No. II.-III.
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Articles
An introduction to this single-topic double issue on Czech religiousness in the second half of the twentieth century (Zdeněk R. Nešpor)
Zdeněk R. Nešpor
An Opium That Has Lost Its Potency?
Religious Processes in Late-Modern Western and Eastern Europe
Ondřej Matějka
“They are Lambs, but We Can Use Them”:
Czech Protestants and the Communist Regime in the 1950s
Jiří Hanuš
Features of Roman Catholic Spirituality in the Bohemian Lands, 1948–89
Olga Nešporová
Death, Dying, and Funeral Rites in Twentieth-century Czech Society
Martin C. Putna
Apocalypticism in the Thinking of the Czech Roman Catholic Émigrés Schwarzenberg, Chudoba, Preisner, and Neuwirth
Zdeněk R. Nešpor
Empirical Research into Religion of Its Day, 1946–89:
A Critical Introduction to the Czech Sociology of Religion in the Years of Marxist Dominance
Memoirs
Jan Jandourek
Studying at the Faculty of Theology, Litoměřice:
Personal Experience from the Years of Late “Normalization”
Dominik Dvořák
Independent Religious Education in the Period of “Normalization”: Several Personal Examples
Materials
David Václavík
Czech Atheism in the Twentieth Century:
Its Development and Institutionalization, 1948–89
Horizon
Eva Hahnová and Hans Henning Hahn
Old Legends and New Visits to the “East”:
Concerning Norman M. Naimark’s Images of History
Reviews
Jiří Pešek
Some Problems with a Synthesis of Twentieth-Century History by Members of One Generation
Lucie Filipová
In Search of a Compromise between Scholarship, Didactics, and Politics: A Franco-German Textbook on Post-1945 History
František Svátek
Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing:
A Comparative View
Jan Křen
An Excellent Boring Book
Milan Otáhal
An Austrian Work on the Collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia
Daniela Kolenovská
Questions Related to Shostakovich
Eva Hahnová and Hans Henning Hahn
The Creeping Return of Ethnic Conceptions of Politics
Dagmar Černá
The Austrian State Treaty Fifty Years On
Vlastimil Hála
Going Astray, as Seen from Right of Centre
Debate
A Reply to Jiří Pešek’s Review of a Czech History Textbook
(Jaroslav Cuhra, Jiří Ellinger, Adéla Gjuričová, and Vít Smetana)
In Protest against Censorship in Soudobé dějiny
(Petr Zídek)
Chronicle
About Three Histories in One Space
(Sylva Sklenářová)
The Malá Skála Seminar on Czechoslovak History during the Occupation
(Zdenko Maršálek and Petr Hofman)
Annotations
Summaries
Articles
An Opium That Has Lost Its Potency?
Religious Processes in Late-Modern Western and Eastern Europe
Zdeněk R. Nešpor
In this article the author presents a fundamental overview of developments in religion in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. He compares the situation in West European countries and post-Communist countries, and, referring to the literature, analyzes some central trends. He explains, particularly the longstanding paradigmatic concept of secularization, whose currently most influential proponent is Steve Bruce, and three alternative models – Rodney Stark’s theory of rational religious choice, Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s concept of religious memory, and José Casanova’s version of the concept of three autonomous components of secularization (whose meeting led to a striking decline in church-based religiousness in Western Europe). The author also considers questions of secularization and the subsequent changes outside and within the established churches, their legal standing, and influence on politics, the mass media, the school system, and other areas. He also explores the development and subsequent decline in the importance of new religious movements, including positions taken against them and against immigrants’ religiousness, as well as the influence of implicit religions. Whereas “political religion” has long lost its role in shaping identity, functional equivalents of religiousness appear mainly in European secularism, which, on the one hand, has Christian roots and has also quite successfully substituted for church-based Christianity, for example in the form of a negative European identity with regard to Muslims. In Late Modern Europe, the author argues, a great number of privatized religious or spiritual forms continue to exist. They may get the attention of only a small part of the public and encourage them to participate, but their influence as a cultural milieu is much larger. In Europe these and other religious processes are not asserted with equal force; though various forms of religion or non-religion have also been entering European politics and public life, they remain controversial partly because they are expressed in different measure and form.
“They are Lambs, but We Can Use Them”:
Czech Protestants and the Communist Regime in the 1950s
Ondřej Matějka
In this article the author examines the coexistence of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren and the Communist regime in the first several years after the Communist takeover, 1948–56. The first part of his analysis, inspired by French and German research on the social history of power by Sandrine Kott and Thomas Lindenberger, outlines the points of contact as well as ideological and political affinities between Protestants and Communists before the February 1948 takeover. These were particularly clear in the Protestant weekly Kostnické jiskry (Sparks from Constance) after the Second World War. Owing to this rapprochement and also to their reflexes developed for survival in the unfavourable circumstances the Protestant minority adapted with relative success to conditions in the Communist dictatorship. To consolidate themselves, they skilfully used instruments offered by the regime, such as “voluntary” work groups (brigády), while the regime relied on Protestants (particularly ministers) in some of its important political strategies such as collectivization and elections. The author pays particular attention to the theologian and philosopher Josef Lukl Hromádka (1889–1969), who was, in his day, a central figure amongst Czechoslovak Protestants. His “instrumentalization” also operated in two directions: in the West, as a representative of Christian peace activities, he helped to create the illusion of religious freedom in Communist Czechoslovakia, but he also served Protestants as a “shield” and mediator enabling them to establish and maintain contacts with Western theologians. In the article the author also seeks to demonstrate that assiduous analysis of archive records of State, Party, and Church provenance reveals the inner contradictions in the Communist apparat regarding relations with the churches and its own powers as well as links of alliance amongst some of its organs and the churches.
Features of Roman Catholic Spirituality in the Bohemian Lands, 1948–89
Jiří Hanuš
In this article the author seeks to explain some fundamental features of Roman Catholic spirituality in the Bohemian Lands after the Second World War. He demonstrates that this phenomenon was in essence both determined by the “Roman Catholic Renaissance” of the 1930s and by new tendencies, particularly after the Communist takeover of February 1948. Among these tendencies was its enforced closed nature, fear of persecution, traditionalism, and conservatism, which were mainly the result of the limitations on being in touch with people abroad. On the whole, however, the author believes that Czech Roman Catholicism from the Communist takeover to the collapse of the regime in late 1989, despite all its problems, contributed to Czech culture, and he demonstrates this also in the reception of the Second Vatican Council in Bohemia and Moravia. The spirituality of women, both of nuns and of secular intellectuals, receives special praise in the article.
Death, Dying, and Funeral Rites in Twentieth-century Czech Society
Olga Nešporová
In this article the author considers the topic of death, dying and funeral rites in Czech society in the broader European and historical context. In the first part, she presents the social-science conception of the taboo on death in early twentieth-century European society and then the gradual lifting of that taboo owing mainly to an interest in dying, which appeared from about the 1960s. She also outlines developments in funeral rites, typical of which is the transition from the traditionally Christian (particularly Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) laying of the dead body into the ground to cremation and the scattering of ashes. Against the background of these developments in Western society she then considers the situation in Czech society, which, owing to forty years of Communist rule and the high degree of secularization, was rather different from Western Europe. Indeed, questions related to dying and hospice care were generally not dealt with by Czechs till the 1990s. The great mistrust of churches has led to less than half of all present-day funeral ceremonies including a religious component. Moreover, Czech society has lost the awareness that organizing a funeral ceremony is a necessity for both the deceased and the bereaved. Consequently, about a third of all cremations in this country take place without any real ceremony.
Apocalypticism in the Thinking of the Czech Roman Catholic Émigrés Schwarzenberg, Chudoba, Preisner, and Neuwirth
Martin C. Putna
The topic of this article is “apocalypticism,” that is, a catastrophic vision of modern civilization with no prospect of a turnaround in one’s inner world, as it appears in the works of four Czech Roman Catholic thinkers, who were émigrés after the Communist takeover of 1948. While in his native land, the historian and columnist Karel Schwarzenberg (1911–1986) wrote in a starkly apocalyptic, anti-civilization spirit, in the tradition of Léon Bloy and Josef Florian. In exile, however, his apocalypticism became milder, and was projected more into his experience of the liturgy (the fleetingness of time). The apocalypticism of the historian, Christian sociologist, publicist, writer, and politician Bohdan Chudoba (1909–1982), and the Germanist, political philosopher, and translator Rio Preisner (1925–2007) was, by contrast, intensified while émigrés. Independently of each other, they created great bodies of work (Preisner was published, but Chudoba’s writing has remained largely in manuscript), in which they tried to present a total vision of history, which was, from their perspective, necessarily doomed. Similarly, they perceive the attempt to modernize the Church after the Second Vatican Council as part of this catastrophic process, because the Church, in their opinion, was conforming to negative tendencies in the world. The Germanist and theologian Vladimír Neuwirth (1921–1998) wrote Apokalyptický deník (Apocalyptic Diary), which is not “apocalyptic” in the usual sense of the word. Rather, it is “consoling” – the apocalypse is an ever-present dimension of human existence and the world, and one must be able to live with it and accept it.
It follows from the comparisons in this article that the apocalypticism of Schwarzenberg and Neuwirth, both of whom worked with Czech émigré clergymen and their associates who mostly agreed with the changes after the Second Vatican Council, tended to diminish, whereas Chudoba and Preisner, who parted on bad terms with those clergymen and their associates, became entrenched in their position as “lone critics on the margin of a (rotten) Church.” It seems that work with Church institutions to some extent protected émigré writers from extreme apocalyptic tendencies. (The émigré novelist Jan Čep is a similar example.) According to the author, however, there is a fundamental differences between the two lone, “real” apocalyptics: whereas Chudoba ended up in Spain in true isolation, without having any hope towards the end of his life that his ideas would find a wider audience, Preisner, in America, lived to see the day when a vision of the world very close to his own would move from the margins back to the forefront of public discourse in the opinions of the American Neo-Conservatives of the early twenty-first century.
Empirical Research into Religion of Its Day, 1946–89:
A Critical Introduction to the Czech Sociology of Religion in the Years of Marxist Dominance
Zdeněk R. Nešpor
The article first summarizes projects of quantitative sociological research into Czech religiousness, which were carried out from 1946 to 1989 (when, with the exception of 1950, religious affiliation was not a question on the census), and it subjects this research to a methodical critique. The author then discusses the institutional background of these research projects. Research into religious attitudes was carried out in 1946 by the recently established Institute of Public Opinion Research. After the Communist takeover, however, sociology was no longer an acceptable discipline, and State organs that were also working against religion took over this research task. Their research into “objective religious factors,” conducted from the 1950s to the 1980s, considered only the decline in church-based religious feeling. More profound sociological research was made possible with the establishment of the Institute of Sociology at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in the 1960s. Though this research was in the sway of the models of the period, that is to say, the “sociology of the parish,” it was relatively successful, methodologically suitable research (for instance into religiousness in North Moravia, 1963, with an attempt to expand it to the whole country), and met with a positive international response. It was doomed, however, by the policy of “Normalization,” when the Institute of Sociology was merged with the Institute of Philosophy. Sociological research into religion was then entrusted to the Institute of Scientific Atheism, which was established in Brno. (The most important research that it conducted was into the religiousness of pupils and students of elementary and secondary schools in South Moravia, 1979.) Similar research was also carried out by the reorganized Public Opinion Research Institute in 1979, 1983, 1985, 1986, and 1989. Not one of these projects, however, can be considered rigorous, because the methods used were ideologically in the sway of the regime, it was not of sufficiently professional quality, and was palpably behind modern Western developments in the sociology of religion. More credible research, though limited for practical reasons, was provided by samizdat and émigré sociology, which cast doubt on the idea of the automatic secularization of Czech society in connection with modernization and the dominance of Marxist thought. The development of truly unbiased research could take place only after the changes that began in late 1989. When interpreting earlier research and comparing results with contemporary findings on religiousness one must therefore bear in mind that it cannot be done without taking into account the conditions of the society and of the discipline in which the research was originally conducted, as well as the aims it was intended for.
Memoirs
Studying at the Faculty of Theology, Litoměřice:
Personal Experience from the Years of Late “Normalization”
Jan Jandourek
An important form of State control of the churches and their repression under Communist rule was the education of young clergymen at the faculties of theology. After 1953, the only officially permitted Roman Catholic faculty of theology was in the Bohemian town of Litoměřice. The author, an important journalist and novelist in the period following the Changes of late 1989, studied there from 1984 to 1989. In the form of personal memoirs he describes the faculty in those days. It was not academically strong, and seminary life served more to control future clergymen (since graduating from the faculty was a necessary condition for subsequent work with the Church) than it was to provide space for spiritual development. Though the students had to be screened by the secret police, which had tried to lure them into collaboration even at the entrance exams, they were definitely not pro-regime. That is particularly true of members of the secret religious Orders. In the second half of the 1980s no one even bothered anymore to persuade students of the necessity of changing one’s anti-Communist attitude. As long as one did not make this attitude clear, the system worked. Theologians themselves could thus not be certain whether they were part of the “visible,” collaborating Church, or were part of the opposition, because simply by having entered the faculty they had made it clear what they thought about the establishment’s Marxist ideology. The situation at the Roman Catholic faculty of theology (which by its subservience to the State authorities brought to mind the general seminaries of the eighteenth century in the reign of Joseph II) thus basically resembled the situation throughout the “official” Church in the Bohemian Lands and throughout Czech society as well. Consequently, its transformation after the Changes of late 1989 is taking a long time.
Independent Religious Education in the Period of “Normalization”:
Several Personal Examples
Dominik Dvořák
This article draws largely on the author’s personal recollections of independent Roman Catholic education in Czechoslovakia in the “Normalization” period, 1970–89, which he places into a more general interpretation of this kind of educational activity. His aim, however, is to provide a picture of the still virtually unknown educational and church activities, rather than to present a complex treatment of the topic. Drawing also on the recollections of other people who were involved, the author discusses the independent religious education of little children within the family, and then, in greater detail, describes working with youth and the training of their leaders, particularly amongst the Salesians, whom he was involved with in the 1980s. Although the Salesians were the most active community in terms of the catechism, they did not limit themselves to working with young people. On the other hand, the social scope of these activities was not large, even within the Church.
Lastly, the author discusses parallel post-secondary education, in particularly the seminars held in private flats, and he discusses in greater detail the wide range of the educational work of Josef Zvěřina (particularly in north Moravia and Prague), which was the theological equivalent of these seminars. In this and other cases, however, he asks whether informal educational programmes met, or even could meet, sufficient standards, and he recalls some contemporaneous samizdat discussions concerning the quality, character, and purpose of the “extracurricular” and “counter-curricular” education.
Material
Czech Atheism in the Twentieth Century:
Its Development and Institutionalization, 1948–89
David Václavík
This article considers the effects of atheism, an intellectual and political movement denying the existence of God (the Supernatural) and casting doubt on the point of institutions connected with God in twentieth-century Bohemia and Moravia. The author distinguishes between atheist, agnostic, and “non-believer,” and, referring to contemporary sociological research into religiousness in Czech society, argues that it would be wrong to consider the mass turning away from traditional confessions to be evidence of its prevailing atheism or a consequence of forty years of Communist dictatorship. The article considers the topic in the broader historical context, and points to the anticlerical (essentially anti-Roman Catholic) tradition in modern Czech history, which is rooted in the National Revival and was intensified in connection with the anti-Habsburg struggle leading to the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic. The Communist regime, seeking, after it took power in February 1948, to suppress the Church and religion, thus found fertile ground. The beginning of atheism in the Czech milieu, as elsewhere in Europe, is linked to the development of the Freethinkers movement. Within this movement (the Czech section, Volná myšlenka, was founded in 1904), a positivist current predominated at first. From the early 1920s, however, its views increasingly clashed with the Marxist-influenced stream. That stream originated in Marx’s interpretation of religion as a false, alienated consciousness, serving the interests of reactionary social forces and an outdated “scientific view of the world.” Atheism in the Marxist conception was thus understood not only as a noetic perspective, but also as a set of principles forming part of Communist, or Socialist, ethics.
The author argues that, after taking power, the Communist regime commenced its struggle against the Churches (particularly the Roman Catholic) with the help of propaganda that was political rather than atheist, owing both to tactical considerations (the considerable religiousness of the rural population) and to the implicit conviction of Communist functionaries that religion would die out together the people and institutions that represented it. In the 1950s, “scientific atheism” had not yet emerged from Marxist-Leninist doctrine as an independent discipline, and was therefore not a special subject of the school curriculum or scholarly debate. It emerged slowly, in about the 1960s, but by then, with the overall liberalization of society, relations between the Churches and State had improved, and space for religious ideas had begun to appear. In the last part of the article, the author describes the institutionalization of “scientific atheism” as part of the strategy of “Normalization,” reflected for example in the founding the Institute of Scientific Atheism at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Brno, 1972. The mission of this institute was not merely the theoretical refutation of religion and the promotion of a “scientific view of the world” in research into the orientation of the population in this respect, but also the elaboration of assessments for publications with regard to their “ideological incorruptibility” and assessments of the activity of the clergy in deciding to revoke the requirement of State consent for those who wished to work as members of the clergy.
Horizon
Old Legends and New Visits to the “East”:
Concerning Norman M. Naimark’s Images of History
Eva Hahnová and Hans Henning Hahn
This article is a Czech translation of an article originally published in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. 54 (2006), nos 7–8, pp. 687–700. Its two authors take issue with the historical concepts of the well-known American historian, Norman M. Naimark, as presented in his Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (published in English, 2001, German, 2004, and Czech, 2006) and in the article “Die Killing Fields des Ostens und Europas geteilte Erinnerung,” published in the Austrian journal Transit (no. 30, winter 2005/06, pp. 57–69). Naimark, according to the two authors, achieved considerable popularity with some historians and readers of history by attempting a revision of the existing conceptions of tragic aspects of twentieth-century European history. In fact, however, he offers nothing new, merely dragging out some old clichés and returning to the tradition of the German populist (völkisch) historiography. That is as true of his interpretation of the post-war expulsion of the German inhabitants of Poland and Czechoslovakia as an act of revenge for wrongs suffered as it is of his implying that the East European nations manifested a particular propensity to ethnic violence in the twentieth century. When he depicts the history of “Eastern” Europe as a series of murders and ethnic cleansings, Naimark tends to display a preacher’s zeal rather than an ability to distinguish things historically. Nor do the authors accept Naimark’s challenge to bridge the different collective memories of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and other nations with the shared recollection of conflicts in order to create a common historical memory. One needs to deal with those differences rationally, argue the authors, not to wipe them away by making relative the categories of perpetrator and victim.
Reviews
Some Problems with a Synthesis of Twentieth-Century History by Members of One Generation
Jiří Pešek
Cuhra, Jaroslav, Ellinger, Jiří, Gjuričová, Adéla, and Smetana, Vít: České země v evropských dějinách, vol. 4: 1918–2004. Prague and Litomyšl: Paseka, 2006, 359 pp.
The textbook under review, České země v evropských dějinách (The Bohemian Lands in European History), has not, according to the reviewer, achieved its authors’ aims. It is in essence a chronicle, systematically commenting on events in the Bohemian Lands and selectively presenting important episodes in the history of Europe and the rest of the world. It lacks, he argues, a clear conception, as well as failing to inquire into the causes and preconditions of historical phenomena and presenting erroneous interpretations.
In Search of a Compromise between Scholarship, Didactics, and Politics:
A Franco-German Textbook on Post-1945 History
Lucie Filipová
Le Quintrec, Guillaume, and Geiss, Peter (eds): Histoire/Geschichte: Europa und die Welt seit 1945. Stuttgart and Leipzig: Ernst Klett Schulverlag, 2006, 336 pp., and Histoire/Geschichte: l’Europe et le Monde depuis 1945. Paris: Éditions Nathan, 2006, 336 pp. (plus CD-ROM).
The reviewer describes the origin of this unique textbook, its chapters, and the differences between the German and French versions, as well as different aspects of the interpretations of the two historiographies as they appear in the textbook. The authors have, in the reviewer’s opinion, dealt successfully on the whole with all the topics, and the result is praiseworthy.
Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing: A Comparative View
František Svátek
Naimark, Norman M.: Plameny nenávisti: Etnické čistky v Evropě 20. století. Prague: Lidové noviny, 2006, 235 pp. (Knižnice Dějin a současnosti, vol. 30.) Trans. from the English by Šimon Pelar and Milena Pelarová.
In his review of the Czech translation of Norman Naimark’s Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge and London, 2001), the reviewer first presents a thorough summary of Naimark’s academic career and works that preceded the publication of the internationally acclaimed volume under review. Then, after describing the Czech reception of this publication, he outlines Naimark’s conceptualization of “ethnic cleansing,” and focuses on Naimark’s presentation of the Czech case. The reviewer reproaches him for insufficient critical work with German literature and poor knowledge of East European sources and academic research, as well as a tendency to politicize the topic.
Jan Křen
Rychlík, Jan: Cestování do ciziny v habsburské monarchii a v Československu: Pasová, vízová a vystěhovalecká politika 1848–1918. Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny, 2007, 259 pp. (Česká společnost po roce 1945, vol. 4.)
The important contribution of this work, whose title translates as “Travelling Abroad in the Habsburg Monarchy and Czechoslovakia: Passport, Visa, and Emigration Policy, 1848–1918,” is, according to the reviewer, that it is the first systematic, careful discussion of a highly important topic. Rychlík has concentrated primarily on the political conditions of travelling in various periods of Czech history and the legislation related to that. The importance that this phenomenon had in everyday life remains, however, a task for future researchers.
An Austrian Work on the Collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia
Milan Otáhal
Blehova, Beata: Der Fall des Kommunismus in der Tschechoslowakei. Vienna: Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte an der Universität Wien and LIT, 2006, 259 pp. (Europa Orientalis, vol. 2.)
The work under review, by a Slovak scholar now living in Austria, is concerned with far more than the end of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, which is highlighted in its title. Rather, it aims to discuss Czechoslovak developments from 1968 to the collapse of the Communist regime in late 1989. The reviewer argues that although the work provides a considerable amount of new information it concentrates excessively on the regime and dissidents, failing to achieve its stated aim of analyzing the emergence of civil society and the activities of the non-conformist intelligentsia. Moreover, the author has, he argues, uncritically adopted certain claims and failed to avoid factual errors.
Questions Related to Shostakovich
Daniela Kolenovská
Volkov, Solomon (ed.): Svědectví: Paměti Dmitrije Šostakoviče. Prague: Akademie múzických věd, 2005, 422 pp. + 16 pp. illus. Trans. from the German by Hana Linhartová and Vladimír Sommer.
This is a review of the Czech translation of Testimony, Dimitri Shostakovich’s reflections on his own times, which were compiled after his death and first published in New York by the émigré musicologist Solomon Volkov in 1979. The reviewer discusses the overlapping of the autobiographical and historical levels. Testimony, she believes, shows Shostakovich in a contradictory light – as an artist who put his statement on the tragic situation of the Soviet Union into his music, whereas he said nothing clearly in words until this posthumous work.
The Creeping Return of Ethnic Conceptions of Politics
Eva Hahnová and Hans Henning Hahn
Salzborn, Samuel: Ethnisierung der Politik: Theorie und Geschichte des Volksgruppenrechts in Europa. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2005, 356 pp.
In this work the German political scientist Samuel Salzborn systematically considers the historical development, tradition, and importance of the terms “minority,” “nationality,” and “ethnic group” (Volksgruppe). The work is important, the reviewers argue, mainly because it analyzes the hitherto insufficiently considered concept of ethnic/national groups as opposed to the model of the political nation and the continuation of the völkisch (populist) traditions in Germany after the Second World War. Attempts to assert these traditions, they argue, continue in the current process of European integration to the present day.
The Austrian State Treaty Fifty Years On
Dagmar Černá
Suppan, Arnold, Stourzh, Gerald, and Mueller, Wolfgang (eds): Der österreichische Staatsvertrag 1955: Internationale Strategie, rechtliche Relevanz, nationale Identität / The Austrian State Treaty 1955: International Strategy, Legal Relevance, National Identity. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005, 1,019 pp.
This is a review of an edited volume of papers given at an international conference to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. The key document of the Second Austrian Republic, the treaty established Austria as a sovereign state, and was also one of the most important international agreements of the period after the Second World War. The articles in the volume consider the topic from many sides, international and domestic, using records that have only recently been made accessible, particularly from Russian archives. The reviewer seeks to present this wealth of scholarship, emphasizing its unusual range and importance.
Going Astray, as Seen from Right of Centre
Vlastimil Hála
Kárník, Zdeněk, Franklová, Zoja, and Kyloušek, Jakub: Bludné cesty sociální demokracie: Studie, rozhovory, názory. Prague: Prostor, 2005, 232 pp.
The originally conceived publication under review comprises interviews with three former Social Democrat premiers, Miloš Zeman, Vladimír Špidla, and Stanislav Gross, and three parallel commentaries by leading Czech journalists on each interview. All is set within an excursus on the history of the Czech Social Democrats and a political-science article about their future prospects. The reviewer considers the volume useful, though he feels that the commentators’ viewpoints are excessively right of centre.
Debate
A Reply to Jiří Pešek’s Review of a Czech History Textbook
In this article, the authors of the fourth volume of the textbook České země v evropských dějinách (The Bohemian Lands in European History), Jaroslav Cuhra, Jiří Ellinger, Adéla Gjuričová, and Vít Smetana, react to Jiří Pešek’s review of their textbook, which is published in the current issue of Soudobé dějiny. They reject most of his reproofs as being unsupported by fact and real argument.
In Protest against Censorship in Soudobé dějiny
In this short article the journalist-historian Petr Zídek protests against the Soudobé dějiny editorial board’s rejection of his contribution to the debate regarding two articles by Jan Křen, “Dokumenty StB jako pramen poznání minulosti” (Secret Police Records as a Source of Knowing the Past) and “Historky StB a paměť,” (StB Tales and Memory), published in Soudobé dějiny nos 3–4/2005, pp. 708–34, and nos 1–2/2006, pp. 243–65. Zídek’s protest is followed by a short statement from the editors.
Chronicle
About Three Histories in One Space
Sylva Sklenářová reports on an international conference of young historians called “Twentieth-century Czech, Slovak, and Czechoslovak History.” Organized by the Institute of History at the Faculty of the Humanities, Hradec Králové, in early March 2007, it was the second year this conference was held.
The Malá Skála Seminar on Czechoslovak History during the Occupation
Zdenko Maršálek and Petr Hofman report on the first of a series of seminars organized by the Department for the History of the Second World War, the Occupation, and the Resistance, at the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. Participated in by historians from various institutions, these seminars took place in the town of Malá Skála near Turnov in late October and early November 2007.
