The article provides a comparison of two monuments - one of
František Palacký in Prague and the second of Theodor Mommsen in Berlin. Both men were the key historians of their nations in the 19th century. Palacký has offered a master-narrative of Czech national past in his famous book The History of Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia and set the main structures of narrating Czech history for two centuries. Theodor Mommsen has become
a worldwide known historian due to his extraordinary History of Rome, for which he has obtained Nobel Price for Literature in 1903. Monuments of these historians were built at the beginning of the 20th century (Palacký’s in 1912, Mommsen’s in 1909). The paper focuses on structural similarities between the monuments, especially in the area of collective memory. Using the theory of
Maurice Halbwachs formulated just before World War II the essay points out that there is a fundamental connection between memory and space. The essay argues that there is no significant structural difference between Palacký’s and Mommsen’s monument in terms of shaping the collective memory. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
The study focuses on the Prague exile of the last crowned French king Charles X in 1832–1836. It notices the popularization reflection of the king’s stay, which originated in the Czech milieu from the end of the 19th century. It arises from the memoirs of Charles’s contemporaries (including members of his exile court and Josef Rudolph of Wartburg, son of the inspector of Prague Castle, etc.), from reports of the Prague Police Directorate, a collection of reports submitted to Chancellor Metternich, from materials on the accommodation and furnishings options of Prague Castle and from the related results of art-historical research of the New Palace of the castle, where the king stayed with his family and a small court. It deals with the king’s interaction with the milieu of the Czech lands. Last but not least, it then deals with the upbringing of Charles’s grandson Henry, in which František Palacký and Joachime Barrande, among others, participated.
In the revolutionary years 1848–49 the Czech historian František Palac¬ký was forced to re-formulate his response to the question What is (the Czech) nation? From starting points kin to German romanticism and to German national-liberal historiography in particular, he defines both a nation and a (national) public as well as the “basic equality of nations in rights and dignity” as necessary conditions of constitutional order. He elaborates an original solution of the relation between the cosmopolitan and the national cultures, of nation in a political and in a cultural sense, of the principle of self-determination and of shared sovereignty. He defends the thesis that in Palacký’s individual texts in the spring of 1848 we can follow his testing of the suitability of individual pre-political projects of the nation for Czech policy within the framework of the shared Danube state. He stresses particularly his relationship to the tradition which sought to transform the territorial conception of the nation, including bilinguality, into a distinctive conception of a modern nation (Bolzano/Woltmann, Young Čechie/Young Bohemia [at the time the Czech and the German designation for the Czech lands]).