No. II.
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Articles
Jiří Pernes
Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Crisis, 1961
Oldřich Tůma
When the Wall Came Tumbling Down:
Spontaneity versus Rigidity
Melvyn P. Leffler
The Cold War Revisited:
The Role of the United States as Reflected in Historiography
Philipp Ther
The Polish-Ukrainian Conflict, 1939–47:
A Comparison of Remarks at a Discussion on the Czech-Sudeten-German Conflict
Horizon
Hans-Peter Schwarz
Questions Concerning the Twentieth Century
Reviews
František Svátek
German Contemporary History in the Early Twenty-first Century:
The Latest Complete Volume of Journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 2001
The Journal of Contemporary History (Milan Otáhal)
Bedřich Loewenstein
A Directed Historical Discourse
Oldřich Tůma
An Unplanned, Yet Inevitable Confrontation:
A Pioneering Publication on the Cold War, Now in Czech Translation
Petr Šafařík
Ardent Nazis or Victims of a Regime?
A Superb New Work on the Sudeten Germans during World War II
Šárka Daňková
A Companion to the Ideas of Hannah Arendt
Jaroslav Valenta
New Sources on the Life of Oskar Schindler
Chronicle
Miroslav Vaněk
The Centre for Oral History at the Institute of Contemporary History, Academy of Sciences, Prague
A Conference of Czech-Polish Students, Pardubice (Petr Blažek)
Annotations
A Bibliography of Contemporary History
The Resettlement of the Germans and Its Repercussions in Current Czech-German Relations
A select bibliography of articles from journals and edited volumes of essays, which were published from 1990 to 2001
Jiří Pernes
The author focuses on the reaction of the leadership and population of Communist Czechoslovakia to the decision of the leaderships of the Soviet Union and East Germany to build a wall around West Berlin and separate the city from the rest of the world, a step that provoked an international crisis in August 1961. On the basis of research in the Central State Archives, Prague, he argues that the Czechoslovak leadership took into account the possibility of war or at least the likelihood of profound political and economic rifts between the states of the East bloc and the Western democracies. Nevertheless Czechoslovakia stood firmly on the side of the Soviet Union and East Germany, and adopted the pertinent political and military measures. Support for Soviet policy on the German Question, however, was expressed not only by Czechoslovak Communist functionaries but also by a broad spectrum of the Czechoslovak public, which was still feeling antipathy as a result of the bitter experiences of the Nazi German Occupation, 1939–45. Communist propaganda, moreover, exacerbated Czechoslovak fears of an economically and militarily strong West Germany, and cast the democratic makeup of West Germany into doubt. Regular analysis of public opinion, which the Communist leadership had ordered in this period, showed that most Czechoslovaks in the summer and autumn of 1961 wanted a peace treaty with Germany, approved of the building of a wall around Berlin and considered Soviet policy towards West Germany a guarantee of the security of Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and its international status. The Communist regime, however, nervously observed the attitude of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, whom they suspected of disloyalty towards Czechoslovakia and sympathy for West Germany.
When the Wall Came Tumbling Down:
Spontaneity versus Rigidity
Oldřich Tůma
The dramatic circumstances surrounding the collapse of the symbol of the Iron Curtain in early November 1989 and attempts to analyze the causes for its fall form the focus of this article. In his introduction the author points out that although events related to the demise of the Berlin Wall have been reconstructed in detail in recent work by historians, unjustified attempts are still being made to interpret this key moment as the voluntary opening of the frontiers by Soviet and East German Communist reformists. Nevertheless, research work into German contemporary history has gone much further in both the description of events and the analysis of causes and contexts of the democratic revolution in East Germany than have comparable analyses of the political Changes in Czechoslovakia. In late October 1989 the new Communist leadership, under Egon Krenz, had to face the mounting public pressure that manifested itself in mass demonstrations and the exodus of East Germans to the Federal Republic through the West German Embassy in Prague. At its session on 9 November 1989 the leadership was therefore forced to pass quick legislation enabling legal emigration to the Federal Republic. When, at the press conference that evening, an ill-informed secretary of the Central Committee, Günter Schabowski, replied that East Germans as of that very moment (rather than the next day) could now travel to the West, this information, disseminated by the Western media, circulated rapidly, and thousands of East Germans soon queued up at crossing points in the Berlin Wall. Within a few short hours, the disoriented East German authorities abandoned their attempt to detain refugees, and opened up the crossing points; as it turned out, they thus forfeited their influence over political developments. In the last part of his article the author provides an interpretation of these events – referring to Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, emphasizing the triumph of human spontaneity over the rigidity of the Communist regime.
The Cold War Revisited:
The Role of the United States as Reflected in Historiography
Melvyn P. Leffler
The author provides an outline of the dynamics of historical research into the Cold War, emphasizing the position of the USA, and considering the leading theoretical and methodological trends and concepts of the last fifty years. Scholarly thinking about the Cold War, has, he argues, followed an arc. In the West in the 1950s the generally accepted view was that the Cold War had been a consequence of the ideological zeal of an international Communist conspiracy led by the Kremlin and supported by the paranoid figure of Stalin. In the period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, this view was replaced by a plurality of schools of interpretation and approaches, including Realists, Revisionists, Corporativists, theoreticians of international relations and Post-Revisionists. What they all had in common was a tendency to move away from seeing things in the categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, from the importance of Communist ideology and the theory of Totalitarianism and the role of the personality, to an emphasis on a broader range and greater complexity of explanatory factors, from the autonomy of the international system, the operation of world capitalism, the interest of economic subjects and the role of smaller states to the psychology of mutual interpretations of adversaries’ intentions. They all, moreover, cast into doubt the idealistic motivations of the USA and the West as sides fighting for freedom and democracy in a confrontation with the Communist regimes, to which they attributed merely propagandistic meaning. Instead, they tended to see the Cold War as a geopolitical struggle, the aim of which was to establish a balance between great powers (and, later, superpowers), which pursued and defended national interests no matter how defined. A new turning-point in the historiography of the Cold War occurred after the collapse of the Communist regimes, in particular with the opening of Soviet archives. Confronted with archive records documenting the aggressive intentions of Moscow and her satellites, as well as the cynicism of the East bloc leaders and the merciless oppression of peoples by their own governments, researchers began to see the Cold War once again as a global conflict between a dictatorship based on an ideology of expansion and, on the other hand, an alliance of free countries promoting democracy and human rights. It is not, however, a matter of returning to the original belief in an American idealism that altruistically sought to aid suppressed nations, but of more balanced and nuanced interpretations regarding the role of ideology as a definite set of beliefs, ideals and traditions, which have determined the policies of the USA and other countries, a view the author shares.
The Polish-Ukrainian Conflict, 1939–47:
A Comparison of Remarks at a Discussion on the Czech-Sudeten-German Conflict
Philipp Ther
In this article the author begins by arguing that the origins of the nationalist tensions between Poles and Ukrainians in Galicia go back to the formation of modern nations in the nineteenth century. In the Republic of Poland between the two world wars, apart from the attempt to find political solutions to growing problems, illegal Ukrainian organizations employed terrorist methods against the Poles, he explains. After the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, in 1939, tens of thousands of Poles were deported. Nor were Ukrainians spared from acts of repression; mutual enmity between the two nations continued to intensify. That was left mitigated by the German Occupation, for the occupying forces exploited Ukrainian nationalist sentiment for Nazi German ends. The Poles became the target of exceptionally brutal attacks by the Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army (Ukrainska Povstanska Armija), which fought against units of the Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa). The terror continued even after these areas were re-occupied by the Red Army, because the new administration was unable to stop it; the expulsions of the Polish population took place in a situation of permanent civil war. In September 1944, agreements were signed which started the second stage of migration – the forced resettlement of Poles from the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine to the territory of Poland and, in the other direction, of Ukrainians from Poland to the USSR, to be supervised by Soviet authorities. Under the agreements the expellees were on paper entitled to take a considerable part of their chattels with them and to apply for reparations for property left behind. Although the whole operation was presented as voluntary ‘repatriation’, it in fact took place under conditions of systematic pressure on persons who did not want to emigrate and of deprivation both during the transfer and in the temporary camps. A total of 787,000 Poles and 482,000 Ukrainians were forced to resettle in 1945–46; in addition, another 300,000 Poles had fled before being forced out, and another 150,000 Ukrainians were expelled to other parts of Poland as part of ‘Operation Vistula’ in 1947. Towards the end of his article the author makes a concise comparison between the expulsions and forced resettlement of these two nations and, on the other hand, the ‘transfer’ of the Germans of post-WW II Czechoslovakia.
Questions Concerning the Twentieth Century
Hans-Peter Schwarz
This is a translation of an article first published in the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (vol. 48, 2000/1). The author, a co-founder of the German quarterly, reflects on the events, tendencies and problems that were fundamental to the formation of the last century. The questions he considers are also, in a sense, a catalogue of relevant topics from the perspective of the discipline of contemporary history in Germany and elsewhere. His inquiry begins with reflections on whether one may consider the twentieth century an independent, unique era of world history. On this basis he then moves on to other questions: What are the milestones and trends of interpretation? Was modern nationalism the all-encompassing feature of the twentieth century (as it had been in the nineteenth)? Can one justifiably talk about the first half of the last century as the ‘age of catastrophe’? And, if the answer is ‘yes’, why was that age replaced (at least in the West) with the age of prosperity in the early 1950s? Were not de-colonialization and the emergence of new states more important in world history than even the Cold War? Was the twentieth century the ‘American Century’? What importance did great figures have in it? Is it appropriate to see the century as a series of failed experiments with ways to tame and overcome capitalism? What was truly new about the twentieth century? Are its determining features the disintegration and decline of the political order, prevailing values, traditions and ways of life? The author concludes his article with a recapitulation of the questions, admitting that his catalogue of queries and topics is far from exhaustive.
German Contemporary History in the Early Twenty-first Century:
The Latest Complete Volume of Journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 2001
František Svátek
The article begins by going back to the early 1950s, when the field of contemporary history was first established in West Germany, a process closely connected with the setting up of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, and the establishment of its quarterly, the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, in 1953. He sets forth the terms and topics of the discipline in the (West) German milieu, and discusses how the discipline was shaped in the pages of the journal during the next ten years, in which questions related to the causes and origins of the rise of Nazism in the Weimar Republic dominated. The article then sets about characterizing the most recent volume of the journal and the research contained in the individual articles. The author sees a clear, long-term continuity in the structure and content of the journal, within which a slight shift of emphasis has recently been occurring. Articles on the history of Nazism and the Third Reich hold first place, though there is now a growing interest in the ‘new lease of life’ that these phenomena have been granted, particularly in how they manifest themselves in historiography, legends, stereotypes and polemics. In this connection he points out a strong tendency towards historical self-reflection, for which the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) has become established. The author supports his argument by referring to several biographical studies of important figures who had ideologically or politically been active during the Nazi dictatorship. In addition to these shifts the focus has also expanded from political history to the study of changes in historical memory and the history of mentalities.
The Journal of Contemporary History (Milan Otáhal)
The author presents a profile of the journal, and provides detailed information on its content during the last year. He maintains that during the last decade most attention has been paid to topics from the period between the two world wars, the history of Fascism and the Shoah, and, in terms of geography, Western Europe and the United States, some Asian countries and the Middle East, whereas central and Eastern Europe have remained peripheral to its interest.
A Directed Historical Discourse
Bedřich Loewenstein
Martin Sabrow, Das Diktat des Konsenses: Geschichtswissenschaft in der DDR 1949–1969, Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001, 488 pp.
The reviewer considers this German historian’s book a useful, sociologically conceived analysis of the frame of the discourse and of the rules that had been followed for the establishment and operation of historiography in the first twenty years of the German Democratic Republic. He describes the individual phases of this process, and offers his own views on the topic.
An Unplanned, Yet Inevitable Confrontation:
A Pioneering Publication on the Cold War, Now in Czech Translation
Oldřich Tůma
Vojtěch Mastný, Studená válka a sovětský pocit nejistoty 1947–1953: Stalinova léta, Prague: Aurora, 2001, 294 pp. Trans. by Milan and Daria Dvořák.
The reviewer considers the Czech-American historian Vojtech Mastny’s Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (Oxford, 1996) to be one of the best works on the origins of the Cold War. In his opinion, the author, drawing on recently declassified East-European archives, argues cogently and convincingly in support of the thesis that the Cold War did not begin by chance from the interplay of circumstances, nor did it come about by the will of politicians; instead, it was, instead, a logical consequence of the opposing natures of competing regimes and the culmination of their mutually conditioned steps.
Ardent Nazis or Victims of a Regime?
A Superb New Work on the Sudeten Germans during World War II
Petr Šafařík
Volker Zimmermann, Sudetští Němci v nacistickém státě: Politika a nálada obyvatelstva v říšské župě Sudety (1938–1945), Prague: Prostor and Argo, 2001, 477 pp. Trans. by Petr Dvořáček.
The reviewer praises this synthesis by a young German historian, both for its having gathered together the important facts and for its overall conception and thoroughness. The book, he argues, fills the most glaring gaps in our knowledge of Sudeten-German history and the areas of Czechoslovakia in which they lived. He points out, however, some factual imprecision and other problems with Zimmermann’s work.
A Companion to the Ideas of Hannah Arendt
Šárka Daňková
Claudia Althaus, Erfahrung denken: Hannah Arendts Weg von der Zeitgeschichte zur politischen Theorie, Göttingen: Vandernhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000, 412 pp.
This monograph by a German author constitutes, according to the reviewer, a successful attempt to understand the life and work of Hannah Arendt through the prism of history as subjective experience and as a mode of theoretical reflection. In the three parts of her book, the author examines the connection between the autobiographical experiences of this German-Jewish philosopher and her political philosophy, her conception of history and historical understanding, and, ultimately, her reflections on the possibilities of making human freedom a reality in the forming of a public space for political behaviour. The author also attempts a synthetic interpretation of its individual elements, and puts them in the context of philosophical-historical discussions.
New Sources on the Life of Oskar Schindler
Jaroslav Valenta
Emilie Schindler, Ich, Emilie Schindler: Erinnerungen einer Unbeugsamen, Munich: Herbig, 2001, 229 pp. + 72 photographs and facsimiles. Erica Rosenberg (ed.), Ich, Oskar Schindler, Munich: Herbig, 2001, 448 pp. + 35 photographs and facsimiles.
The reviewer discusses the German publication of the memoirs of Schindler’s wife, Emilie, and an edition of various texts and documents of Schindler’s from the post-war period. The reviewer points out a number of dubious and confusing pieces of information in both books and the sloppy work of the Argentine editor, Rosenberg, who also conducted an interview with Emilie Schindler, a version of which appears in these memoirs. According to the reviewer, the two publications seek to cash in on the Schindler legend, and their value as historical sources is almost non-existent.
The Centre for Oral History at the Institute of Contemporary History, Academy of Sciences, Prague
Miroslav Vaněk
The author, Head of the Centre, reports on the conception and activity of this recently established research institute. The Centre, now a member of the International Oral History Association, has already begun collaboration on research and teaching with institutions both in the Czech Republic and abroad, and is currently preparing some noteworthy projects. Up-to-date information is available on their website www.coh.usd.cas.cz, and they can be reached by e-mail at coh@usd.cas.cz.
A Conference of Czech-Polish Students, Pardubice (Petr Blažek)
The author reports on a conference called ‘The Czech and Polish Historical Tradition and Its Relationship to the Present’, which was held by students in Pardubice, Bohemia, in April 2002.
Šárka Daňková (1977) is a Researcher at the Institute of International Studies, the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. She is concerned with German and Austrian history.
Melvyn P. Leffler (1945) is Professor of American History at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. His chief professional interest is the national-security policy and foreign economic relations of the United States in the twentieth century. His book Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, 1992) received several American awards.
Bedřich Loewenstein (1929) was, till 1970, a Senior Researcher in the History Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In 1979–94 he was Professor of Modern History at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is concerned with select topics of European history from the eighteenth century to the present, particularly civil society. His publications in Czech include Projekt moderny (Prague, 1995).
Milan Otáhal (1928) is a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, where he is concerned with the topic of Normalization in Czechoslovakia, 1969–89. His most recent publication is Podíl tvůrčí inteligence na pádu komunismu (Brno, 1999) and, with Miroslav Vaňek, he compiled and edited Sto studentských revolucí: Studenti v období pádu komunismu (Prague, 1999).
Jiří Pernes (1948) is a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. His research areas include the Communist system in Czechoslovakia in crisis, 1953–57, and émigrés after the February 1948 Communist takeover. His publications on Czech and central-European history, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, include Svět Lidových novin (Prague, 1993), Habsburkové bez trůnu (Prague, 1995).
František Svátek (1936) was till recently a Senior Research at the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, and is currently a Lecturer at the Institute of Political Science, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. He is concerned with political élites in Czechoslovakia, 1918–53, nineteenth and twentieth-century Czech and European history, and the theory of historiography.
Hans-Peter Schwarz (1934) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bonn. He is Chairman of the Academic Board of the Institute of Contemporary History, Munich, and Co-editor of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. His chief areas of interest are international relations, contemporary history and comparative political science. Among his publications is the two-volume Adenauer: Der Aufstieg, 1876–1952; Der Staatsmann, 1952–1967 (Stuttgart, 1986 and 1991).
Petr Šafařík (1973) is a doctoral student in the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. He is chiefly concerned with the history of contemporary culture.
Philipp Ther (1967) is a Senior Researcher in the Centre for Comparative History, Berlin. His professional interests include modern nationalism in Germany and in central and Eastern Europe, as well as forced migrations in the twentieth century. Among his publications is Deutsche und polnische Vertriebene: Gesellschaft und Vertriebenenpolitik in der SBZ/DDR und in Polen 1945–1956 (Göttingen, 1998).
Oldřich Tůma (1950) is Director of the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. Since the early 1990s his research has focused on modern Czech history, particularly the years 1969–89.
Jaroslav Valenta (1930) is a Professor and Senior Researcher in the Historical Institute, Prague. His professional interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century central European, Czechoslovak and Polish history.
Miroslav Vaněk (1961) is a Senior Research in the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, and Head of the Centre for Oral History at that institute. He specializes in the period of ‘Normalization’, 1969–89, with a focus on environmental conservation, the youth, and independent activity, in which he employs the methods of oral history. His publications include Nedalo se tady dýchat: Ekologie v českých zemích v letech 1968–1989 (Prague, 1996) and, with Milan Otáhal, he compiled and edited Sto studentských revolucí: Studenti v období pádu komunismu (Prague, 1999).
