Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Czechoslovakia
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
The Czechoslovak Review
Author: Czechoslovakia
Author: Mary HeimannPublisher:
ISBN: 9780300141474
Category : Czechoslovakia
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
A revisionist history, this volume sets out to debunk many of the myths about Czechoslovakia.
A Czech Dreambook
Author: Ludvík VaculíkPublisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN: 8024638525
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 576
Book Description
It’s 1979 in Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing restoration of repressive communism known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writer’s block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his last novel, and even longer since he wrote the 1968 manifesto, "Two Thousand Words,” which the Soviet Union used as one of the pretexts for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of a friend, Vaculík begins to keep a diary: "a book about things, people and events.” Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculík has written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction – an inverted roman à clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, the secret police and leading figures of the Czech underground play major roles.
The Czech Black Book
Author: Historický ústav (Československá akademie věd)Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Czechoslovakia
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
This is an hour-by-hour account of the fall of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact armies in 1968.
Avant-garde to New Wave
Author: Jonathan L. OwenPublisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9780857451279
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
The cultural liberalization of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s produced many artistic accomplishments, not least the celebrated films of the Czech New Wave. This movement saw filmmakers use their new freedom to engage with traditions of the avant-garde, especially Surrealism. This book explores the avant-garde's influence over the New Wave and considers the political implications of that influence. The close analysis of selected films, ranging from the Oscar-winning Closely Observed Trains to the aesthetically challenging Daisies, is contextualized by an account of the Czech avant-garde and a discussion of the films' immediate cultural and political background.
Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands
Author: Eagle GlassheimPublisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
In this innovative study of the aftermath of ethnic cleansing, Eagle Glassheim examines the transformation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland from the end of the Second World War, through the Cold War, and into the twenty-first century. Prior to their expulsion in 1945, ethnic Germans had inhabited the Sudeten borderlands for hundreds of years, with deeply rooted local cultures and close, if sometimes tense, ties with Bohemia’s Czech majority. Cynically, if largely willingly, harnessed by Hitler in 1938 to his pursuit of a Greater Germany, the Sudetenland’s three million Germans became the focus of Czech authorities in their retributive efforts to remove an alien ethnic element from the body politic—and claim the spoils of this coal-rich, industrialized area. Yet, as Glassheim reveals, socialist efforts to create a modern utopia in the newly resettled “frontier” territories proved exceedingly difficult. Many borderland regions remained sparsely populated, peppered with dilapidated and abandoned houses, and hobbled by decaying infrastructure. In the more densely populated northern districts, coalmines, chemical works, and power plants scarred the land and spewed toxic gases into the air. What once was a diverse religious, cultural, economic, and linguistic “contact zone,” became, according to many observers, a scarred wasteland, both physically and psychologically. Glassheim offers new perspectives on the struggles of reclaiming ethnically cleansed lands in light of utopian dreams and dystopian realities—brought on by the uprooting of cultures, the loss of communities, and the industrial degradation of a once-thriving region. To Glassheim, the lessons drawn from the Sudetenland speak to the deep social traumas and environmental pathologies wrought by both ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored modernization processes that accelerated across Europe as a result of the great wars of the twentieth century.
The Czechoslovak New Wave
Author: Peter HamesPublisher: Wallflower Press
ISBN: 9781904764427
Category : Czechoslovakia
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
This study of the most significant movement in post-war Central and East European cinema examines the origins and development of Czechoslovakian film during this time, as well as the political and cultural changes which influenced some of the most important works.
Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler
Author: Igor LukesPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199762058
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
The Munich crisis of 1938, in which Great Britain and France decided to appease Hitler's demands to annex the Sudentenland, has provoked a vast amount of historical writing. The era has been thoroughly examined from the perspectives of Germans, French, and British political establishments. But historians have had, until now, only a vague understanding of the roles played by the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, the country whose very existence was at the very center of the crisis. In Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler, Igor Lukes explores this turbulent and tragic era from the new perspective of the Prague government itself. At the center of this study is Edvard Benes, a Czechoslovak foreign policy strategist and a major player in the political machinations of the era. The work looks at the first two decades of Benes's diplomacy and analyzes the Prague Government's attempts to secure the existence of the Republic of Czechoslovakia in the treacherous space between the millstones of the East and West. It studies Benes's relationship with Joseph Stalin, outlines the role assigned to Czechoslovak communists by the VIIth Congress of the Communist International in 1935, and dissects Prague's secret negotiations with Berlin and Benes's role in the famous Tukhachevsky affair. The work also brings evidence regarding the so-called partial mobilization of the Czechoslovak army in May 1938, and focuses on Stalin's strategic thinking on the eve of the World War II. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was difficult for Western researchers to gain access to the rich archival collections of the East. Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler makes ample use of these secret archives, both in Prague and in Russia. As a result, it is an accurate and original rendition of the events which eventually sparked the Second World War.
The Last Palace
Author: Norman EisenPublisher: Crown
ISBN: 0451495799
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Book Description
A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa’s greatest houses—and the lives of its occupants When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador’s residence in Prague, returning to the land his mother had fled after the Holocaust, he was startled to discover swastikas hidden beneath the furniture in his new home. These symbols of Nazi Germany were remnants of the residence’s forgotten history, and evidence that we never live far from the past. From that discovery unspooled the twisting, captivating tale of four of the remarkable people who had called this palace home. Their story is Europe’s, and The Last Palace chronicles the upheavals that transformed the continent over the past century. There was the optimistic Jewish financial baron, Otto Petschek, who built the palace after World War I as a statement of his faith in democracy, only to have that faith shattered; Rudolf Toussaint, the cultured, compromised German general who occupied the palace during World War II, ultimately putting his life at risk to save the house and Prague itself from destruction; Laurence Steinhardt, the first postwar US ambassador whose quixotic struggle to keep the palace out of Communist hands was paired with his pitched efforts to rescue the country from Soviet domination; and Shirley Temple Black, an eyewitness to the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring by Soviet tanks, who determined to return to Prague and help end totalitarianism—and did just that as US ambassador in 1989. Weaving in the life of Eisen’s own mother to demonstrate how those without power and privilege moved through history, The Last Palace tells the dramatic and surprisingly cyclical tale of the triumph of liberal democracy.
Elusive Equality
Author: Melissa FeinbergPublisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822971038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
Examines debates over women's rights in the first half of the twentieth century, to show how Czechs gradually turned away from democracy and established the separation of state and domestic issues, at the expense of personal freedoms.