No. I.
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Milan Drápala
The Rejection of Liberalism in the Bohemian Lands and Helena Koželuhová: An Ideological Profile of the Post-war Republic, 1945-48
Zdeněk Beneš
History and the Present: On the Nature of Contemporary History
Petr Luňák and Jiří Šedivý
Theory and Empiricism in the Study of International Relations
Jan Horský
The Rationality of Historical Action:
Weber’s Sociology as an Impetus to Historical Research
Horizon
František Svátek
Crossing Boundaries:
On the Life and Work of the Czech and European Intellectual Bedřich Loewenstein
Reviews
Věra Škvorová
Addressed by a Poet
Discussion
Vilém Prečan
Interpreting Zorin’s Correspondence from Prague to Moscow in February 1948:
A Reply to a Letter from Galina Murashko
Annotations
Bibliography on Contemporary History
Articles, reviews, and polemics from journals and edited collections published abroad, 1996-99
An Ideological Profile of the Post-war Republic, 1945-48
Milan Drápala
This article sketches out the ideological topography of the Czechoslovak Republic just after World War II and the prevailing attitude towards liberalism. The author maintains that the post- war régime limited itself by distancing itself from, or even presenting itself as the opposite of, the liberal-democratic system of the First Republic as a People’s Republic both in its political and economic organization and in its ideology. The legacy of the First Republic was, however, ridden with contradictions, for its system consisted of considerable illiberal elements and a strong tendency for change was at work within it. This tendency first found its place after the Munich Agreement in the Second Republic, and then, as an alternative orientation after 1945.
In the author’s view the theme of liberalism was present after World War II mostly in judgements or the settling of accounts, when the various political and intellectual currents and personalities found themselves in a rare unity. The usually vague argumentation was not, however, to the detriment of the sharpness of judgements or to the far-reaching nature of generalizations. Liberalism and its proponents were assigned the responsibility for every possible evil: social exploitation and injustice, the decadence of modern society, the relativization of values, the birth of totalitarianism, and also the two greatest traumas of the First Republic – the the Great Depression of the 1930s and then the Munich tragedy – experiences which were later decisive for turning Czechoslovak society away from liberal values. For Communists, settling the score with the ‘bourgeoisie and its lackeys’ was an important instrument in the struggle for power. The disposition of the majority of the élite in the arts was anti-liberal. The political forces and important persons coming out in support of democratic socialism, to whose principles the author pays particular attention, were generally known for their attempt to merge the principles of civil liberty and social equality into a perfect synthesis of a new order ‘Made in Czechoslovakia’ under the aegis of the Eastern wartime ally, the Soviet Union. That was the case particularly of President Edvard Beneš, the National Socialist Party, and also political columnists of the non-partisan periodicals Dnešek and Svobodné noviny, whose guiding spirit was Ferdinand Peroutka. In his public positions Peroutka was now professing the abandonment of liberalism and the endorsement of socialism.
The only generally acknowledged ideological link with the days of the First Republic was the legacy of T. G. Masaryk and his humanism. The author seeks here to demonstrate how this legacy was stripped of its historical basis, politically misused through the problematic actualization of Masaryk’s teleological conception of history, and transformed into an empty moralistic gesture. In this connection the author expresses the view that Masaryk’s humanism in this form represented too shaky a foundation for effective criticism of the present situation and especially for a programme for consistent anti-totalitarian resistance.
The article then goes on to discuss the ideological projects of the ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism, which grew out of the concept of Christian solidarismus, as it had been developed by some authors in the Czechoslovak People’s Party, particularly Bohdan Chudoba. The author seeks to provide a concise outline of the ideology of the People’s Party, which, considering its traditionalism, stood in sharp antagonism to liberalism, yet, as the only non-socialist party and one that was taking in an influx of new members from the banned right-wing parties, created the space for at least the peripheral survival and formation of positions that were accommodating towards liberalism. In the ranks of the Czechoslovak People’s Party or in close proximity to it stood some journalists, economists, and lawyers of a liberal orientation (František Weyr, for instance) who were not bound to the ideology of the party. The weeklies of the People’s Party, Obzory and Vývoj, became the tribune of free-thinking views, as did the Slovak journal of a similar tenor, Nové prúdy. Among the important liberal personalities outside the People’s Party, the author mentions the economist Karel Engliš, who was elected Rector of Charles University in 1947. Among the remarkable journals he mentions is Nová doba, and he also discusses right-wing features of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party.
The only personality in ‘top-level’ politics who tried publicly to articulate liberal approaches in the years 1945-48 was, the author believes, the niece of the writers Karel and Josef Čapek, Helena Koželuhová. She stated publicly that her origins lay in the official platform of the People’s Party, but in her columns, speeches, and discussions within the party, the liberal accents went beyond that platform and, indeed, Koželuhová tried to change it. In her activity, the author believes, one can see an orientation towards an alternative to the ruling régime: hence, in economics, instead of socialization and central planning, there is market competition among predominantly private entrepreneurs with limited state regulation; in the relations between the state and the citizen, instead of paternalism and bureaucracy, there is the upholding of civil rights and free co-operation of various interests; on the level of moral and political values, instead of the pathos of collectivism, there are the ethics of individual responsibility; and in the conception of a political system, instead of a limited democracy, there is an open and pluralist society.
The author traces the precipitous career of Koželuhová and her conflicts with the party leadership. These came to a head shortly after her election to the Constituent National Assembly in May 1946, when, she was – in contravention of the principles of democracy and human decency – expelled from the People’s Party, and, as the result of a signed declaration, stripped of her parliamentary immunity. Because Koželuhová was extraordinarily popular, this decision called forth a great upsurge of protest in the People’s Party, which the leadership managed to quell only after considerable effort. This internal crisis, however, seriously weakened the People’s Party when it was faced with the decisive power struggle with the Communists. Above all, this revealed authoritarian tendencies ruling within the People’s Party itself. Admittedly, Koželuhová’s attempt to resurrect right-wing politics in the Bohemian Lands was, from the point of view of future developments, an unimportant episode, yet it did, believes the author, represent a potential chance for the formation of more open disagreement with the fatal slide into totalitarianism that was underway.
History and the Present:
On the Nature of Contemporary History
Zdeněk Beneš
The scholarly status of contemporary history is sometimes brought into doubt. The inaccessibility of primary sources, inadequate ‘distance’ from the events, processes, and phenomena being studied, and the historian’s own vested interest in the subject he or she wishes to research are usually presented as the chief premises leading to this conclusion. The way out, then, is an empiricist conception of the historical sciences, which rests on the theoretical and methodological basis of the ‘classic’ historical sciences, as conceived in the mid-19th century; one example of this sort of conception of contemporary history is the work of the professor of Austrian history and, from 1918, of Czechoslovak history at Prague, Josef Pekář (1870-1937). Pekař’s interpretation of the nature and status of contemporary history is the starting point for interpretation in the present article.
The subject of the interpretation, however, is the view of contemporary history as an integral component of historiography, which in an essential way now differs from other sub-disciplines of contemporary historical sciences. The theoretical concept from which this essay begins is the category of historical culture that enables one to follow mutual links of heterogeneous kinds of historical thinking, which have in modern times always been present in the whole of historical thinking. They are determined by historical rationality, that is to say by received and recognized principles of scholarship, but are also co-determined by the so-called ‘mythologizing’ kinds of thinking. An important place among them is occupied by the unconscious motives and determinants, which can in the empiricist conception be grouped together in the category of ‘lack of distance’. Using as his examples two works of historiography, Radzinski’s biography of Stalin and Hobsbawm’s voluminous Age of Extremes, the author sets out to demonstrate how this level of historical thought is reflected in research into contemporary history and how it permeates the attempt at an empirically-based scholarly picture of the present.
Above all, with his analysis of Radzinski’s book the author of the present article puts forth a hypothesis on the interpretation of contemporary history as a ‘shared experiencing of the text’, in which the basic categories of knowledge and understanding, scholarly text and belles lettres, conceptual and metaphoric thinking seem to merge and for which the anthropological conception of historical reality seems to provide a link between them.
Theory and Empiricism in the Study of International Relations
Petr Luňák and Jiří Šedivý
The authors first explain the differences between the discipline of history and the theory of international relations and also discuss the points the two have in common. They then go on to outline the debate between the individual historical and theoretical schools. Against the background of these debates they set out to demonstrate that the proponents of both disciplines in the Czech Republic would gain from a mutual exchange of opinions.
The Rationality of Historical Action:
Weber’s Sociology as an Impetus to Historical Research
Jan Horský
In connection with the thematization of the history of the early modern age and of contemporary history there appear in historical literature attempts to describe development, particularly of European culture, with the help of, among other things, the theory of increasing rationality (see, for instance, the work of Norbert Elias, Lucien Febvre, and Richard van Dülman). These theories might find partial support in the sociology of Max Weber. The present article both summarizes some of the conclusions of the discussion on Weber’s conception of the rationality of social behaviour, which was taking place in the German literature (particularly the work of S. Kalberg and R. Döbert) and, on the other hand, wishes to bring attention to some interesting methodological and noetic connections of this theory and the historians’ attempts at studying rationality.
Rationality for Weber (according to Kalberg) is a conscious cognitive process that aims to govern reality, or (according to Döbert) rational behaviour characterizes its conscious controllability, communicability, and reproducibility. It also turns out, however, that a pre-condition of cognizance of behaviour is (expressed in the terminology of Karl Popper) a certain element of the essentialism in Weber’s sociology (which is otherwise of a nominalistic stripe). Besides the pre-condition of cognizance of behaviour there are other pre-conditions present in the historian’s endeavour to discuss certain behaviour as the rational aid of Weber’s theory. They also mean that the endeavour to achieve the application of rationalizing theories always carries with it a certain hypotheticalness, an ideal-type construability, and intuitive insight. This is mainly a matter of pre-conditions introduced in an attempt to overcome the tension between the ideal-type construction of the historian or sociologist and, on the other hand, the ‘empirical’ behaviour of the people in the period being studied. It also has to do with the tension between the fact that the researcher’s ideal-type construction is an expression of ‘theoretical rationality’, yet the researcher is using it to help himself or herself to describe not only rational but also irrational behaviour. Consequently, it is true also that rationality is clearly better described if it has to do with the study of long-term processes (longue durée) than with the study of ‘conventional’ events. The possibility of ‘reasonably re-experiencing’ the motives of the actor is, says Weber, conditioned by the researcher’s cultural proximity to the actor. It is safe to say, then, that historians of contemporary history ought in this sense to be in a better position than, for example, medievalists.
Crossing Boundaries:
On the Life and Work of the Czech and European Intellectual
Bedřich Loewenstein
František Svátek This essay is reprinted from the festschrift to mark the seventieth birthday of the a foremost Bohemian-born historian, Bedřich Loewenstein: Překračování hranic aneb Zprostředkovatel/Grenzüberschreitungen oder der Vermittler, edited by Vilém Prečan, Prague, 1999. The author begins with meditations on the idea of boundary, ranging from the international to the personal, as an introduction to the historian Loewenstein who has crossed boundaries in many ways. He is a ‘philosophizing historian’, a rare bird in Czech historiography. But, actually, he has found the key to other areas, other disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, political science, and political philosophy. He has also surmounted the borders between Germans, Czechs, and Jews, Germans and Jews, and all Europeans, as well as the boundary between the ivory tower of academia and the public and public concerns.
A historian of historiography would likely classify Loewenstein as a historian of ideas, into the category of Geistesgeschichte. After graduating he began work at the Institute of History, the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, taking up the subject of early 19th-century German liberalism, using the example of Young Germany. He then wrote a political and intellectual biography of Bismarck. Loewenstein contributed widely with book reviews and articles to probably all the Czech historical journals.
The historian Golo Mann, a friend of Loewenstein, and the author of the introduction to the German translation of the Czechoslovak historian’s Plädoyer für Zivilisation (1972), said the work was ‘well and beautifully written’. The author of the present article says that this points to another crossing of boundaries by Loewenstein, the connection of writing a scholarly work well, that is to say, writing precisely with an understanding of the nuances of terms, and writing beautifully, that is, mastering the art of style. This, too, is an unusual talent in the Bohemian Lands.
The author recalls that Loewenstein long ago really did read and Marx and understood him (and the work of Marx’s contemporaries) yet himself did not become a Marxist. Later, from about the mid-1960s, he concentrated on the intellectual and psychological roots of Fascism, and was able to connect themes (again without boundaries) and synthetically conceive a prolegomenon to the historical, philosophical, and psychological analysis of the ‘phenomenon of Fascism’. At the same time he expanded to other topics, eventually searching for the nature of civil society in the ‘modern’ age, and the questions of power, iniquity, serfdom, and dictatorship.
With the defeat of the Prague Spring and the onset of Normalization, Loewenstein found it increasingly difficult to work. Some of his work was withdrawn from publication, and some was pulped. He was soon contributing with articles to samizdat publications and helping in the editorial work of the samizdat journal Historické studie. In the 1970s, he worked with the anti-Communist opposition as a supplier of forbidden literature. In 1979 he emigrated to Germany, and became Professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin, where he was concerned with the Modern in Europe, as well as the Prague Spring and Normalization, all the while helping his former colleagues in Czechoslovakia who had been dismissed from their jobs.
In Bedřich Loewenstein, writes the author, one encounters that very ‘modern’ phenomenon of the multicultural, the variety of roles in which an individual appears and which he to a certain degree chooses. Loewenstein continues to be a Czech, but he is also now a German; he is a Jew, although he owes his religious formation to the Christianity of the Academy of the YMCA. Above all, however, he is a European. Because he has not been living and active in Bohemia since the 1979, he is perhaps less well known in the Czech Republic than he deserves to be, and it is the author’s hope that the festschrift in which this article initially appeared will help Loewenstein reach a wider audience than he hitherto has.
Věra Škvorová
The reviewer looks at Jan Čep’s Samomluvy a rozhovory [Soliloquies and dialogues], Prague: Vyšehrad, 1997, 315 pp. This is the fifth volume in the collected works of Jan Čep (1902-1974). It was published in the form in which it had been prepared for a samizdat edition in 1982 by Bedřich Fučík and Mojmír Trávníček, who also wrote the Afterword. The volume mainly contains three collections of essays written for Radio Free Europe. In the West they were published soon after being broadcast.
The programme that Čep wrote for was originally called Jak přežít? [How to survive?] and then Úvahy časové a nadčasové [Considerations temporal and timeless]. In the first collection, titled ‘O lidský svět’, the author puts himself in the shoes of his listeners who are being subjected to the pressures of the Communist régime; he points to the dehumanizing nature of Marxist ideology and helps them to preserve their own internal worlds. In the second collection, after which the whole collection has been named, it is the timeless considerations which predominate: here Čep shares with his listeners a Christian view of the world and the human condition there. The third collection, Malé řečí sváteční [Short holiday talks], contains occasional essays for religious and secular holidays. To this collection of radio talks the editors have added a selection of Čep’s articles that had been published in various periodicals in the 1950s, which they have titled Doplňky [Addenda]. The ideas contained within them mostly recall the radio talks, and also present Čep as an author of reviews and reports on books and authors.
Although it has been almost fifty years since the essays in this volume were first published it is only today that they are appearing in Czech bookshops. This volume, far from being merely another in the Collected Works of Jan Čep, is in itself of interest to the historian, particularly for how it came into being. It also provides evidence of the fact that in the 1950s the Czech Service of Radio Free Europe did not limit itself merely to political commentary and criticism of the conditions in Czechoslovakia; Čep’s words were intended for listeners in need of spiritual strength to help them to maintain a certain level of morality and keep themselves from being easily manipulated by the régime. The greatest value of this volume, the reviewer believes, however, is in the lasting validity of Čep’s words, which readers today will still find relevant, even though the Iron Curtain and the jamming of radio signals to the Bohemian Lands are now things of the past. Indeed, their current relevance is clear from Radio Free Europe’s recent decision to reinstate the programme ‘Considerations Temporal and Timeless’.
Interpreting Zorin’s Correspondence from Prague to Moscow in February 1948:
A Reply to a Letter from Galina Murashko
Vilém Prečan
The Russian historian and Director of the Centre for the Study of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, Galina P. Murashko, recently (14 March 1999) wrote a letter to the Editors of Soudobé dějiny in which she protested that only excerpts of her article on Zorin’s stay in Prague in 1948 had been published in Nos 2-3/1998 of this journal, and in which she also criticized the articles by the historians Leonid Gibiansky and Karel Kaplan commenting on her views, which were published in the same number of Soudobé dějiny. Dr Murashko’s letter is re-printed here in full, followed by the reply of the Editor-in-Chief of Soudobé dějiny, Vilém Prečan.
Zdeněk Beneš (1952) is Docent of Czech History, and is employed in the Institute of Czech History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. He specializes in the history and theory of the historical sciences.
Milan Drápala (1964) has been a Researcher in the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, since 1990. His chief area of academic interest is the political activity of members of the Czech cultural elite from the 1930s to the present.
Jan Horský (1963) was educated in history at Charles University. After teaching at the Faculty of Education, at Ústí nad Labem, he now lectures at Charles University, Prague. He is concerned with the history of historiography, historical demography, and the history of the natural sciences.
Petr Luňák (1966) graduated in history from Charles University and in international relations and economics, the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He teaches at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, and since 1998 has been Deputy Director of the Analysis Department of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1998 he habilitated in modern history.
Vilém Prečan (1933) is Docent of History, Charles University, and is a founder of the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. He is concerned mainly with Czechoslovak history in the European context from the Munich Agreement of 1938 to the present.
František Svátek (1936) was until recently Senior Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History; he now lectures at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. His primary academic interest is political élites in Czechoslovakia in the years 1918-53, Czech and European history from the 19th century to the present, and the theory of historiography.
Jiří Šedivý (1964) read political science and English at Charles University, and then took a degree at King’s College, London. He now lectures at the Institute of Political Science, Charles University. Since 1998 he has been Director of the Institute of International Relations, Prague.
Věra Škvorová (1935) is a graduate of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, and has worked mainly in computer programming. Since 1993 she has been employed in the Editorial Department of the Institute of Contemporary History, where she is concerned with computer layout.
