No. I.-II.
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Contents
Resistance, Collaboration, Accommodation
Articles
Stanislav Kokoška
Resistance, Collaboration, Accommodation:
Some Remarks Concerning Research on Czech Society in the Protectorate
Vladimír Černý
The ‘Olga’ Partisan Unit:
The Bloody Trail of One Resistance Group
Pavel Večeřa
The Genesis of a Collaborator:
The Journalist F. J. Prokop and His Role in Publicizing the Trial of General Alois Eliáš
Martina Šmejkalová
Patriotic Education or Nazi Indoctrination?
Teaching Czech at Secondary Schools in the Protectorate
Discussion
Eva Hahn(ová) and Hans Henning Hahn
(Un)suitable Remarks on a German Bestseller by Alfred de Zayas Concerning the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans
Miloš Havelka
Revisionism as the Fate of a Movement?
Concerning a New Work by Michal Kopeček
Milan Nakonečný
A Reply to the Criticism of My Book on Czech Fascism
Reviews
Pavel Baloun
Czech Fascists as ‘Naive Nationalists’:
An Untraditional View of the Phenomenon of Czech Fascism
Petr Kaplan
Sudeten Germans and the Twilight of the First Republic
Petr Šafařík
The Nazi Justice System in the Sudetengau
František Svátek
An Important Contribution to an Increasingly Difficult Topic
Karel Hrubý
In Praise of Roots
Martina Hamplová
A Well-balanced Social History of Post-war Europe
Documents
Marek Syrný and Matej Medvecký
The Transcript of Viliam Široký’s Interrogation at State Security Headquarters in 1941
Annotations
Summaries
Articles
Resistance, Collaboration, Accommodation:
Some Remarks Concerning Research on Czech Society in the Protectorate
Stanislav Kokoška
In this article the author raises several theoretical questions connected to an insufficiently researched topic, Czech society in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (15 March 1939–8/9 May 1945). He considers, on the one hand, possible theoretical starting points, which he sees as residing in the thorough application of sociological approaches to historical research, and, on the other, the debates over the terms ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’. The term ‘collaboration’ (kolaborace) was imported into the Czech milieu, and is generally used to mean dishonourable work with, or for, the enemy. The author therefore sees the use of this term as being chiefly in research on public policy, in which the extant sources usually provide enough information to form a reliable picture of the individual actors and their motives. In this respect the author also refers to the views of some Czech historians who have already pointed out that when discussing the behaviour of Czech society in the Protectorate it is extremely difficult to set a clear, universally valid boundary between resistance and collaboration.
For actual research on Czech society in the Protectorate the author prefers semantically neutral terms, free of moralizing connotations. He sees inspiration in sociology, whose approaches enable the development of a more complex model than the hitherto widely held view of a society that lived in some kind of permanent dilemma between resistance and collaboration. Apart from research on everyday life in the Protectorate – the milieu which the individual actors moved about in – the author recommends exploring also the ‘extent of adaptation’ (the way the actors accommodated themselves to the conditions of the new régime) and the ‘extent of identification’ (whether the actors identified with the new régime and to what extent they considered it something unchangeable). From a comparison of both factors the author then deduces the actors’ basic attitude to the régime (positive, neutral, potentially hostile, hostile) and their basic modes of behaviour (loyalty, law-breaking, opportunism, resistance). The ‘extent of identification’ in particular constitutes the dynamic factor whose value was dependent on a whole range of circumstances. In researching Czech society in the Protectorate one must therefore consider other important topics, for example, the effect of Nazi and Allied propaganda, the responses in Czech society to the news about the course of the war, and, last but not least, fear, an integral part of Protectorate reality. To understand the behaviour of Czech society in the years of the Second World War (and therefore its values and orientation at the time of Liberation), one must in historical research devote sufficient consideration to the elementary fact that this society found itself in the grip of a totalitarian régime and was consequently not operating on the principle of freedom of choice.
The ‘Olga’ Partisan Unit:
The Bloody Trail of One Resistance Group
Vladimír Černý
This article discusses the Olga partisan unit, which is written into the history of the resistance in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia because of its important operations, but whose reputation was tarnished by wanton acts of violence carried out on the orders of its commander, Josef Houfek.
The Olga group was established by Houfek, together with Olga Františáková, in central Moravia in January 1945. The author describes the founding and development of the group, and seeks to demonstrate, among other things, that Houfek’s decision to join the partisans was based not so much on patriotism as a desire to stand out and to seek adventure; this twenty-three-year old butcher’s apprentice had, moreover, previously been convicted of petty theft and had served in both the Wehrmacht and the Protectorate police. The author describes a number of clashes between partisans of the Olga group and German units, focusing on two operations that gained them considerable recognition. In the first, the partisans managed, on 26 February 1945, to dump more than half a million litres of fuel and motor oil from Wehrmacht wagons at a railway station in the village of Morkovice, in the Zlín region of Moravia. On 19 April 1945, shortly before the end of the war, at the manor house in Hoštice near Kroměříž, they captured the commander of the 16th Panzer Division of the Wehrmacht, Generalmajor Dietrich von Müller, which was an absolutely unique act in the history of the partisan movement in the Bohemian Lands. The author, however, also considers cases where the partisan commander ordered the execution of several fellow-partisans and others who were accused, without good reason, of collaboration or whom he felt, for one reason or another, were in his way. For these excesses he was arrested after the war and put on trial twice, but was given only a light sentence. Using hitherto neglected archives the author has also verified a number of pieces of questionable information, which had accumulated during the years when the partisan unit was operating. This includes, in particular, Františáková’s having allegedly spied for the Gestapo, which turned out to be an unfounded claim. The author also notes an incident in the village of Střílky (near Kroměříž) just after the war, in which three alleged collaborators were executed under the direction of members of the Olga unit; this incident later became a point of contention between a leading Czech poet, František Halas, and a major literary historian, Václav Černý. In conclusion, the author briefly discusses the post-war lives of some members of the Olga unit, and attempts an overall assessment of their activity in the context of the resistance.
The Genesis of a Collaborator:
The Journalist F. J. Prokop and His Role in Publicizing the Trial of General Alois Eliáš
Pavel Večeřa
The author describes the career of the journalist and chess writer, František Josef Prokop (1901–1973), who, after the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, joined the small group of leading pro-German journalists and became editor-in-chief of a Czech daily newspaper, České slovo, and, later, Lidové listy. The article focuses on the key moments of his career as he was trying to make his mark as a journalist in the Protectorate. It also seeks to interpret the causes of his rise and the motives for his collaboration. In addition, the author aims to assess the newspaper coverage of the trial of the former Premier of the Protectorate government, General Alois Eliáš (1890–1942), in which, in early October 1941, Prokop – together with a leading collaborator journalist, Karel Werner – played a considerable part. It was this act, according to the author, by which Prokop has ingloriously come to be remembered in the history of Protectorate journalism. The method of publicizing the Eliáš trial is, the author argues, extremely interesting. The press department of the arts and politics section of the Office of the Reich Protector, led by Wolfgang Wolfram von Wolmar (who actually ran the Czech press in the Protectorate), had to figure out how to portray to the Czech public Eliáš’s resistance activity, for which he was sentenced to death, without mentioning substantial facts about the existence of an active home resistance. No less important in publicizing the trial was the presentation of Eliáš the man. The Nazis were primarily concerned to ensure that the sentenced general came out of the confrontation vanquished and calling on his fellow-Czechs to be loyal to the occupying régime. Prokop essentially discharged this task under the strict supervision of the head of the German press department and, though later a less active collaborator, he remained in the service of the Germans right to the end of the Occupation. On trial before the National Court after the war, Prokop sought to trivialize his collaborationist activity and to persuade the court that he had actually supported the resistance by his work. The court did not accept this version, and sentenced him to four years in prison.
According to the author, Prokop was not motivated to collaborate for ideological or political reasons, but chiefly for material gain and the advancement of his career. He represents the kind of person who clearly gives preference to his hobbies over his own work or the public interest, yet does not hesitate to accommodate pragmatically to the demands of those who hold power. In this psychological portrait the author concludes that the actual sphere of Prokop’s self-realization, and possibly even self-transcendence, was the game of chess, which he perceived as an art, and which provided him with an escape from onerous reality. The author puts forth the hypothesis that Prokop perhaps saw his problematic work as a journalist in the Protectorate as a kind of chess match.
Patriotic Education or Nazi Indoctrination?
Teaching Czech at Secondary Schools in the Protectorate
Martina Šmejkalová
The article is concerned with the Czech language and its instruction in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, especially at secondary schools. Using primary sources, in particular curriculum materials related to the teaching of Czech, regulations issued by the Ministry of Education, period textbooks, and also correspondence, the author seeks to explain how official education policy was projected into actual teaching practice. She examines two main currents of instruction – the official, as reflected in published materials, and the nonconformist, which even made its way into some passages of the textbooks used at the time. It is generally true, however, that textbooks and teaching practice were permeated with expressions of linguistic patriotism, which the supervisory bodies of the Protectorate or Reich tolerated. The main interference in the structural organization of teaching the subject was the dissolution of its previous unity: the bureaucrats in charge of education approached the basic constitutive components – the Czech language and Czech literature – separately and it is therefore now necessary to distinguish between them. While the content of the teaching of literature was suppressed and the existing textbooks were substituted for by individual volumes of the ideologically fraught Nová čítanka, Czech language instruction in this period drew mainly from the earlier traditions and suffered less. That was also because Czech language instruction and textbooks were not primarily meant for the task of re-educating, unlike the tasks of Czech literature, which was considered an ‘opinion-forming subject’. The exclusion of the history of literature from school instruction was in practice often circumvented by transferring its material, under the pretext of providing examples of the historical development of the language, to Czech lessons. The author pays considerable attention to the conception, content, cultural stereotypes, and values reflect in the Nová čítanka. She sums up by saying that it provided a picture of the Czechs as a nation with a splendid folk traditional and a rather rich culture, which, however, could develop thanks only to the favourable influence of the German cultural genius, and also a picture of the Czechs as a nation that was once mostly agricultural, for whom manual work is by and large the most suitable form of labour. The ideological manipulation of the Nová čítanka, according to the author, was – unlike the Communist textbooks after the takeover of late February 1948 – rather concealed and resided in combining selected national and Nazi values and providing only partly true information.
Discussion
(Un)suitable Remarks on a German Bestseller by Alfred de Zayas Concerning the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans
Eva Hahn(ová) and Hans Henning Hahn
In this polemical essay the authors present the American lawyer and historian Alfred-Maurice de Zayas (born in Havana, in 1947), who has become one of the most successful authors of German literature on the expulsion of the Czechoslovak Germans (Vertreibungsliteratur). They also discuss his Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans, which has been published in six English editions and at least ten German (first by Routledge & Kegan Paul, in London and Boston, in 1977, most recently in a revised and expanded edition by Herbig, Munich – Die Nemesis von Potsdam: Die Anglo-Amerikaner und die Vertreibung der Deutschen). The book considers how eleven million Germans living east of the post-war German frontier lost their homeland between 1939 and 1949. According to the authors of the essay, the book, with its notes and bibliography, meets the criteria of professional historiography in terms of form, but it is not actually conceived as empirical research on events and developments. Rather it is more like discovery proceedings for an indictment of the Allied forces, who, de Zayas alleges, were seeking revenge against Germans, rather than justice. In terms of content, the book contains nothing new, more or less reproducing the historical stereotypes of the Germans, Czechs, and Poles, and their relations with each other, in the way these have been transmitted mainly in German ‘expulsion historiography’ and journalism. Thus, for example, the Munich Agreement of September 1938 is seen as the logical outcome of the unjust arrangement of central Europe after the Great War; the German minorities’ irredentist ambitions in the successor states are called a reaction to discrimination; and the Sudeten Germans are depicted as the innocent victims of Hitler’s policy. These one-sided pictures of the past, which de Zayas presents, are intended, according to the reviewers, mainly to justify current political aims – namely, reparation for the ‘expellees’ from the formerly German eastern territories in keeping with international law in the form of ‘Recht auf Heimat’ (that is, the right to return to the homeland), restitution of property, and compensation for damages. De Zayas, however, completely ignores the fact that such arguments have not been accepted by any court of law. His success amongst readers reveals, according to the reviewers, that his interpretations continue to suit considerable parts of German society, which prefer the ‘myth of expulsion’ to a critical view of the recent past.
Revisionism as the Fate of a Movement? Concerning a New Work by Michal Kopeček
Miloš Havelka
In this review-essay the author looks at Michal Kopeček’s Hledání ztraceného smyslu revoluce: Zrod a počátky marxistického revizionismu ve střední Evropě 1953–1960 (Prague: Argo, 2009), whose title translates as ‘In Search of the Lost Meaning of the Revolution: The Birth and Beginnings of Marxist Revisionism in Central Europe’. The questions the reviewer raises and his development of the impulses contained in those questions help him to formulate broader reflections on the genesis, nature, and contexts of Marxist revisionism. In passing, he makes some mildly critical comments about the book. He also offers four different ways or lenses for reading Kopeček’s work. First he shows the possibility of perceiving it through the prism of the historical analysis of discourse, in which the main concern is the overall development of a certain type of thinking (here, Marxist), as is done in the history of ideas. From this perspective, the reviewer considers the relationship between Marxism and Nationalism in the twentieth century, not only in the sense of its legitimizing potential in pushing through Communist ideology and régimes in central Europe (as analyzed by Kopeček in this book), but also in the sense of the changes in Communist doctrine and the emancipating potential of nationalism at a distance from the ‘obligatory’ model of socialism and in the democratizing process of the 1960s. In connection with the development of Western Marxism, which is critical of ideological doctrine, the reviewer wonders whether each and every attempt to make doctrine a reality is not necessarily also its revision. And he asks to what extent the revisionist arguments of the 1950s were original or were, on the contrary, adopted from earlier revisionism. At the level of the analysis of hegemonic and critical discourse, that is, of Stalinism and revisionism, it is a matter of ideological differences and counter-positions in power-politics between the two camps. The author-reviewer here points to the different conceptions of ideology (stabilizing for orthodoxy, but mobilizing or, depending on the point of view, retarding for revisionism), and he points to the role of formal and informal institutions of power, and asks what it was that formed the common ideological ‘matrix’ of Stalinism and revisionism. The prism of analysis of the utopian discourse, according to the author of this article, constitutes a third possible way of reading Kopeček’s book, in the intentions of its title, ‘in search of the lost meaning of the revolution’. The book considers the relationship between the movement and its roots, the legitimizing charge of these returns, and hope in the cultivation of an unsatisfying present by reviving its utopian and emancipating dimensions. The author proposes that revision has, from the perspective of this utopian dimension, necessarily accompanied Marxism throughout its existence, and has, with time, even become its driving force. In the end he points to the level of comparative analysis, concentrating on a comparison of the development, forms, and role of revisionism in all the states examined here – Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. In his conclusion, the author praises Kopeček’s book highly as an original and important attempt to change the approach to research into the former régime, and remarks that Kopeček excels in his profound knowledge of the material, the intensity of his historical empathy for the topic, and the freshness of his manner of interpretation.
A Reply to the Criticism of My Book on Czech Fascism
Milan Nakonečný
The author reacts here to a review of his Český fašismus (Prague, 2006). The review, by Pavel Baloun, is re-published (in an edited form) in the current issue of Soudobé dějiny as ‘Čeští fašisté jako “naivní národovci”: Netradiční pohled na fenomén českého fašismu’ (Czech Fascists as ‘Naive Nationalists’: An Untraditional View of the Phenomenon of Czech Fascism). He declares that he really would not like to be linked to the ‘traditional’ view of Czech fascism, which is, in his opinion, now, as during the First Republic, in the thrall of the ruling ideology and political interests. The same is true of the established idealization of the interwar Czechoslovak democracy and its main politicians, which he rejects. For example, the refutation of the continuously reiterated, intentionally misleading, ‘Castle’ interpretations of the ideas and actions of General Radola Gajda (1892–1948) is not at variance with the critical assessment of Czech fascism, which he offers in his book. Unlike the mainstream, the author comes out in favour of Czech nationalism as the value basis of his historical interpretations. He is willing to take the responsibility for factual errors in his book, but rejects as unfounded the reproach that he did not work sufficiently with official primary sources, for it is up to the reviewer to demonstrate in concrete terms what has been neglected.
Reviews
Czech Fascists as ‘Naive Nationalists’:
An Untraditional View of the Phenomenon of Czech Fascism
Pavel Baloun
Nakonečný, Milan. Český fašismus. Prague: Vodnář, 2006, 427 pp.
This review is an edited version of an article that the reviewer published at the website http://www.fronta.cz/kniha/nakonecny-cesky-fasismus. The reaction of the author of the book, Milan Nakonečný, appears in the current issue of Soudobé dějiny, under the title ‘Odpověď na kritiku mé knihy o českém fašismu’ (A Reply to the Criticism of My Book on Czech Fascism). The reviewer points to the numerous errors of fact in the work under review, which, according to him, stem from Nakonečný’s not having worked sufficiently with archive records of official provenance, especially for the period of the First Republic, and his having drawn much of his information from the Fascist press. He also reproaches Nakonečný for his insufficient consideration of the existing historical literature. He is puzzled by Nakonečný’s many criticisms of interwar Czechoslovakia and its politicians. In conclusion the reviewer claims that Nakonečný openly sides with the Czech nationalists and critics of the democracy of the First Republic, but this, according to the reviewer, may provide an impulse for more profoundly conceptual reflections and debates about Czech fascism.
Sudeten Germans and the Twilight of the First Republic
Petr Kaplan
Brandes, Detlef. Die Sudetendeutschen im Krisenjahr 1938 (Veröffentlichungen des Collegium Carolinum, vol. 107). Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008, xvi + 399 pp.
In his latest monograph, Brandes, an important German historian, focuses on the position of the Sudeten Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia and their role in breaking apart the country. The reviewer praises Brandes’s extraordinarily thorough work with primary sources. He sees the fundamental contribution of the book in its observing the lives of the Sudeten Germans as the history of many social groups and their mutual relations and interactions with the outer milieux (Czechoslovak and German), rather than as one single story of a homogeneous stratum of the population. The author is manifestly critical of the minorities policy of the First Republic, which, in his view, made it difficult for the German minority to identify with the new state. He believes the main cause of the ‘uncontrolled expulsions’ of Czechoslovak Germans after the war stemmed from the tensions that had come to a head in Czech-German relations on the eve of the Munich Agreement.
The Nazi Justice System in the Sudetengau
Petr Šafařík
Anders, Freia. Strafjustiz im Sudetengau 1938–1945 (Veröffentlichungen des Collegium Carolinum, vol. 112). Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008, vii + 551 pp. + CD-ROM.
This book is, according to the reviewer, a precise work that, to a certain extent, fills the gaps in the treatment of the legal history of the Reichsgau Sudetenland (also known as the Sudetengau). The book merits praise for its carefully worked-out theoretical starting points (which are based on a typology of Max Weber’s concept of ‘domination’) and also for its far-ranging work with primary sources. In the chapters devoted to changes in criminal law, the activity of the public prosecutors, the courts, sentences, and the social profile of employees of the justice system in the Sudetengau, the book provides much valuable quantitative information and the work demonstrates its conclusions using concrete cases.
An Important Contribution to an Increasingly Difficult Topic
František Svátek
Weger, Tobias. ‘Volkstumskampf’ ohne Ende? Sudeten Organisationen 1945–1955 (Die Deutschen und das östliche Europa – Studien und Quellen, vol. 2). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008, 639 pp.
The reviewer situates this publication in the ever-stronger stream of criticism of national stereotypes and myths in the German Federal Republic, which has also affected the ideologizing historiography and journalism of Sudeten German provenance. With a profound theoretical grounding, the author of the volume under review thoroughly analyzes the continuity and discontinuity of Sudeten German interpretations of their own history, as well as key terms and ideas from the interwar nationalist zeal to the post-war establishment of Sudeten German institutions. In the second, longer part of the volume, he then, on the basis of a wide range of sources, describes in detail the emergence and first ten years of the development of these organizations, critically analyzing various documents of their programmes. Because of its comprehensiveness, clear organization, and critical apparatus, Weger’s book also serves well as an encyclopaedia.
Karel Hrubý
Kopeček, Michal. Hledání ztraceného smyslu revoluce: Zrod a počátky marxistického revizionismu ve střední Evropě. Prague: Argo, 2009, 386 pp.
In a detailed review-essay of Michal Kopeček’s recent book (whose title translates as ‘In Search of the Lost Meaning of the Revolution: The Birth and Beginnings of Marxist Revisionism in Central Europe’), the reviewer assesses the theoretical roots of Kopeček’s interpretations, the subtlety of his analysis of terminology, and his broad range of sources. He notes that ‘revisionism’ already had a long history in the 1950s, and points out that in addition to the author’s analyses of revisionist tendencies in philosophy and sociology one could trace it in their application to economics, jurisprudence, and belles-lettres. The part of the book that makes the greatest contribution to our understanding is, according to the reviewer, the discussion of the development of revisionism in Poland, where the ground was best prepared for revisionism and where, in the intellectual activity of Leszek Kołakowski, it reached its apex in central Europe. Of similar importance was Georg (György) Lukács, in Hungary, but he sought mainly to justify Leninism in theoretical terms. In Czechoslovakia, unlike in these two neighbouring countries, revisionism lacked political support and had to wait till the second half of the 1960s to become fully developed. But that part of the story is beyond the scope of the publication under review.
A Well-balanced Social History of Post-war Europe
Martina Hamplová
Kaelble, Hartmut. Sozialgeschichte Europas: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007, 437 pp.
According to the reviewer, this large publication about the historical transformations of post-war European society from 1945 to the present, surpasses other histories of European society after the Second World War. This is because, from the geographical point of view, it takes the eastern lands of Europe into account, in terms of time it includes also the last quarter of the twentieth century, and in terms of subject matter it seeks to present a compact and detailed social history. It is also exceptional in that it tries not only to convey the differences within the countries of the Continent, but also to interpret what it is that is characteristic of European society as a whole.
Documents
The Transcript of Viliam Široký’s Interrogation at State Security Headquarters in 1941
Marek Syrný and Matej Medvecký
This set of documents contains the written record of an interrogation of the Slovak Communist official Viliam Široký (1902–1971) at State Security Headquarters (Ústredňa štátnej bezpečnosti – the political police of the Slovak State) in Bratislava in June 1941, and two additional documents. In the First Republic Široký worked as a secretary of the regional and district committees of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPCz) in Slovakia. He edited the main Slovak Communist daily, Pravda, and was active in the apparat of the Communist International. In 1935 he was elected a deputy to the Czechoslovak National Assembly, in 1938 he became the Chairman of the regional leadership of the Party in Slovakia, and, after the Party was banned, he moved to Moscow. In June 1941, shortly before Germany invaded the Soviet Union, he returned to Slovakia, but after a brief period underground he was arrested and spent the rest of the war in prison. After the Liberation he became Vice Premier of Czechoslovakia and Chairman of the Slovak Communist Party, and, later, in the 1950s, Premier and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He helped to bring in the Stalinist terror and to organize the show trials, for which, in 1963, he was stripped of all his offices. From the transcript published here it is evident that after his arrest in Slovakia Široký communicated to his interrogators important information about the resistance movement and gave them contacts to members of the resistance, which led to their arrest. As the editors of the document point out, after the war the existence of the incriminating transcript was kept secret, but in the early 1950s it did not slip the attention of the secret-police investigators when preparing the show trials. In this connection, people stopped talking about the formerly praised resistance activities of Viliam Široký.
