Lost Youth in Army Records
We invite you to the traveling exhibition Lost Youth in Army Records, which will take place from November 3 to December 31, 2025, at the South Bohemian Research Library (Lidická 1, České Budějovice) and is free of charge.
A team of authors (J. Hlaváček, M. Fišer, L. Krátká, T. Kykal, P. Mücke, P. Tomek) presents compulsory military service in the Czech lands (1868–2004) through official sources that reveal not only the mechanisms of state control, but also the everyday experiences, physicality, and identity of conscripts across regimes – from the monarchy to the democratic army after 1989.
Since May of this year, the exhibition has been seen by more than 22,000 visitors at various locations throughout the Czech Republic, from the early modern palace in Opava, to the fortress museums in Králíky and Dobrošov, to its current stop in the modern premises of the South Bohemian Research Library in České Budějovice.
The exhibition catalog can be found here.
The exhibition was created as part of a project financially supported by the Ministry of Culture under NAKI III – a program to support applied research in the field of national and cultural identity for the years 2023 to 2030 (2023–2030) and is registered in the Central Project Register under number DH23P03OVV054.