The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture

The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture PDF Author: Miloslav Rechcigl
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3112415906
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture".

The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture

The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture PDF Author: Miloslav Rechcigl
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3112415906
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture".

Vanished History

Vanished History PDF Author: Tomas Sniegon
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785335073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Bohemia and Moravia, today part of the Czech Republic, was the first territory with a majority of non-German speakers occupied by Hitler’s Third Reich on the eve of the World War II. Tens of thousands of Jewish inhabitants in the so called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia soon felt the tragic consequences of Nazi racial politics. Not all Czechs, however, remained passive bystanders during the genocide. After the destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Slovakia became a formally independent but fully subordinate satellite of Germany. Despite the fact it was not occupied until 1944, Slovakia paid Germany to deport its own Jewish citizens to extermination camps. About 270,000 out of the 360,000 Czech and Slovak casualties of World War II were victims of the Holocaust. Despite these statistics, the Holocaust vanished almost entirely from post-war Czechoslovak, and later Czech and Slovak, historical cultures. The communist dictatorship carried the main responsibility for this disappearance, yet the situation has not changed much since the fall of the communist regime. The main questions of this study are how and why the Holocaust was excluded from the Czech and Slovak history.

The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation

The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation PDF Author: Bradley F. Abrams
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742530249
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
The material effects of World War II, in combination with Eastern Europe's disappointingly undemocratic interwar history, placed radical social change on the postwar agenda across the region and shaped the debates that took place in immediate postwar Czech society. These debates adopted both a cultural form, in struggles over the meaning of the recent past and the nation's position on the East-West continuum, and a directly political form, in battles over the meaning of socialism. The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation examines the most important and politically resonant fields of historical and cultural debate in Czech society immediately after World War II. Bradley Abrams finds that communist public figures were largely successful in controlling debate over the nation's recent past--the interwar First Republic and the experiences of Munich and World War II--and over its location on the East-West continuum. This success preceded and was mirrored in the struggles over the political issue of the times: socialism. The communists engaged their political foes in the democratic socialist and Roman Catholic camps, and, surprisingly, found significant support from a major Protestant church. Abrams's careful reading of major publications re-creates a postwar mood sympathetic to radical social change, questioning the standard view of the communists' rise to power. This book not only contributes to the specific literature on Czech history, but also raises questions about the relationship between war and radical social change, about the communist takeover of the region, and about the role of intellectuals in public life.

Spartakiads

Spartakiads PDF Author: Petr Roubal
Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN: 8024638517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Every five years from 1955 to 1985, mass Czechoslovak gymnastic demonstrations and sporting parades called Spartakiads were held to mark the 1945 liberation of Czechoslovakia. Involving hundreds of thousands of male and female performers of all ages and held in the world’s largest stadium—a space built expressly for this purpose—the synchronized and unified movements of the Czech citizenry embodied, quite literally, the idealized Socialist people: a powerful yet pliant force directed by the regime. This book explores the political, social, and aesthetic dimensions of these mass physical demonstrations, with a particular focus on their roots in the völkisch nationalism of the German Turner movement and the Czech Sokol gymnastic tradition. Featuring an abundance of photographs, Spartakiads takes a new approach to Communist history by opening a window onto the mentality and mundanity behind the Iron Curtain.

The Czech Reader

The Czech Reader PDF Author: Jan Bažant
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822347946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
Frances Starn is a writer living in Berkeley, California. --Book Jacket.

Worlds of Dissent

Worlds of Dissent PDF Author: Jonathan Bolton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674064836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Worlds of Dissent analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents." Their personal and political experiences--diverse, uncertain, nameless--have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia. Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Václav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West--including Ludvík Vaculík, whose 1980 diary The Czech Dream Book is a compelling portrait of dissident life. Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. Worlds of Dissent offers a rare opportunity tounderstand the texture of dissent in a closed society.

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia PDF Author: Mary Heimann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300141474
Category : Czechoslovakia
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A revisionist history, this volume sets out to debunk many of the myths about Czechoslovakia.

Czechs, Germans, Jews?

Czechs, Germans, Jews? PDF Author: Kateřina Čapková
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857454749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The phenomenon of national identities, always a key issue in the modern history of Bohemian Jewry, was particularly complex because of the marginal differences that existed between the available choices. Considerable overlap was evident in the programs of the various national movements and it was possible to change one's national identity or even to opt for more than one such identity without necessarily experiencing any far-reaching consequences in everyday life. Based on many hitherto unknown archival sources from the Czech Republic, Israel and Austria, the author's research reveals the inner dynamic of each of the national movements and maps out the three most important constructions of national identity within Bohemian Jewry - the German-Jewish, the Czech-Jewish and the Zionist. This book provides a needed framework for understanding the rich history of German- and Czech-Jewish politics and culture in Bohemia and is a notable contribution to the historiography of Bohemian, Czechoslovak and central European Jewry.

Modernism: Representations of National Culture

Modernism: Representations of National Culture PDF Author: Ahmet Ersoy
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9637326642
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Presentations of National Cultures. Fifty-one texts illustrate the evolution of modernism in the east-European region. Essays, articles, poems, or excerpts from longer works offer new opportunities of possible comparisons of the respective national cultures, from the different ideological approaches and finessing projects of how to create the modern state liberal, conservative, socialist and others to the literary and scientific attempts at squaring the circle of individual and collective identities.

Dreams of a Great Small Nation

Dreams of a Great Small Nation PDF Author: Kevin McNamara
Publisher: Public Affairs
ISBN: 1610394844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
In 1917, two empires that had dominated much of Europe and Asia teetered on the edge of the abyss, exhausted by the ruinous cost in blood and treasure of the First World War. As Imperial Russia and Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary began to succumb, a small group of Czech and Slovak combat veterans stranded in Siberia saw an opportunity to realize their long-held dream of independence. While their plan was audacious and complex, and involved moving their 50,000-strong army by land and sea across three-quarters of the earths expanse, their commitment to fight for the Allies on the Western Front riveted the attention of Allied London, Paris, and Washington. On their journey across Siberia, a brawl erupted at a remote Trans-Siberian rail station that sparked a wholesale rebellion. The marauding Czecho-Slovak Legion seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and with it Siberia. In the end, this small band of POWs and deserters, whose strength was seen by Leon Trotsky as the chief threat to Soviet rule, helped destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire and found Czecho-Slovakia.