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, a conference, "The Past is the Battlefield of the Our Contemporaries," was held in the Czernin Palace, Prague, on 24 and 25 January 2013, to mark the eightieth birthday of the historian Vilém Prečan, the first director of the Institute and the current Chairman of the Board of the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre. The conference was accompanied by an evening of music and a buffet dinner at the Museum of Music, organised by the National Museum, Prague. The author reports here on all the papers given in the five conference blocks, and concludes with a long quotation of Vilém Prečan's...
Recenze
Subjective Biography and the Limits of "Objective" Sources
Doubravka Olšáková
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):159-163
Miles, Jonathan. Devět životů Otto Katze: Příběh komunistického superšpiona z Čech [original edition: The Nine Lives of Otto Katz: The Remarkable True Story a Communist Super-Spy. London: Bantam, 1998]. Trans. Petruška Šustrová. Praha and Litomyšl: Paseka, 2012, 336 pp.;Laurence, Charles. Společenský agent Jiří Mucha: Láska a žal za železnou oponou - intriky, sex, špioni [original edition: The Social Agent: A True Intrigue of Sex, Spies, and Heartbreak behind the Iron Curtain. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010]. Trans. Kateřina Lipenská. Praha: Prostor, 2012, 250 pp.The reviewer compares the biographies of two cosmopolitan Czech intellectuals who...
Unreliable Elements, or the Object of Social Engineering in the Czech Borderlands?
David Kovařík
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):164-172
Spurný, Matěj. Nejsou jako my: Česká společnost a menšiny v pohraničí (1945-1960) [They Are Not Like Us: Czech Society and Minorities in the Borderlands (1945-1960). Praha: Antikomplex, 2011, 373 pp.In this review, the author discusses the main ideas in Matěj Spurný's book that he considers an important contribution to the social history of postwar Czechoslovakia, since Spurný attempts not only to identify the changing attitude of majority Czech society and its political élites towards minority groups (Germans, Roma, and Volhynian Czechs), but also to identify the Sinnwelt and social practice which emerged in the borderlands after the Second World...
About an End or a Beginning? Czech Historiography and Research into the Final Phase of the Second World War
Radka Šustrová
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):173-179
Hrbek, Jaroslav, Vít Smetana, Stanislav Kokoška, Vladimír Pilát, and Petr Hofman. Draze zaplacená svoboda: Osvobození Československa 1944-1945 [Freedom Dearly Bought: The Liberation of Czechoslovakia 1944-1945], Vol. 1-2. Praha: Paseka, 2009, 351 and 358 pp.;Kokoška, Stanislav et al. Nultá hodina? Československo na jaře 1945 ve strategických souvislostech [Zero Hour? Czechoslovakia in the Spring of 1945 in Strategic Contexts]. (Edice Prostopravdy, vol. 2.) Praha: Euroslavica - Nadační fond angažovaných nestraníků, 2011, 256 pp.According to the reviewer, the two publications under review - Hrbek, Smetana et al.'s Draze zaplacená svoboda and...
The "Golden Era" or Only a "Sweet Intermezzo" of Czech Sociology?
Miloslav Petrusek
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):180-184
Nešpor, Zdeněk R. Republika sociologů: Zlatá éra české sociologie v meziválečném období a krátce po druhé světové válce [The Republic of Sociologists: The Golden Era of Czech Sociology in the Interwar Period and Shortly after the Second World War]. Praha: Scriptorium, 2011, 304 pp.The work under review is the first history of Czech and Slovak sociology from its beginnings to 1948. Its author, according to the reviewer, has superbly combined sociological understanding with an historical overview, archive research, and extraordinary industry. The reviewer considers the essential strong points of the publication to be its readability and objectivity,...
Scientific Revolutions and Political Attitudes
Jan Mervart
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):185-190
Sommer, Vítězslav. Angažované dějepisectví [Engaged Historiography: Party Historiography between Stalinism and Reform Communism]. Praha: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny - Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, 2011, 508 pp.The reviewer mainly appreciates the fact that Sommer's monograph takes so-called "Party historiography" seriously rather than as a mere instrument of politics or propaganda. Thanks to that, it can legitimately be read at least on two levels: as the study of an important segment of Czech postwar historiography extending also into the history of other fields of the humanities in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods and also as...
Gentle History. A Cultural Historian in the Archives
Adéla Gjuričová
Czech Journal of Contemporary History 2014, 2(1):191-195
Krapfl, James. Revolúcia s ľudskou tvárou: Politika, kultúra a spoločenstvo v Československu po 17. novembri 1989. Bratislava: Kalligram, 2009, 302 pp.In the work under review, which has now been published in a revised and expanded English edition, Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989-1992 (Ithaca, NY, 2013), the American historian James Krapfl has successfully avoided the danger of letting his work be defined by contemporary disputes about whether to interpret the events as a so-called Velvet Revolution. Instead, he has combined thorough research in many archives with the approaches of the "new...