No. I.
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Karl Stuhlpfarrer
The Domestic and the Foreign:
Austria’s Changing Interpretations of Its Nazi Past
Milan Drápala
The Last Bastion of the West:
Czech Non-Socialist Political Journalism, 1945–48
Jiří Knapík
Verse in Bad Repute:
Criticism of Jaroslav Seifert, 1950
Jan Gorenčík
The Slapy Dam Project and Its Social Repercussions
Materials
Pavel Marek
The Czech Small Businesses Movement, 1918–38
Horizon
František Kautman
Seifert’s Píseň o Viktorce
Ivan Skála
An Alien Voice
Reviews
Pavol Martuliak
The Road to Humiliation, Repression, and Liquidation
Jan Měchýř
The Sociological View of Issues in Contemporary History
On Sources
Jan Kuklík & Jan Němeček
Czech and Czechoslovak Documents in the Hoover Institute Archive
Chronicle
Vilém Prečan
Jan Vladislav Turns Seventy-Five
Annotations
Bibliography
Articles from Czech scholarly journals and essay volumes, 1996–98
Summaries
Austria’s Changing Interpretations of Its Nazi Past
Karl Stuhlpfarrer
The author examines the way in which the Austrians came to terms with their Nazi past. He also notes the political discourse, trials of war criminals, reparations for victims, collective memory, and reflections by professional historians and people in the arts. Austrian society, according to the author, showed a strong tendency to suppress its own share of guilt for participating in Nazi crimes. After World War II Austrian politicians accepted the thesis (and held on to it for a long time) that Austria was the first victim of Hitlerite Germany. The author demonstrates that this thesis was advantageous from the point of view of international relations, and above all that it supported the process of integration in Austrian society, a process whose dominant feature was the Austrian attempt to slough off responsibility for Nazi crimes. The juridical settling of accounts with crimes committed by Austrians during the Nazi régime were handled by the tribunals of the Great Powers and by People’s Courts in Austria. These trials, which were held in the years 1945–55, heard accusations against 28 148 persons of whom less than half were convicted, including 43 death sentences. Apart from that, more than a half million other comprised persons were registered in lists, and they received lighter sentences. At first when providing reparations to victims of the Nazis, members of resistance movements were given preference over those who had been persecuted for reasons of race; restitution of property was carried out only in a lackadaisical manner. The author maintains that the Austrian legal system after the war incorporated some elements of Nazi law. Until recently in the Austrian collective conscience memories of the dead war heroes clashed with reverence for the victims of Nazism, whose symbol came to be the Mauthausen concentration camp. The author states that the most considerable interest in Austria’s share in Nazism has been manifested by the young historians beginning in the mid-1980s. This problem was treated in the arts, for instance in the novel by Gerhard Fritsche, Fasching (1967), before scholars tackled it. In conclusion Stuhlpfarrer claims that Austria was not a mere victim of Nazism, but nor was it simply a perpetrator.
The Last Bastion of the West:
Czech Non-Socialist Political Journalism, 1945–48
Milan Drápala
The author turns his attention to two Prague weeklies, Obzory [Horizons] and Vývoj [Developments], published in the years 1945–48 under the auspices of the Czechoslovak People’s Party. They were tribunes of nonconformist, radically critical views on the authoritarian and leftist-populist aspects of the governing régime of ‘limited democracy’. The form of both the weeklies was determined by three features: clearly pro-Western (particularly pro-Anglo-Saxon), anti-socialist, and pro-Christian. The author evaluates the journalism of writers such as Pavel Tigrid, Helena Koželuhová, Ladislav Jehlička, Bohdan Chudoba and Jan Kolář, who also published in the daily Lidová demokracie and the Slovak revue, Nové prúdy, for their penetrating analysis of their society and realistic assessment of the danger stemming from the Communists’ ambitions to attain power and from international developments. This clear-headed position did not, however, lead them to be reconciled with the spirit of the age. The author reveals the ideological tension between some of these nonconformists, which was centred on liberal or Christian ‘integralist’ values as an alternative to the totalitarian ideology, as well as on possible ways out of the social crisis. Koželuhová, for advocating what for her colleagues was an overly liberal viewpoint, was excluded from the People’s Party and afterwards was even prevented from publishing. The author also emphasizes Obzory’s contribution to lifting the taboos on topics such as inhumane treatment of Germans in internment camps and instances of revolutionary terror.
Verse in Bad Repute:
Criticism of Jaroslav Seifert, 1950
Jiří Knapík
Jaroslav Seifert’s collection of verse, Píseň o Viktorce, was published in 1950, and Seifert soon became the target of a violent ideological campaign, which began with a critical review by Ivan Skála in the Party weekly Tvorba. The Czechoslovak Communist Party apparat, led by Rudolf Slánský, was particularly interested in the criticism, and Slánský entrusted the campaign to the foremost ideologue and formulator of Communist policy on the arts and culture, Gustav Bareš.
The campaign against Seifert was not merely a response to his new collection; it was also a reaction to his earlier, uncomplimentary statements about Soviet poetry and, to a certain extent, the political views he had expressed in the years 1929–38. Skála’s criticism in Tvorba, however, met with the displeasure of some members of the writers’ community, particularly Vítězslav Nezval, who came out vigorously in Seifert’s defence; consequently, members of the Party leadership with a dogmatic attitude towards the arts did not manage to establish a kangaroo court of writers to judge Seifert’s work.
At one point, Bareš’s adversary in cultural affairs, Minister of Information Václav Kopecký, tried to use Bareš’s and the Party apparat’s hard-line attitude towards Seifert to further his own ends. In September 1951 a session of the Party’s Central Committee set in motion changes in the leadership, and Kopecký and his supporters began to exploit the ‘Seifert case’ to point out mistakes committed by the Party apparat in the area of the arts and culture.
Changes in the constellation of political power led to Bareš’s demise in January 1952. His involvement in the anti-Seifert campaign had only helped lead to his own disgrace and thus indirectly to his fall. This, however, had been preceded by Bareš’s self-criticism before Party members and to self-criticism by the editors of Tvorba, in which the previous approach to Seifert had been declared mistaken. As a consequence of these events artists who had profited from the alliance with Kopecký improved their standing in the organs of the Writers’ Union and obtained greater influence in the formation of policy for the arts. The Second Congress of Czechoslovak Writers, which took place in 1956, provided everyone who had participated in the attack on Seifert with an opportunity to express less partisan opinions on the matter. While the poets Skála and Sedloň took advantage of this, Kopecký, in his book ČSR a KSČ [The Czechoslovak Republic and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia] (1960), again defended the campaign against Seifert. This was evident in the fundamental compatibility of the aims of Kopecký and Bareš in policy on the arts, and it demonstrates that the differences between the two politicians’ methods consisted merely in the choice of tactics.
The Slapy Dam Project and Its Social Repercussions
Jan Gorenčík
The dam at Slapy (just south of Prague) represents one of the large construction projects of socialist Czechoslovakia. It is a monumental work, and like other similar projects has its own dramatic history. The project’s development provides insight into the essence of the ‘socialist system’ – greater insight perhaps than many an ‘attractive’ subject of recent Czechoslovak history, such as crimes committed in the name of establishing and preserving Communism.
The actual plan for the dam and the system of cascades along the River Vltava had developed over many years, and, while trying to keep pace with changing needs, placed the emphasis on a vast range of parameters, sometimes in direct opposition to one another. Following the Communist takeover of February 1948, the conception of the Vltava cascades changed, preserving nothing of the original, pre-World War II plans of Josef Bartovský, which had been partially realized near the Bohemian towns of Vrané and Štěchovice. The possibility of using the Vltava as a waterway was also radically re-evaluated, and after consultation with Soviet experts (Remezov in particular) it was decided that facilities would not be built for cargo ships, and that the maximum hydro-electric power would be exploited at the upper levels, namely at Slapy and Orlík. The whole conception of a militarized economy was marked by budgetary restraints and attempts at the quickest possible completion of the waterworks. Investment into shipping facilities were declared inefficient and uneconomical.
The gravest chapter in the story of the construction of Slapy dam consists of the state’s approach to financial compensation for damages caused in the inundated areas. Of the total 296 owners of real estate earmarked for purchase (apart from the property of the state, towns, and the Church), the state built replacement housing for part of the population of Hřiměždice, that is to say for workers from the nearby quarries (a total of five property owners), as well as for most of the population of Zvírotice, where the state, at its own expense, built an élite cooperative community (including 28 property owners), and for 107 citizens, who, as part of the new action plan of the Regional National Committee, received subsidies enabling them to build replacement housing. The greater part of the total number of property owners, a total of 156 persons (including ‘kulaks’ and owners of small businesses), however, had to leave their homes. Reparations, if they received any, were not enough to enable them to build or to buy new housing.
The ‘Vltava cascades’, including the Slapy dam, might, from the point of view of the needed energy that was obtained, be considered the lesser of two evils. But ‘socialist Slapy’ was merely one more monument of an era during which a militarized economy’s race for energy brought about enormous and often irreparable damage to the natural environment and the social fabric. The dam is a reminder of the time when the publicly declared ‘efforts for the welfare of our working people’, including their civil rights, remained merely a hypocritical, demagogic cliché. The Slapy dam is one of the milestones of error on the road to the embarrassing end of the socialist system in Czechoslovakia.
The Czech Small Businesses Movement, 1918–38
Pavel Marek
Under discussion here are the mechanisms for the transfer of interests within the diverse small-businesses movement in Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1938. The author examines the relations between the factions and leaderships of the national- democratic party that would become the Party of National Unification, the Czechoslovak People’s Party, and the socialist parties within this ‘nonpolitical’ movement. Special attention is paid to the structures and mechanisms of the Czechoslovak Party of Middle-Class Small Business and Commerce. On the basis of his research the author describes how the complicated nature of the transfer of interests of the small-business factions of the political parties culminated in attempts to influence the non-political structures of the ‘estates’ and to transform them into partisan satellite groups. Not only were they more stable, but the mechanisms for the transfer of interests had been built by the state, for whom they represented partners on matters of economic and social policy. Party differences may have been overcome in the nonpolitical organizations, but the price to be paid for this was the absence of a unified platform and of concentrated pressure on the political centre. The ‘small-business pillar’, in the sense of a specific and complete instrument, was never built. One could perhaps talk about certain signs of one, but only in connection with the development of the Czechoslovak Party of Middle-Class Small Business and Commerce.
František Kautman
In the first part of this article (which first appeared in 1982 in the emigré journal Listy) the author analyses the structure of Jaroslav Seifert’s Píseň o Viktorce [The Song about Viktorka] (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1950). In the second part he recalls the circumstances preceding the publication of the work, and the consequences of Ivan Skála’s intensely critical review of this work, which was published in Tvorba (1950). Skála’s article was clearly intended as a signal for the unleashing of a malicious Party-led campaign against Seifert. The campaign never actually materialized, but for the next four years Seifert was forbidden to publish.
An Alien Voice
Ivan Skála
This is Skála’s original review of Seifert’s Píseň o Viktorce. It was published in 1950 in Tvorba, the Party’s weekly on the arts and culture, at the order of the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Gustav Bareš. In the review, Skála characterizes Seifert as a talented poet who has, however, renounced his roots in proletarian poetry, alienated himself from the ‘working man’, and become the mouthpiece of petit bourgeois values. Skála harshly condemns Píseň o Viktorce because Seifert has depicted in it the tragic fate of the character from Božena Němcová’s major work of nineteenth-century Czech prose fiction, Babička, instead of celebrating the building of contemporary Czechoslovakia and the state’s rosy prospects. In his review, Skála insinuates that behind the story of Viktorka lurks a reactionary allegory on the life of the decadent artist in socialist society who has lost the opportunity to satisfy his self-centred interests. Skála concludes his assessment by claiming that Seifert ‘has no right to misuse the honorary title of "poet"’
The Road to Humiliation, Repression, and Liquidation
Pavol Martuliak
J. Pešek and M. Barnovský, Štátná moc a cirkvi na Slovensku 1948–53 [Church and State in Slovakia, 1948–53] (Bratislava 1997).
This publication provides an overview of the important Churches in Slovakia after WW II. The authors focus on the question of the persecution and, in some cases, liquidation of the Churches, particularly the Uniate. It also provides an overview of the liquidation of the religious orders.
The Sociological View of Issues in Contemporary History
Jan Měchýř
Lubomír Brokl et al, Reprezentace zájmů v politickém systému České republiky [Representation of interests in the Czech political system] (Prague: Sociologické nakladatelství, 1997), 207 pp.
The authors of this volume examine ‘institutional interests in Czech society’ (the emergence of civil society) after November 1989. The work comprises four separately authored sections: (1) Lubomír Brokl, ‘Pluralist democracy or neo-corporatism?’; (2) Zdeňka Mansfeldová, ‘Social partnership in the Czech Republic’; (3) Zdeňka Mansfeldová and Aleš Kroupa, ‘Civil associations and professional associations’; and (4) Jonathan Terra, ‘Theoretical and methodological questions in the study of neo-corporatism’.
The first and last sections are purely theoretical, whereas the second and third provide facts on the social question, trade union activity, and tripartism (a neo-corporative institution, consisting of government, employers and unions) in the Czech Republic.
Czech and Czechoslovak Documents in the Hoover Institute Archive
Jan Kuklík & Jan Němeček This article is concerned with records on twentieth-century Czech and Czechoslovak history, which are deposited in the Hoover Institute Archive, Stanford, California. Apart from general information on the Czechoslovak holdings and on the archive and library of the Hoover Institute the authors discuss the collected papers of Eduard Taborský, Štefan Osuský, Juraj Slávik and Ladislav K. Feierabend, as well as mentioning the papers of Vladimír Krajina, Miroslav Schubert, Ivo Ducháček and Jaroslav Stránský.
Special attention is paid to documents concerning the Czechoslovak resistance abroad during World War II and to material on the politics of the Czechoslovak emigrés after the Communist takeover of February 1948. The authors compare the materials in the Hoover Institute with existing publications, including memoirs and scholarly literature, as well as with records from Czech archives.
This contribution concludes with samples from several documents, which illustrate the nature of the individual collections. Among them is a draft letter from Osuský to Rudolf Beran, congratulating him on being named Prime Minister; Edvard Beneš’s preface to an unpublished book, In the Fight for Peace and Freedom; Táborský’s notes on Beneš’s talks with Robert Bruce Lockhart in April 1941; Beneš’s notes on talks with Alexander J. Korneychuk, 28 November to 1 December 1943; Slávik’s notes on talks with Beneš, from 4 August 1945, on Slávik’s candidacy for a seat in the provisional National Assembly; and a letter from Josef Voženílek and Břetislav Morávek to Osuský, dated 11 September 1948.
Testimony to the Breakup of the ‘Socialist Commonwealth’:
From the Memoirs of Mikhail Gorbachev, Vadim Medvedev and Valerii Musatov
Vilém Prečan
These excerpts from the memoirs of three Soviet politicians have been selected, introduced, and provided with footnotes by Vilém Prečan. In his introduction, Prečan states that his intention here is to make more Czechs than just the small number of historians and political scientists aware of the documentary value of these memoirs by Soviet politicians. Despite a certain degree of self-stylization, typical of this kind of literature, these works represent important personal testimony by leading actors in important historical events, valuable historical sources that are often still the sole source of information on events of extraordinary importance. There is, therefore, a danger that the interpretation of events related to Czechoslovakia in these memoirs might be unquestioningly accepted by others, and it behooves those best equipped to comment on them, namely Czech and Slovak historians, not to remain silent.
The second impulse for translating and publishing these excerpts was the deficient state of Czech research on the last phase of the Soviet era (1985–91), which is connected chiefly with the name Mikhail Gorbachev. The dissolution of the outer areas of the Soviet empire and the collapse of the Communist régimes throughout Europe were part of the events in Czech society at the time and of the history of the Czechoslovak state. Prečan states that reasons why this topic is studied so little in the Czech Republic are to be found less in historiography than in the current state of Czech society. This, however, does not relieve historians of their professional duty, particularly on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the ‘annus mirabilis’, when the topic is about to become the point of interest for political commentary and politically-charged interpretation. Without knowledge of the contemporaneous international context one cannot satisfactorily explain the entire complex of factors influencing the democratic revolution in Czechoslovakia and many other key events during it, nor can one properly participate in the current international professional discourse on the final stage of the Cold War.
Three excerpts have been chosen here from Gorbachev’s Zhizn i reformy [Life and reforms]. The chapter titled ‘The End of the "Brezhnev Doctrine"’ describes how leaders in the East bloc countries reacted to perestroika; the chapter ‘Czechoslovakia: The ‘68 Syndrome’ provides us with Gorbachev’s view of political developments within Czechoslovakia from the mid-1980s on, including his view of some Czechoslovak politicians such as Gustáv Husák, Václav Havel and Alexander Dubček; the last excerpt contains Gorbachev’s analysis of the disintegration of the ‘socialist commonwealth’. The chapter ‘The ‘68 Syndrome’, from Vadim Medvedev’s Raspad: Kak on nazreval v ‘mirovoy sisteme socializma’[The break-up: How it developed in the ‘international system of socialism’] mainly discusses the constellation of forces and the power struggles in the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and captures the atmosphere during Gorbachev’s visit to Prague in April 1987. The excerpt from the Valerii Musatov’s Predvestniki buri: Politicheskiye krizisy v Vostochnoi Yevrope (1956–1981) [Forecasters of the storm: Political crises in Eastern Europe, 1956 mission to Prague in late November 1989]. All three authors are in agreement on one thing, namely that the USSR during the Gorbachev era consistently implemented its policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of its allies, including Czechoslovakia. In addition to the memoir material, there is also an excerpt from talks between Gorbachev and Miloš Jakeš, held in Moscow on 11 January 1988.
Contributors
Milan Drápala (1964) has been a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, since 1990. His chief academic interest is the political activity of the Czech cultural élite from the 1930s onwards.
Jan Gorenčík (1970) is a graduate of the Natural Sciences and Arts Faculties of Charles University, Prague. During his university studies he began to focus on contemporary Czechoslovak economic and social history.
František Kautman (1927) is a literary historian and fiction writer. He is particularly concerned with the theory of interpretation of a work of literature, and the comparative study of Czech, Russian and German literature. His recently published work includes Svět Franze Kafky (1991), Dostojevskij, věčný problém člověka (1992), and K typologii literární kritiky a literární vědy (1996).
Jiří Knapík (1975) is in his fourth year of the history programme at the University of Opava. His special interest is Czechoslovak cultural policy from 1945 onwards. He has published in regional journals and the revue Proglas.
Jan Kuklík (1967) is a Lecturer in the Department of Legal History, at the Law School of Charles University, Prague. He specializes in the history of Czechoslovak jurisprudence from 1918 to 1945. He is the author of Vznik Československého národního výboru a Prozatímního státního zřízení ČSR v emigraci v letech 1939–1940 (1996).
Pavel Marek (1949) is employed in the Department of Political Science and European Studies, the Faculty of Arts, Palacký University, Olomouc. His area of special interest is political and cultural history from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. At present he is concerned with the politicization of the middle classes.
Pavol Martuliak (1939) is Docent in the Department of History, at the University of Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. He specializes in Slovak and Czech history in the interwar period and from 1945 onwards.
Jan Měchýř (1930) is Docent in the Institute of Economic and Social History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. He is particularly interested in Czechoslovakia from 1945 onwards.
Jan Němeček (1963) is a Researcher in the Historical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His interests include the Czechoslovak resistance abroad during World War II. With the Institute of International Relations, he has also taken part in the preparation of volumes of documents on Czechoslovak diplomacy.
Vilém Prečan (1933) is co-founder and, until June 1998, Director of the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague. He special interest is Czechoslovak history in the European context from the Munich Agreement of 1938 to the present.
Ivan Skála (1922–1997) was a poet, Communist functionary, and long-time editor of Rudé právo as well as in the publishing houses Mladá fronta and Československý spisovatel. In the 1950s he was a prominent author of verse for political agitation; 1960–71 a deputy of the Federal Assembly; 1962–72 a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; in the seventies and eighties he was active in re-establishing strict Communist rule in the arts, and in 1982 became Chairman of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union.
Karl Stuhlpfarrer (1941) is Professor of History in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, University of Vienna. His special interest is Central European history. Among his publications is the two-volume Umsiedlung Südtirol 1939–40 (Vienna 1985).
