No III.
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Adrian von Arburg
One Way or the Other
An Analysis of the Forced Migration in the Czech Lands After the WW II
Michal Kopeček – Miroslav Kunštát
‘The Sudeten German Issue’ in Czech Academic
Discussion After 1989
Horizon
Mathieu Hautemulle
A Trip to Syldavia
A View (not only) of French Cartoons on Eastern Europe
Review
Pavel Kolář
Between Hegemony and Plurality
Metanarrative German History After 1945
Blahoslav Hruška
The Heart of Wagner’s Cult Was Beating for Hitler
František Novák
An Unflattering Picture of Austria during the Nazi Period
Jiří Pešek
The Fortunes of Germans in Post-war Poland in Detail
Peter Švík
The Impacts of President Beneš’ Decrees on Deportations and Re-slovakization
Jan Měchýř
A History of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and its Controversial Interpretation
Michal Reiman
Disputable ‘Destalinization’
A Book about the 1953–1956 Crisis in the Soviet Bloc
Jan Růžička
Helsinki and the Fall of Communism
International Norms of Human Rights as a Factor of Political Changes
Marie Mrázková
The Successful Road of Adenauer’s CDP
Discussion
Tomáš Zahradníček
How to Deal with History
The Twentieth Century Witness – Witold Gombrowicz – and His Remembrances
Václav Kural
Comments on the Year 1968 as Discussed in Soudobé dějiny
Chronicle
Twice about the Conference on Franz Kafka in Liblice
František Kautman
A Fate of Franz Kafka’s Literary Work in the Czech Lands after 1948
Pavel Reiman
On Kafka’s Conference Organized in 1963
Czechoslovak Resettlement Policy and Its Effects in the Bohemian Lands after World War II
Adrian von Arburg
After and even during the escape, expulsion, and ‘transfer’ of almost three million Sudeten Germans, the Czech borderlands were resettled by Czechs and other non-Germans. This process represented one of the largest internal migrations in the history of the Bohemian Lands: in 1945-50, one quarter of the overall Czech population participated in it, seeking to start a new life in areas just previously inhabited predominantly by Germans.
Rather than the actual process of resettlement, the article first considers the importance of the topic and existing research on it, and he acquaints the reader with the availability of documents in Czech archives. Referring to research elsewhere, particularly, in Poland, he calls for a complex debate on the topic, which has so far been lacking in Czech historiography. In the next two parts of his article, based on extensive research in Czech archives, the author attempts to determine the extent to which the German expulsion was linked, both organizationally and conceptually, with ‘resettlement policy’. He demonstrates that the Prague Settlement Office (Osidlovací úřad) headed by Miroslav Kreysa, a Communist, and its Bratislava branch, which was concerned primarily with the Hungarians of Slovakia, had from the beginning not ruled out force as a possible means to achieve its aims. The author argues that the forced migration of Germans influenced the resettlement of this territory by the Slavic population. The question remains, however, to what the extent there was a common political link between the two processes. The implementation of the internal settlement, which was initially intended as basically voluntary for the Slav population, was also marked by the use of force, since the carrying out of these two migration processes were largely run by the same governmental bodies that saw to the expulsion of the Germans. Using specific examples, the author then demonstrates the effects on some of the non-German segments of the population, mainly the Hungarians from south Slovakia, Croats from south Moravia, Roma, and people from the Hlutschin and Weitra regions.
‘The Sudeten German Question’ in Czech Academic Debate after the Changes of Late 1989
Michal Kopeček and Miroslav Kunštát
The article summarizes and evaluates the academic debate on the ‘Sudeten-German Question’, which, after the political changes of late 1989, entered a qualitatively new phase. Yet even in the 1990s it did not cease to be seen through the prism of the tragic culmination of Czech-German relations in the Bohemian lands from 1938 to 1946. Academics from abroad concentrated on the ‘Dispute over the Beneš Decrees’ and the ‘Debate on the Transfer’ – that is to say, on topics that, despite repeated attempts by historians to the contrary, could not remove itself entirely from politics. The authors of the article do not aim to provide an exhaustive commentated bibliography of the debate; they are instead concerned with its conceptual characterization, a description of its development, and a critique of its theoretical and ideological limits. They set out the debate on the basis of an ideal-type model defined by two extreme positions according to attitude in the interpretation of the transfer of the German population after the Second World War. The reductionist or, rather, dichotomous model that they present – where the basic line of division is represented by the horizontal axis from ‘defenders of the transfer’ to ‘critics of the transfer’ – suggests the semantic field on which one can judge other elements and positions in the contemporary Czech debate. It is largely President Edvard Beneš, according to the authors, who constitutes the crystallization point and personification of the disputes. Most of the participants in the debate can reasonably be placed close to the centre of the imaginary spectrum: this considerably heterogeneous group rejects the incontestability and utter certainty of the two extremes, and emphasizes the historic context of events.
Although the year 1989 was crucial in opening up the arena, it was definitely not the beginning of the debate. The authors consider the post-1989 reception of earlier debates on the topic, which had taken place among Czech émigrés, dissidents at home, or in the ‘grey zone’ during the Communist period in Czechoslovakia, in other words the views of influential writers who logically also constituted the basic positions after 1989 (for example, Toman Brod, Jan Křen, Václav Kural, Bedřich Loewenstein, Ján Mlynárik, Petr Pithart, Petr Příhoda, Milan Otáhal, and Václav Vrabec), as well as writers of the middle and younger generation (for example, Jindřich Dejmek, Jaroslav Kučera, Jan Kuklík Jr., Jan Němeček, Jiří Pešek, Zdeněk Radvanovský, Tomáš Staněk, and Pavel Škorpil). The ‘extreme’ poles of the debate are analyzed separately, owing to the sometimes excessively obvious fluctuations on the boundary between journalism and academic historiography sometimes as passing remarks (for example, Boris Čelovský, Bohumil Doležal, and Dalibor Plichta) or more thoroughly in independent parts of an article (such as those by Milan Churáň and Emanuel Mandler). The article pays particular attention to those who felt obliged as professional historians to make public statements against imagined or real ‘abuses of the past’ by the mass media (for example, Jaroslav Pánek and Jiří Pešek) or felt a need to write popular works for readers in the Czech Republic and abroad, whether commissioned by the government (such as Zdeněk Beneš, Jan Kuklík Jr., Václav Kural, and Jiří Pešek) or on their own (including Jaroslav Kučera and Alena Míšková), whose opinions were usually addressed to German readers.
International academic discussion – German and Austrian in particular – could only be outlined in the article, mainly by mentioning the important works of German historians or historians living in Germany (Detlef Brandes, Ralf Gebel, Eva Hahn, Hans Lemberg, Jan Pauer, and Volker Zimmermann). A concise assessment of the work of the joint German-Czech Committee of Historians (and its German-Slovak counterpart) is also provided, as well as that of the less visible Austrian-Czech Committee of Historians. The increasing significance of the international debate is demonstrated in the conclusion, which argues that projects dealing with ‘politically sensitive’ topics are becoming increasingly international, which in turn facilitates a broadening of historical and political perspectives. Also, many Czech historians often write in English or German and vice versa, and there is much translation both ways. The change in paradigms, the authors believe, is not only necessary; it is also inevitable. That can, however, only indirectly influence the nature of the debate in the ‘public space’. At a time when political and cultural discourse is becoming irrevocably pluralistic and the ‘memorialism’ is on the rise as never before, the historian becomes a mere rank-and-file participant in the public debate on history, albeit a considerably privileged one. All participants in the debate are – whether consciously or not – approaching the time when the last eyewitnesses to the painful past will be gone and history will step in to take their place.
A Journey to Syldavia:
The View of Eastern Europe in French and Other Comics
Mathieu Hautemulle
In this essay, first published in La Nouvelle Alternative (vol. 17 [2002] no. 56, pp. 151-166), the author sets out to illustrate how central and eastern Europe are portrayed in French comics as a special historical and geographical entity, especially after the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, the decline of the Soviet empire, and the outbreak of the Balkan wars in the mid-1990s, and he also seeks to demonstrate how they can be used as an historical source. He considers the chief characteristics of these comics, such as their depiction of the countryside, physical appearance, clothes, language, temperament, the relationship between men and women, the conflict between the individual person and the powers that be, what goes on behind the scenes of politics, and ideological symbols. He shows how historical reality is reflected in cartoon fiction or, in some cases, how reality and imagination are mixed together into an iconographic myth. The heroes of the mostly gloomy and ‘barbaric’ stories, which are set in the former Soviet Union, central Europe and the Balkans, grope their way through the labyrinth of Communism, Fascism, capitalism, and rising nationalism, in which suppressed energies, political oppression, national traumas, and the power struggles of groups and individuals are played out.
Between Hegemony and Plurality:
Metanarratives of German History after 1945
Pavel Kolář
Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow (eds), Die historische Meistererzählung: Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, 255 pp.
This is the review of a volume of articles based on papers given at the Conference of German Historians, Aachen, in 2000, in the section ‘Booms and Depressions in National Metanarratives’. The articles compare competing metanarratives, that is to say, ‘great historical narratives’, with hegemonic claims to interpretation and a certain legitimizing function, in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany (East German history based on Marxist interpretation and, on the other hand, nationalist historiography and the theory of the Sonderweg in West Germany). They seek to illustrate the structure of these historical discourses and their institutionalization. The possible alternative models they discuss include feminist historiography, regional historiography, micro-history, the history of everyday life, and the recently conceived history of supranational units in a globalizing world. Aware that almost everything becomes fodder for the mass media, which has broken the historian’s monopoly on being a producer of ‘historical truth’, the authors make a plea for a plurality of opinion and cultural tolerance, a standpoint favoured by the reviewer, who recommends it to the participants in the Czech ’struggle for history’.
The Heart of the Wagner Cult Was Beating for Hitler
Blahoslav Hruška
Brigitte Hamann, Winifred Wagner oder Hitlers Bayreuth. Munich: Piper, 2002, 687 pp.
The reviewer looks at the latest book by the well-known Austrian historian Brigitte Hamann. In this work, another in a series of successful biographies in which she depicts a wide range of cultural history by focusing on one figure, Hamann analyzes the politicization of Bayreuth, the centre of the Wagner cult, during the Nazi period. Her main character this time is Winifred Williams-Klindworth, the wife of Wolfgang, Richard Wagner’s only son. Although Williams-Klindworth became a convinced Nazi, and was an antisemite and close to Hitler, she intervened many times to help the persecuted.
An Unflattering Picture of Austria during the Nazi Period
František Novák
Evan Burr Bukey, Hitlerovo Rakousko: Jedna říše, jeden národ. Translated by Michal Prokop, Prague: Rybka, 2002, 375 pp.
The book under review is a Czech translation of Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945, by Evan Burr Bukey, Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Concerned with the politics and atmosphere of the First Austrian Republic, Bukey analyzes the attitudes of the individual strata of the Austrian population towards the Anschluss and the Nazi régime, with an emphasis on the intensified antisemitism, and the Austrians’ reactions to the developing conflict between the Axis and the Allies. The reviewer finds it a readable, high-quality synthesis that ultimately debunks myths about Austrian resistance to Nazism during the Second World War.
The Fortunes of the Germans of Post-war Poland:
A Detailed Examination
Jiří Pešek
‘Nasza ojczyzna stała się dla nas obcym państwem…’: Niemcy w Polsce 1945-1950. Wybór dokumentów, vols 2-4. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2000-01, 588, 496, and 495 pp.
The reviewer continues his assessment of the large publishing project by Polish and German historians, which is concerned with the forced population transfers of the ethnic Germans from Poland after World War II. (For his review of vol. 1, see Jiří Pešek ‘Velkorysá edice k poválečnému vysídlení Němců z Polska’ Soudobé dějiny, vol. 9, no. 1, 2002, pp. 120-24). Although still only in Polish these subsequent volumes of documents, like their predecessor, on the erstwhile German population in the individual voivodships of Poland, also merit praise, the reviewer concludes.
The Impact of President Beneš’s Decrees on the Deportations and Re-Slovakization
Peter Švík
Katalin Vadkerty, Maďarská otázka v Československu 1945-1948. Bratislava: Kalligram 2002, 863 pp. With a Preface by László Szarka. Appendices: Zoltán Fábry, ‘Obžalovaný prehovorí: Dokumenty z dejín Maďarov v Československu (adresované českej a slovenskej inteligencii)’; Rezső Peéry, ‘Bohatá úroda siedmich chudobných rokov’; Rezső Peéry, ‘Memorandum O situácii Maďarov v Československu’; and Rezső Szalatnai, ‘Memorandum Maďari na území ČSR v rokoch 1938-1945′. Trans. by Marta Lesná, Katarína Borbášová, and Galina Sándorová.
This monograph by a Slovak author of Magyar origin is, according to the reviewer, the most thorough and most complete contribution to the history of Magyars in Slovakia during the first years after World War II. Despite her providing respectable factual material, the reviewer reproaches the author for a pro-Magyar bias in her interpretation, one-sided normative moral standards in judging the collective guilt of the Magyar and Slovak populations, and failing to consider closely enough the historical context of the harsh treatment of Magyars in Slovakia after the World War II.
Two Histories of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia:
Problems of Interpretation
Jan Měchýř
Jacques Rupnik, Dějiny Komunistické strany Československa: Od počátků do převzetí moci. Trans. from the French by Helena Beguivin, Prague: Academia, 2002, 285 pp.
Martin Nechvátal, 15. 5. 1921. Založení KSČ: Ve službách Kominterny. (Edice Dny, které tvořily české dějiny, vol. 3.) Prague: Havran, 2002, 126 pp.
In assessing two books on the history of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the reviewer reflects on the requirements of historical research into this topic. While he finds Rupnik’s book (a recent Czech translation of his Histoire du Parti communiste tchécoslovaque : des origines ŕ la prise du pouvoir, Paris, c.1981) to be a factual, apposite, and penetrating analysis of the Czechoslovak Communists’ road to power, and one that remains the best monograph on the topic notwithstanding its age, Nechvátal’s work, though well-informed and providing much of interest, tends to suffer from incongruity and superficiality.
Questionable ‘Destalinization’:
A Book about the 1953-56 Crisis in the Soviet Bloc
Michal Reiman
Jan Foitzik (ed.), Entstalinisierungskrise in Ostmitteleuropa 1953-1956: Vom 17. Juni bis zum ungarischen Volksaufstand. Politische, militärische, soziale und nationale Dimensionen. Paderborn, Munich, Vienna and Zurich: Schöningh, 2001, 393 pp.
In looking at this volume of articles by German, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Russian historians on developments in the central-European Soviet satellites after the death of Stalin, the reviewer considers the volume an informative contribution to the history of the area. He also finds, however, that none of the articles clarifies the decisive changes in Soviet policy in this period, nor does any indicate the forms these changes took. Furthermore, the term ‘de-Stalinization’, he argues, remains ill-defined and misused in the volume.
Helsinki and the Collapse of Communism:
International Norms of Human Rights as a Factor in the Changes
Jan Růžička
Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001, 308 pp.
The reviewer first defines Thomas’s starting point from the perspective of international-relations theory. This is Constructivism, which Thomas favours because of the failure of Realism and Liberalism to predict the collapse of the Soviet bloc or even to explain it in hindsight. Thomas traces the construction of the ‘framing’ within which the international norms on human rights in the Helsinki Agreement acquired different meaning, and also how these norms were then socialized at various levels. The reviewer regrets that the author does not really differentiate between the West and the United States and that he overlooks the reception and influence of these norms in Western Europe. Nevertheless, he emphasizes the originality of the idea of linking Constructivist theory with empirical research, particularly in the interpretation of US policy under the influence of the ‘third basket’ of the Helsinki Final Act (1975).
Adenauer’s CDU and the Road to Success
Marie Mrázková
Frank Bösch, Die Adenauer CDU: Gründung, Aufstieg und Krise einer Erfolgspartei 1945-1969. Stuttgart and Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001, 575 pp.
The reviewer considers Bösch’s book about the beginnings of the Christian Democratic Union in Germany the first scholarly work on the topic to be based on primary sources. It is marked, she maintains, by precise analysis of all relevant aspects of the topic, logically and clearly structured interpretation, an ability to examine the topic from various angles, and a balanced assessment of the role of Konrad Adenauer. Moreover, it is written in an engaging way. The reviewer draws particular attention to chapters on the integration of smaller political parties into the CDU, its informal administration, and its semi-legal means of financing in the 1950s.
Coping with History:
Witold Gombrowicz, a Twentieth-century Witness and His Memoirs
Tomáš Zahradníček
With regard to the book Vspomnienia polskie [Memories of Poland] about interwar Poland by the émigré writer Witold Gombrowicz, the article considers the rudiments of the historian’s craft and also the bounds and standards separating historical knowledge from subjective testimony. Gombrowicz reclaimed the right to autonomy from the social sciences, and took this approach in writing the Vspomnienia, where he unites autobiographical description with an exploration of the changes in the structure and mentality of pre-war Polish society. Following on from this, the article develops the idea of the loss of the trained historian’s exclusive position as producer of ‘historical truth’ and its guardian in a pluralist society swamped with information (sources), and assigns him or her a reduced, though still significant, role among the many different voices presenting the past.
The Debate on 1968 in Soudobé dějiny:
Some Comments
Václav Kural
In this article the author enters a debate published in previous volumes of Soudobé dějiny on the reform process in the Czechoslovak Communist Party during the Prague Spring and Alexander Dubček’s role in it. He considers in particular whether the Dubček leadership’s approach to reform actually continued after the meeting of heads of the Communist parties, which was held in Dresden in March 1968, as Antonín Benčík argues, or whether it ended, as Jitka Vondrová and Jaromír Navrátil argue. Kural inclines to Benčík’s view, and supports his case with, among other things, the evidence of the Soviets’ angry reactions to the steps taken by the Czechoslovak leadership. The author appeals also for a more moderate, factual, impersonal tone in the debate, a view shared by the editors of Soudobé dějiny.
Two Articles about the Kafka Conference in Liblice
In May 1963 a Franz Kafka conference was organized in Liblice, not far from Prague. Among its international participants were Roger Garaudy and Ernst Fisher, both Marxist theorists on art. The significance of the conference was that it removed a certain ideological taboo concerning discussion of Kafka in Communist Czechoslovakia, and was above all a political act. The debate between ideological interpreters from East Germany and open-minded critics, which reverberated in the press for a long time afterwards, led to the conference becoming well known even abroad. The literary historian František Kautman and the Germanist Pavel Reiman, whose papers are published in the current issue of Soudobé dějiny, were, together with the journalist and aesthetician Alexej Kusák and the Germanist Eduard Goldstücker, the initiators and organizers of the conference.
The Fate of Franz Kafka’s Literary Work in the Bohemian Lands after 1948
František Kautman
This in many ways autobiographical article by a leading Czech expert on Franz Kafka is concerned with the changing reception of Kafka’s work from the period just after the Communist takeover of February 1948 to the mid-1990s. The changing reception depended largely on the political situation in the country. From the time of the takeover until the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, Kafka’s works were considered ‘reactionary’; after the short Thaw they were again suppressed from 1958 to 1962. The Kafka conference in Liblice, the atmosphere of which is described here, launched a new wave of interest in Kafka, which was reflected in literature, theatre and cinema, and lasted till 1969. In the following years, during the hard-core Communist policy of Normalization, Kafka’s works were again seen much as they had been in the 1950s – his works were not translated, and the ones that had been translated were now removed from the public libraries, while his influence on unsanctioned literature increased further. That situation began to change in the mid-1980s. Six months before the Changes beginning in mid-November 1989, an unsanctioned Kafka theatre festival was organized in Prague. The 1990s saw the publication of a number of works by and about him, but he also became a kind of tourist attraction and matter for the mass-media.
Pavel Reiman
At the time of the Liblice Conference on Kafka, the author was head of the Institute of History of the Communist Party. He wrote this article in the early 1970s after being forced to quit his job. Here he describes how he got came to know the works of Kafka, and offers his thoughts on the circumstances surrounding the conference and the ideological debate that followed.
