In this interview with documentary filmmaker Apolena Rychlíková, Anna Šabatová, one of the most remarkable figures of modern Czechoslovak history, considers not only the intellectual foundations of Charter 77 and the dissident movement, but also what shaped Šabatová’s personal background. The interview introduces an often-overlooked continuity between dissent and critical approaches to the post-communist era. This continuity is present in the humanistic, left-wing thought of Anna Šabatová, stemming from the tradition of the Czechoslovak democratic left, which permeates her whole life, not only philosophically and intellectually, but above all practically. Anna Šabatová’s lifelong efforts for a more just society have never stopped, connecting the period before 1989 with the period that followed.
The study situates the events that took place on the Czech borderland on March 4th, 1919 into a greater historical context and refers to the usage of the imagery of the fallen Czech German protestors in contemporary literature. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
The article analyses the “Iron Curtain” as a Czech site of memory.
The official communist narrative denied the Western term “Iron Curtain” and asserted the legalistic argumentation of “state borders protection” supported by nationalistic and ideological arguments. After the fall of the regime in 1989 and the opening of the state borders, the Western “Iron Curtain” paradigm was adopted by the democratizing Czech society whereas the communist narrative
became marginalised. It did not disappear, though, and both interpretations, the “Iron Curtain” as a central part of the new mainstream discourse and the “state border protection” as a peripheral part of post-communist memory, have remained alive side by side. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
The study deals with the policy towards the Jewish minority in Slovakia during the first years of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic. In particular it examines the attitudes, semantics and everyday praxis of the members of the new political establishment. Whilst they attempted to solve the "Jewish question" as soon as on the turn of the 19th and 20th century by establishing cooperatives, after the World War I they used their new governmental authority for revising the so-called "liquor licenses" which were seen as a "Jewish privilege". This emphasis on the "practical" or "humanitarian" antisemitism - significant for the Czech and Slovak populism since the late 19th century - merged in the postwar period with the aggressive campaign against the "Judeo-Bolshevism" which was alleged as a threat for the new Czechoslovak state. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
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 infl uence 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 authors do not, however, see the Communist takeover of February 1948 as a watershed in the sphere of leisure. Instead, they demonstrate both the continuity and differences between the period of limited democracy, from May 1945 to February 1948, and the years that followed. In some cases, they highlight features that were identical in Nazi German and Communist approaches to leisure activities (the rejection of jazz, ''trash'' (brak) in the arts, and Western infl uences in general). The authors discuss how the Communist regime intervened intensively in the way people chose to spend their free time, in its endeavour to shape a new type of man and woman in the new social conditions. At the same time, particularly in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the State so emphasized the importance of the work of building socialism, that leisure was seen as a ''necessary evil'', since it used up valuable physical and mental energy that would have been better spent on increasing productivity. For the same aims, but also with regard to the idea of somewhatdemocratising the arts, the regime gave preference to activities such as political and vocational self-education as well as the study of selected arts and cultural values. In keeping with the subordination of the individual to the interests of society, collective forms of recreation and the leisure (holidays spent with groups of co-workers, mass group visits to plays, fi lms, concerts, museums, galleries, and, later, Pioneer camps) were given priority. Traditional club activity and individual leisure were seen as ''bourgeois survivals''. Some young people’s non-conformist leisure activities met with suspicion from the authorities or with outright repression. Amongst the models of leisure that the regime held worthy of emulation were the Socialist youth construction projects (stavby mládeže), ''volunteer'' work, and additional instruction or training. The new organizations, such as the Revolutionary Trades Union Movement (Revoluční odborové hnutí - ROH), the Czechoslovak Union of Youth (Československý svaz mládeže - ČSM), and the Union for Co-operation with the Army (Svaz pro spolupráci s armádou - Svazarm), which took the place of the earlier clubs and associations, comported with the new ideology and provided the required forms of leisure. The authorities endeavoured also to support considerably developed and differentiated hobbies, such as making art, playing board games, and collecting. Special facilities were established to run these activities, including the enterprise-based clubs of the ROH, houses of culture (kulturní domy), and people’s educational societies (osvětové besedy). Forms of universally accessible activity, like chess and phillumeny (collecting matchbox labels), were supported, whereas fi nancially more demanding hobbies or those linked to private gain, such as philately or numismatics, were marginalized. A slight retreat from the ideologised conception of leisure came with the so-called ''new course'' of 1953. But more striking changes were made in the second half of the 1950s. These years, which saw shorter working weeks, a higher standard of living than before, and the emergence of consumerist trends, are described by the authors as a period of the planned expansion of leisure and its gradual individualisation.
The study deals with issues of corporate management and pitfalls of the ''socialist supervision'' in Czechoslovak enterprises in the period of late socialism. Using documents of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the State Security, period texts and specialized publications, it shows how party organs and state authorities were unsuccessfully trying to make supervisory mechanisms and audits a functional tool of the implementation of the ruling party´s economic policy. The author analyzes the supervisory and audit mechanisms that were used, and outlines basic reasons of the almost fatal failure of supervisory activities of the system which was, in a way, obsessed with supervision and control. He explains the systemic conditionality of the supervisory system which socialist managers often and in many respects bent to suit the needs of the enterprises they were in charge of; such situation naturally did not match the needs of the society as a whole. Using many specifi c cases as an example, the study graphically shows that members of the Czechoslovak corporate management community in the 1980s were fully aware of systemic, political and social limitations of the supervisory system which they managed to modify, fairly successfully, to suit intra-corporate conditions. The result was a situation in which the party leadership was reacting to increasingly obvious symptoms of the “agony of the centrally planned economy” by adopting various directives and guidelines to make the supervisory process more effective and to consistently promote the ''whoever manages - supervises'' principle. However, the anticipated effect did not materialize and, at the end of the day, the non-functional supervisory mechanisms made a substantial contribution to the collapse of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. and Překlad: Jiří Mareš
The article investigates how the Holocaust distorted and exploited in Cold War debates on the example of genesis and reception of the book Ghetto Warschau. Tagebücher aus dem Chaos [Warsaw Ghetto: Diaries from Chaos]. The book is a translation of the essay Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w czasie drugiej wojny światowej [Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War], written by the Jewish historian and creator of the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto Emanuel Ringelblum while hiding from the German Occupiers in Warsaw in 1944. Ringelblum addressed his essay to the Polish reader discussing the relation of Christian Poles and Polish Jews under German occupation based on his own experience and the material he had collected. It was originally published in several portions in the Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute, an early Holocaust Research Center based in Warsaw. The German translation was based on this publication and published in summer 1967 in a Stuttgart-based publishing house. However, the new title, introduced by its German editors, suggested it was Ringelblum’s diary. Above that the blurb and many footnotes highlighted the role of Poles as perpetrators in the Holocaust, while minimizing that of Germans. As the article shows, the book was prepared by the Göttinger Arbeitskreis ostdeutscher Wissenschaftler [Göttingen Working Group of Eastern German Scholars], a Think Tank with close ties to the German expellee community, campaigning for a revision of the Polish western border. Göttinger Arbeitskries used the book and earlier on excerpts of Ringelblum’s text for a smear-campaign in the West-German expellee press. Through the biased presentation and distorted context of the work these former Ostforschers sought to portrait Poles as eternal anti-Semites and the factual perpetrators of the mass murder of Polish and European Jews following their anti-Polish agenda. Polish nationalist within the ruling Polish United Workers Party in turn exploited the book and the campaign based on it, which coincided with the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland. Though the Institute was not involved in the publication of the German book, the Polish national communists accused it of supporting German revisionism and ''Zionists'' abroad in their slander of Poland. and Přeložil: David Dichelle
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 chiefl y 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 to put social policy into the context of social history. The author thus fi rst provides an outline of the social framework, which represents the concept of a Volksgemeinschaft (national/ethnic/racial community), in which ideas about the purpose and function of social policy were formed and implemented. In the next part, she focuses on the defi nition of the term ''social policy'' as understood by Nazi theorists after 1933. In the last part of the article, she seeks to defi ne the new social relations in the CzechGerman environment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and suggests possibilities of its analysis in the area of the implementation of social policy. She believes that it will be fruitful to study the implementation of the relevant criteria in the Reich and the Protectorate at the level of discussions among experts, and to research social policy in practice. The author sees the most important aspects of the implementation of social policy as residing in the various motivations of the regime when implementing social policy in relation to different parts of the population, ranging from social exclusion to forms of social protectionism.