No. I.
Hlavní stránka » pages » Journal Soudobé dějiny » Volume XVI. (2009) » No. I. »
Contents
Intellectuals Caught in the Cogs
Articles
Ivana Ryčlová
Maxim Gorky:
Between the Hammer and the Anvil
Daniela Kolenovská
The Return of André Gide
Jiří Křesťan
Václav Talich Has Lost Heart:
On the Purging of the Nation (Part I)
Discussion
Jaroslav Kučera and Volker Zimmermann
The State of Czech Research on Nazi Occupation Policy in Bohemia and Moravia:
Reflections Occasioned by a Standard New Publication
Horizon
Ernst Hanisch
The Dominance of the State:
Austrian Contemporary History Caught between Politics and Scholarship
Material
Tomáš Nigrin
The Life and Work of Willy Brandt in Ten Volumes:
Concerning a Unique German Edition
Reviews
Doubravka Olšáková
‘Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me’
Milan Hauner
The Trauma of Munich in a Work of French Historical Fiction
Piotr M. Majewski
The Munich Agreement, Great Britain, and an Attempt to Revise the Czech View
Mečislav Borák
A Long, Hard Road:
Reparations for Victims of Nazism in Europe
Bohuslav Litera
The End of the Cold War:
The Debate Continues
František Svátek
In Search of New Alternatives in Research on Communist Regimes
Jiří Vachek
New Ways of Looking at the Recent History of Central and Eastern Europe
Ondřej Picka
The Standard of Living and Political Legitimacy in Three German Régimes
Annotations
Summaries
Summaries
Articles
Between the Hammer and the Anvil
Maxim Gorky
Ivana Ryčlová
The article is intended to shed new light on one of the greatest and, at the same time, most controversial writers of twentieth-century Russian literature – Maxim Gorky (1868–1936). Countless myths and legends surround this renowned figure. Recent interpretations of his life and work range from describing him as someone who praised the Gulag system (particularly in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of him) to his being depicted as a victim of Stalin.
The author of the article, on the basis of sources published in Russia after perestroika, attempts to reconstruct the events that caused Gorky, formerly a radical opponent of the October Revolution, to become one of the co-implementers of the ideas of the Stalinist régime. The article provides sufficient evidence to support the argument that Gorky was neither a convinced Stalinist nor an opponent of the Stalinist dictatorship. He was, however, one of the few people after Stalin rose to power, apart from the Party leadership, to be in close touch with the dictator. It was mainly Gorky’s authority and international prestige which Stalin increasingly exploited to further his own political aims.
An artist’s compromise with power has always been, and will surely always be, a matter of failed integrity and conscience. In the light of this, one may only conclude that Gorky was ethically inconsistent. Many Soviet writers squandered their talents in writing rhetorical articles for the State-run press, but none of them contributed as much as Gorky to the spread of Stalinism simply by turning a blind eye. In the assessments of his personality and the role that he was destined to play in society and politics during the establishment and building of the ‘first proletarian state in the world’, there will probably always be two extreme positions: the Gorky whose intervention in the highest circles could help certain people out of severe difficulties and the Gorky who lent his international reputation and voice to one of the greatest criminals of the last century.
Daniela Kolenovská
The author begins by recalling the necessary conditions that enabled the spread of pro-Soviet sympathy amongst Western intellectuals in the 1930s. They include the dire consequences of the Great Depression, the growing Nazi threat, and the alluring ideals of social justice, in the light of which the Soviet Union appeared to many to be a radical, but attractive, social experiment. These attitudes from the end of the 1920s were supported by the organizational mechanisms and propaganda which Moscow employed to win support in Western intellectual circles. The author presents André Gide (1869–1951) as an engagé writer who did not hesitate to express his morally non-conformist and socially critical views, although without joining an organization or abandoning his individualism. None the less he was unable to resist his Communist friends’ urgings to participate in various cultural-political events organized by the French Communist Party. Moscow began to take an interest in Gide in connection with his efforts to get justice for the Bulgarian and German Communists on trial in Leipzig for having allegedly set fire to the Reichstag in 1933. Like many other French writers, Gide had been persuaded to get involved by the writer Ilja Erenburg (1891–1967). In the summer of 1936 Gide accepted an invitation from the Soviet Writers’ Union to visit the U.S.S.R. The journey resulted in Gide’s famous volume of reporting, Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (1936). In this work, he also describes in moderate terms his negative impressions of the journey, which he intended as friendly criticism. For the Soviets, however, that was unacceptable, and in late 1936 they launched a campaign against his alleged slander. Shortly afterwards, the French Communists joined in against Gide.
The article also considers the heated debates amongst Czechoslovak artists. The extreme, Stalinist positions from these debates are represented by Anti-Gide neboli Optimismus bez pověr a iluzí (Anti-Gide: Optimism without superstition or illusion) by the writer Stanislav Kostka Neumann (1875–1947), and the balanced, detached view, for example, of the literary historian and critic Václav Černý (1905–1987). In reply to the Communist attacks, Gide published Retouches à mon Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (1937), in which he condemned the Moscow show trials, thus bringing his pro-Soviet episode to a close.
Václav Talich Has Lost Heart: On the Purging of the Nation (Part I)
Jiří Křesťan
The article is concerned with the cultural-political context of the life and work of great conductor Václav Talich (1883–1961). Talich found himself between artistic freedom and political pressure in the first and second Czechoslovak republics, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and post-war Czechoslovakia. The complicated relationship between Václav Talich and Zdeněk Nejedlý (1878–1962), forms something like the axis of the author’s interpretation in this, the first part, of his article. From the beginning of the Czechoslovak Republic, in late 1918, to the end of the Second World War, in May 1945, Talich stood at the head of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Nejedlý was an influential left-wing professor at Prague University, an historian, and musicologist, and, after 1945, the Communist Minister of Education and, briefly, Labour. The two men had not always been as distant from each other as one might judge from their confrontation after the Second World War. In the interwar years Talich had not been a proponent of rightwing politics, though he was later reproached for having been so. In the first half of the 1920s he had briefly been a member of the Social Democratic Party, and amongst his close friends were, for example, clearly left-wing artists like the writer-composer-dramatist-director Emil František Burian and the writer Vítězslav Nezval. On more than one occasion, Nejedlý himself praised Talich’s art in reviews, though he also expressed some reservations, which stemmed from a different aesthetic understanding of music. The two men came into open confrontation in 1935, when Talich became head of the Opera of the National Theatre, whereas Nejedlý and his supporters had been promoting the conductor-composer Otakar Jeremiáš for the job.
Nejedlý and Talich may have been closest in the period of Second Republic (the several months from the signing of the Munich Agreement in late 1938 to the German occupation of mid-March 1939), when they both spoke out in defence of national Czech cultural values. From the summer of 1939 to 1940 Talich was pilloried in the Czech fascist press, and had to face censorship and attacks in the National Theatre as well. The article considers in detail all the problematic things Talich was reproached with after May 1945: his membership in the leadership of two collaborationist organizations – the Czech Association for Collaboration with the Germans (Český svaz pro spolupráci s Němci) and the Czech anti-Bolshevist League (Česká liga proti bolševismu), as well as his being a member of the committee of the Czech National Council (Národní rada česká); his participation in a 1940 visit to Germany by Czechs working in the arts, and the subsequent meeting with the Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in the National Theatre, Prague; his speech pledging loyalty to the Reich, given in the Municipal House, Prague, on 12 July 1942, shortly after Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich had been attacked by Allied parachutists; his personal and working relations with the Minister of Education and Public Enlightenment Emanuel Moravec, who was the embodiment of Czech collaboration with the Germans. The author also corrects some claims by journalists and historians about the circumstances of Talich’s arrest on 23 May 1945 and his release from prison about a month later. He asks as well whether Nejedlý’s personal role in the post-war prosecution of Talich was truly clear, as has been presumed by Talich’s biographers.
Discussion
The State of Czech Research on Nazi Occupation Policy in Bohemia and Moravia:
Reflections Occasioned by a Standard New Publication
Jaroslav Kučera and Volker Zimmermann
This is a critical commentary on Jan Gebhart and Jan Kuklík’s two-volume work about the Second Czechoslovak Republic (1 October 1938 to 14 March 1939) and the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (15 March 1939 to 8 May 1945). The work was published by Paseka in Prague and Litomyšl, in 2006 and 2007, as part of Velké dějiny zemí Koruny české, a multivolume popular history of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. They ask what picture of the German occupation have contemporary Czech historians provided, and – with respect to the indisputable contribution of this work – they focus on problematic aspects, which, they argue, reflect characteristic shortcomings of research by Czech historians.
That is particularly true of the insufficient consideration given to Nazi rule in the context of the Reich itself, which substantially influenced occupation policy, as well as the absence of a comparative perspective, which would have enabled pinpointing what was specific to the Protectorate compared to other regimes in occupied Europe. Another fault, according to the reviewers, is that both volumes are not so much a history of the Bohemian Lands in this period as they are histories of the Czech nation in the ethnic sense. Apart from the Protectorate itself, the volumes deal thoroughly with the Czechoslovak political exiles and Czechoslovak armies abroad, whereas with few expectations they omit events in the Sudetenland (Reichsgau) and other annexed territories. The third conceptual problem, according to the reviewers, is that Gebhart and Kuklík, in keeping with the trend in Czech historical literature, automatically treat the Second Republic as the prologue to the Protectorate, whereas it can also legitimately be seen as the epilogue to the First Republic. Consequently, questions about the causes of the quick disintegration of the democracy of the First Republic and its transformation into a system of another kind vanish from view. The fact that economic history and social developments in the Protectorate remain totally eclipsed by political history, as does, in part, the depiction of society and everyday life in the Protectorate, also corresponds to the current state of research. The reviewers, moreover, see a marked imbalance in the fact that so many places in both volumes are devoted to various kinds of resistance compared to forms of collaboration with the Germans. They also point out the absence of a typology of these phenomena, as well as persistent problems of terminology. In conclusion they state that although this work is extraordinarily rich in facts, it is historical description, unfortunately, that strikingly outweighs interpretation.
Horizon
The Dominance of the State:
Austrian Contemporary History Caught between Politics and Scholarship
Ernst Hanisch
This is a Czech translation of ‘Die Dominanz des Staates: Österreichische Zeitgeschichte im Drehkreuz von Politik und Wissenschaft’ published in Alexander Nützenadel and Wolfgang Schieder (eds), Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2004, pp. 54–77). The author argues that contemporary history in Austria became established at the beginning of the 1960s, that is, ten year’s later than in the Federal Republic of Germany. It was not established from a need to come to terms with the Nazi past, but to rethink the teaching of history, which neglected the conflict-fraught history of the first (pre-war) republic and the existence of the post-war (second) republic. Consensus was found in ‘coalition historiography’ (Koalitionsgeschichtsschreibung), which corresponded to the constellation of power in the state, long determined by the operation of the grand coalition of the Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei – ÖVP) and the Austrian Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs – SPÖ). From the 1960s into the 1980s contemporary history was extensively institutionalized as a field, and was fully freed from the current events in Austria. Historiography remained markedly linked to the State, however, by various commissions on which historians sat together with politicians, research teams attached to ministries, and state-financed research projects on politically relevant topics. The author sees the causes in the Austrian tradition and the political circumstances of post-war Austria. He does not, however, on the whole judge the links between the State and scholars of contemporary history to be something bad, because they have not resulted in a State historiography or a system that suppresses freedom of opinion. In some cases, moreover, State initiatives have contributed to fertile discussion, of which there is a general shortage in Austrian contemporary historiography.
In the 1970s, coalition historiography, promoted by the generation of historians born in the 1920s, with its preference for political history and the positivist approach, was challenged by the generation of Sixty-eighters, which opened the field of contemporary history to diverse impulses from the social sciences, and oriented the field to research on Nazism. Only at this point did historians begin to see Nazism as part of Austrian history and cease to perceive Austria as the Nazis’ first victim. None the less, the left-wing liberal inclinations of this generation led them to over-simplification, inaccuracies, and an ignoring of the dark sides of Communism. Austrian Nazism did not come to the centre of historians’ attention, however, till the second half of the 1980s, with the outbreak of the scandal around the Nazi past of the former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, who had just been elected President of Austria. This state of affairs continued into the next decade. In the 1980s, meanwhile, Austrian historiography was hit by a great wave of Postmodernism, particularly Deconstructionism, which undermined the Sixty-eighters. Since that time, Austrian contemporary history has been highly pluralistic, and no single theoretical framework dominates the field, but that has also led to a lack of differentiation between the essential and the marginal, as well as to historians’ ignoring each other’s work. The author concludes by identifying several clear trends or approaches in Austrian contemporary history today, and he considers their prospects.
Material
The Life and Work of Willy Brandt in Ten Volumes:
Concerning a Unique German Edition
Tomáš Nigrin
This contribution presents the monumental, ten-volume edition of documents related to the political career of Willy Brandt (1913–1992). Called Willy Brandt: Berliner Ausgabe and edited by Helga Grebing, it was published by the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation (Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung), Berlin, from 2000 to 2006. In terms of size and comprehensiveness, this is the first edition of its kind in the world. It is intended for a wide readership. Drawing on this edition, the present contribution aims to outline Brandt’s political career, from his entry into the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1930 to his time in exile in Norway and Sweden when Germany was under Hitler’s rule and during the Second World War, his gradual rise in the post-war Social Democratic Party of Germany, to his work in the important offices of Mayor of West Berlin, Chairman of the Social Democratic Party, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, and Chairman of the Socialist International (1976–1992), and as a member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1983. The work also pays considerable attention to the epochal Ostpolitik, which normalized relations between West Germany and the countries of the Soviet Bloc, and led to Brandt’s being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.
Reviews
‘Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me’
Doubravka Olšáková
Čapková, Kateřina, and Michal Frankl. Nejisté útočiště: Československo a uprchlíci před nacismem, 1933–1938. Prague and Litomyšl: Paseka, 2008, 424 pp.
This work, according to the reviewer, provides a great deal of information about the organizing of aid to refugees of Nazism in pre-war Czechoslovakia. It also describes the operation and atmosphere of the refugee camps and movingly acquaints the reader with a number of actual life stories. It fails, however, to provide a unified interpretation, general conclusions, or a comparative picture. Importantly, it debunks the myth that the First Republic of Czechoslovakia was a haven for refugees. With its uncompromising criticism of the restrictions implemented by the Czechoslovak state, however, the work unconsciously creates a contrary myth, and would undoubtedly have been more balanced had it also attempted to compare Czechoslovak policy with that in other European countries in the 1930s.
The Trauma of Munich in a Work of French Historical Fiction
Milan Hauner
Benamou, Georges-Marc. Mnichovský přízrak. Prague and Litomyšl: Paseka, 2008, 242 pp. Trans. from the French by Zuzana Tomanová.
This is a review of Le fantôme de Munich: Roman (Paris: Flammarion, 2007) by the French journalist, novelist, and screen-writer Georges-Marc Benamou, which has recently been translated into Czech. The novel brings to life the actors and setting of the Munich conference of September 1938, by means of a fictional interview between an American journalist and the former French premier, Édouard Daladier, which takes place thirty years after the events. The reviewer considers the author’s aims unclear and his psychological portraits unconvincing and lopsided. According to the reviewer a more suitable figure for the leading role in such a work of historical fiction would have been the Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš.
The Munich Agreement, Great Britain, and an Attempt to Revise the Czech View
Piotr M. Majewski
Smetana, Vít. In the Shadow of Munich: British Policy towards Czechoslovakia from Endorsement to the Renunciation of the Munich Agreement (1938–1942). Prague: Karolinum Press, 2008, 358 pp.
The author of this volume, according to the reviewer, has achieved a thoroughly researched piece of work of a polemical nature, the aim of which is to surmount the prejudices and stereotypes of Czech historians of Czechoslovak-British relations in this period. The reviewer sees its shortcomings in the fact that this ‘revisionist model’, showing more sympathy for British than for Czechoslovak motives and attitudes, is not always persuasive.
A Long, Hard Road:
Reparations for Victims of Nazism in Europe
Mečislav Borák
Hockerts, Hans Günter, Claudia Moisel, and Tobias Winstel (eds). Grenzen der Wiedergutmachung: Die Entschädigung der NS-Verfolgte in West- und Osteuropa 1945–2000. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006, 876 pp.
According to the reviewer, the topic discussed in the volume under review has never before been considered in such breadth and depth. Its twenty contributors concentrate on three areas: the approach of the German authorities to the demands for reparations to victims of Nazism, ‘reparations diplomacy’ in eleven countries of western Europe, and the ‘freezing’ of reparations in four countries of eastern Europe. The articles in the volume seek to answer the fundamental question of how it happened that foreign victims of the Nazi régime were long excluded from German reparations, and it painstakingly traces the thorny path to redress.
The End of the Cold War: The Debate Continues
Bohuslav Litera
Pons, Silvio, and Federico Romeo (eds). Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War. London and New York: Frank Cass, 2005, 237 pp.
Njølstad, Olav (ed.). The Last Decade of the Cold War: From Conflict Escalation to Conflict Transformation. London and New York: Frank Cass, 2004, xxiii + 435 pp.
The reviewer considers two volumes, both published in the USA, which are, according to him, thanks to the contributions by top-notch experts, of considerable importance in explaining certain questions of the Cold War and its end. He also provides summaries of the most relevant contributions. Whereas the first volume is devoted to problems of definition, periodization, and the end of the Cold War, the second volume concentrates on the last ten years of the East Bloc, while being concerned in its thematic sections with the overall context, developments in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, and US and west-European foreign policy in the last phase of the Cold War.
In Search of New Alternatives in Research on Communist Regimes
František Svátek
Kopeček, Michal (ed.). Past in the Making: Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989. Budapest and New York: Central University Press, 2008, x + 264 pp.
The volume under review is considered in the context of current research on collective memory, the politics of history, and historical revisionism, and it highlights its innovative potential for international comparative history and the search for new approaches to the study of Communist régimes and their societies. The volume, the reviewer argues, beneficially links together theoretical and methodological essays with concrete analysis of historical material in case studies devoted to the ‘creation of the past’ in sensitive areas of collective memory in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (and the former Czechoslovakia), Poland, the Ukraine, Hungary, Slovenia, Germany, and Estonia.
New Ways of Looking at the Recent History of Central and Eastern Europe
Jiří Vachek
Mueller, Wolfgang, and Michael Portmann, (eds). Osteuropa vom Weltkrieg zur Wende. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 2007, 418 pp.
The volume under review comprises contributions by young historians mostly from central and eastern Europe. In three sections it covers the topics of the Shoah, the post-war expulsion of the German minorities, the establishment of Communist régimes, the arts and sciences, propaganda, relations amongst the elements of the powers-that-be in the 1950s and 1960s, and ultimately the milestones of crisis in the existence of the East Bloc. The author points to certain contributions, and considers the volume to be on the whole an achievement that fills a number of gaps in the recent history of the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Finland.
The Standard of Living and Political Legitimacy in Three German Régimes
Ondřej Picka
Steiner, André (ed.). Preispolitik und Lebensstandard: Nationalsozialismus, DDR und Bundesrepublik im Vergleich. Cologne: Böhlau, 2006, 224 pp.
The chief aim of this essay volume is to explore the link between the development of the standard of living and the success of the policy of price controls on the one hand and the endeavour of the three régimes to achieve legitimacy on the other. The volume seeks to describe this link and compare it, using the example of three different régimes – the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic, and the Federal Republic of Germany. According to the reviewer, however, the individual case studies present a chronological interpretation with a number of secondary details rather than emphasizing comparable elements. The upshot is that the volume does not offer a convincing answer even to the basic question it raises.
