Czech Academy of Sciences, Masaryk Institute and Archives

The article explores the role that the uniformed physical violence played in the creation of the new order in Czechoslovakia and Austria immediately after the First World War.

The article analyzes the development and the current state of the research about the Holocaust on the territory of the Czech Republic. It highlights the historiographic gap after the demise of the Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente (and after the death of the historian Miroslav Kárný) and highlights the surviving ethnonational and traditional framings of the narratives of the Holocaust of Bohemian and Moravian Jews.

The essay is devoted to the specifics of the contemporary Russian opposition and civil society. We describe the characteristics of contemporary ‘intellectual activism’ and the growing network of small civil and political groups in today’s Russia. We show that Russian civil society remains fragile and fragmented; the public discussion is not focused on strategies of resistance to arbitrariness but on constructing moral categories such as the wide and vague concept of ‘new ethics’. We also show how outsiders appear among contemporary Russian dissidents, who are not supported by most independent leaders and intellectuals – these are young ‘new leftists’ and feminist activist groups. These political activists find themselves under pressure from both the siloviki and the authorities, and in the focus of criticism of opposition leaders, becoming, in fact, dissidents among dissidents in contemporary Russia.

In an ongoing effort to understand what led to the crime of the Holocaust and why Jews were its target, researchers across various disciplines do not relent in providing new insights. The book by Andrew Kornbluth adds more structure to this joint endeavor to comprehend the Shoah as it zooms in on the enthusiastic complicity of local communities in the genocide conducted by the Germans in occupied Poland. It is based on many years of comparative studies of court case records regarding the Decree of August 31, 1944. In the actual effect until 1956, the decree made it possible to put on trial persons suspected of collaboration with the Germans, including those helping Germans murder Jews. Already vastly explored in earlier works by researchers such as Jan T. Gross, Barbara Engelking, Jan Grabowski, and Dariusz Libionka, as well as in other forms of powerful narrative (e.g., Henryk Grynberg's Dziedzictwo [Heritage, 1993], Piotr Łoziński's Birthplace [1992], and Piotr Chrzan's Klezmer [2015]), the nature of Poles’ complicity in the Holocaust was further specified in Kornbluth's book. This, however, happened while attempting to accomplish another research objective declared by the author. The primary focus was to examine the August Decree trials (so-called “sierpniówki”) in view of Polish State's attempts to come to terms with the violent past in the wake of the war. In the author's opinion, the nature and results of that reckoning with the past have reverberated in social and political attitudes in the country ever since.Despite a certain frugality with words, many titles of the book's ten chapters speak volumes, as in: “The Country Without a Quisling?” (introduction), “There Are Many Cains Among Us,” “Crowdsourcing Genocide,” “The Math of Amnesty,” or “The Conspiracy of Memory” (conclusion). What adds to the overall effect are powerful subheadings and evocative turns of phrases, such as “genocidal conveyor belt” (referring to rural denunciation and capture, pp. 66, 203) or the one about Germans whose insufficient presence in the Polish countryside effectively prevented them from combing the forests: they were therefore “outsourcing their workaday business of genocide” (p. 6) to “ordinary men,” that is, this time Polish, not German, policemen, firefighters, and village headmen.Based on research of 400 trials (concerning territories under German-ruled Generalgouvernement in Poland), Kornbluth establishes clear differences in crimes committed by Poles against their fellow citizens, depending on whether the victims were Christian or Jews. Crimes against Christians were rather rare and meant to settle scores between individuals, with perpetrators facing ostracism and risking vengeance from the Polish Underground. That same Underground, as court documentation shows, often instigated crimes against Jews. According to Kornbluth, both indirect and direct crimes by Polish Christians against their Jewish fellow citizens (i.e., denunciation, or physical elimination during which Germans were not even present) had all the trappings of ethnic cleansing. They were frequently an organized effort and free of stigma at the time of its occurrence. It was only after the war when perpetrators and witnesses of those crimes had to confront the memory of not only the German, but Polish crimes on Jews: “whereas crimes against Poles drove people apart, crimes against Jews brought people together, had a solidarizing effect, Jewish property was redistributed, guilt apportioned among numerous participants” (pp. 39, 148).As demonstrated earlier by Christopher Browning, genocide carried out by the Germans was not always characterized by anonymity and the use of the most modern means. It was conducted from behind the desk as much as directly, by bakers or cigarette sellers pulling the trigger and looking the victim in the eye. Polish “ordinary men” were guilty of a crime of an incomparably smaller scale, but of more intimate nature as they often attacked their own neighbors and acquaintances, and with the so-called low-tech (killing) tools for daily use as a pitchfork, axe, or hammer.Both the book by Kornbluth and the August trials have three sets of actors: the tormentors, that is, Christian Poles persecuting Jewish Poles (but solely in the countryside, with the word szmalcownik and the “urban” context virtually and remarkably absent from the narrative), the judges passing sentences after the war and the victims, that is, Jews. Of those three groups, judges are given the most attention, with Jewish victims and witnesses receiving considerably less of it. Kornbluth justifies these proportions by pointing to the fact that Jewish witnesses hardly had their voice heard during the trials (important in the context of the current dispute over these sources). Following the pogrom in Kielce, Jews would flee Poland in the midst of trials and refuse to testify in Eastern Poland out of fear of being identified by somebody who had known them before the war. On top of that, they had no confidence in the justice system. One can decide whether they were right to be suspicious by reading the chapters dedicated to the judges and the challenges that awaited them in the aftermath of the war.Kornbluth aptly describes the amount of damage that the Polish justice system suffered as a result of the war. On top of destroyed judicial infrastructure (even the most basic legal bulletins were nowhere to be found) and a drastic shortage of staff (a third of the legal profession perished in the war; for example, Białystok had only one prewar judge left), there were also legal and procedural hurdles associated with decisions in cases without a precedent. There were no laws against denunciation or escorting Jews to a German police station (hence the necessity to find a way around the legality principle nullus crimes sine lege).That said, Kornbluth's key argument, which in my view requires a more structured formulation, is that of a “fiercely independent judiciary” (p. 269). According to the book's author, shortage of staff coupled with the sense of lack of political legitimacy, made the postwar justice system less than fussy when it came to judges. Prewar right-wingers were welcome, irrespective of their anti-Jewish bias and the impact thereof on verdicts in collaboration and accessory to murder cases. Taking a closer look at selected bios of judges involved in the August trials (most insightful passages concern the Jewish judges), Kornbluth challenges the popular belief that “all justice in the communist Poland was Stalinist justice” (p. 10), represented by Communist judges hellbent on eradicating the Underground by any means necessary (during secret and show trials).The August trials resulted in a string of death and prison sentences. However, the analysis of court records and its findings allowed Kornbluth to produce an impressively long list of reasons why the judges failed to make sure that proper justice was served after the war. The political profile of many of the judges was just the tip of the iceberg. Both the State and the public had very good reasons for not going all the way with facing up to the past, as well as for “codifying a variety of exculpatory myths about the war” (p. 267) that have held a tight grip on the Polish public opinion ever since. The Communist regime did not want to further alienate its subjects by pressing the issue of their role as perpetrators. The public would rather nurture the sense of victimhood than reflect upon itself, partly out of fear of the gruesome findings. In part, however, due to the lack of remorse and the still prevailing mechanism of scapegoating Jews for whatever misfortune befell them.The list of mitigating circumstances put forward by the defendants and some of the judges is certainly an important finding and the book's strong feature. It includes a figure of the Jew as “the threatening victim” and “Jews as criminals.” Prevalence of wartime violence was considered a mitigating factor too, which led to a diffusion of individual culpability whenever a group was involved in a violent act. In the trials, the Blue Police was often portrayed as “helpless pawns” devoid of agency; some went even further, arguing that it was better for Jews to be beaten up by Poles than by Germans, thus turning an act of violence into a “crime out of compassion.”The book on such a topic cannot paint but a thoroughly depressing picture of those times. Could it be the need to seek consolation (but not symmetry) or perhaps the awareness of multiple exceptions to the rule, both during and after the war, that makes a reader look for an occasional recognition, or at least some reference to whatever little good was done for the Jewish fellow citizens in those turbulent times? Due to its important message, suggestive and impressive rhetoric, it would be a great loss if the book distanced those who in historiography value grays over black and white.While that was not its primary objective, Kornbluth's book fills in the gaps in our growing knowledge of the nature of Christian next-door neighbors’ participation in the Nazi genocide. It does so by shedding light on the history of the postwar justice system in Poland. A pertinent input into an ongoing debate around Poland's efforts to grapple with the past (Kornbluth's calls for rethinking the term “collaboration”), the book offers also valuable contribution to comparative analysis of how the various postwar justice systems tried both high-profile war criminals and so-called ordinary people.1

The transition from the administrative system of the Habsburg monarchy to that of the successor nation-states after World War I has traditionally been analysed in terms of discontinuity, or even rupture. In our research, which focuses on the specific case of Transylvania, we demonstrate that both the development of a centralised administrative system and the relationship between the state authority and local autonomies were characterised by continuity rather than change. In both the Hungarian and the Romanian state, the key institution involved in the process of diminishing local self-government was the representative of the central power in the territory (the lord lieutenant until 1918 and later the prefect). The gradual expansion of his prerogatives over institutions and county officials began in Hungary in the early 1870s, and continued until the interwar period in Romania; this was a process that extended beyond the changes in the political and state regime in 1918. Thus, for interwar Transylvania, administrative centralisation in the French tradition did not represent a paradigm shift, but instead the continuation and acceleration of an already quite advanced process that the Hungarian state, which had been eager to modernise its administrative structures, had already introduced 50 years earlier.

This article probes the consequences of basing post–World War I citizenship regimes on the Habsburg imperial network system for the control of mobility, a system known among specialists as Heimatrecht or pertinency. To date most of the historiography has focused on what this meant for national minorities in nationalizing states, with the most important studies thus far looking at the experience of Jews in Austria and Poland. We argue that though the national exclusionary tools of postwar pertinency are of undoubted importance, a larger, social trauma was experienced through post-Habsburg Europe, one that affected far more people and left many facing the consequences of potential statelessness. This article focuses on how postwar pertinency affected the worlds of work, welfare, and expulsion in the immigrant-rich industrial port town of Fiume, Europe’s smallest postwar successor state.

Given that two dramatically different refugee regimens have developed along Poland’s eastern border, this essay explores the social conditions and discourses that facilitate such a radically different treatment of people. The Polish state’s violation of human rights on the Belarusian section of the border and the celebration of these rights on its Ukrainian section have become part of media spectacles. This text analyses both the technical and content-related issues of communication about migrants and refugees from the Global South. It includes typologies of attributional biases in the media towards people on the move, discusses their functions and the ways towards a normalisation of violence. The final section historicises the current negative responses to refugees and sets them in the wider context of the uneasy obligations imposed on the “West” by its professed values. In doing so, this essay touches upon questions not only of a sense of social responsibility, but also of actual responsibility for the people who have died in Polish forests and rivers.

2021 saw the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there is a growing interest in the historicization of the past 30 years of transformation. Taking this anniversary as a point of departure, we want to look into a specific area that has markedly changed in the last three decades – the scholarly community. The interest of analysing the academia in a period of transformation is not new, and the 1990s are amply covered by the literature scrutinising changes and forging plans for the future development, but we intend to enrich this discussion with approaches coming from the history of science and of scholarship. By looking at changes that happened in the decade following the end of the Socialist utopia, we propose to look into mechanisms of organizational and intellectual innovation and place them in the context of European and global integration. As we argue, looking at the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe can help us to understand how scholarly systems change by oscillating between tradition and innovation, and we propose the notions of a selective Westernisation and an equally selective traditionalism for our case study.

The emergence of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) in Europe marked several significant milestones. The discovery of TBE in Czechoslovakia in 1948, with Gallia and Krejčí simultaneously isolating the TBE virus (TBEV) from human samples for the first time in Europe outside the Soviet Union, was pivotal. Subsequent TBEV isolation from ticks suggested the viral transmission via this vector. In 1951, the outbreak in Rožňava in Slovakia (Czechoslovakia) revealed an unexpected mode of transmission, unpasteurized milk from a local dairy, challenging existing understanding. Investigations exposed illicit practices of mixing cow's milk with goat's milk for economic gains. Laboratory research confirmed the outbreak was caused by TBEV, which was substantiated by serological analyses. This was the first and largest documented alimentary TBE outbreak in history. In this review, we delve into both published sources and unpublished archival data, offering a comprehensive understanding of these historic accomplishments and shedding light on these pivotal moments.

Abstract This book uses violence as a prism through which to investigate the profound social, cultural, and political changes experienced by (post-) Habsburg Central Europe during and immediately after the Great War. It compares attitudes toward, and experiences and practices of, physical violence in the mostly Czech-speaking territories of Bohemia and Moravia, the German-speaking territories that would constitute the Republic of Austria after 1918, and the mostly German-speaking region of South Tyrol. Based on research in national and local archives and copious secondary literature, the book argues that, in the context of total war, physical violence became a predominant means of conceptualizing and expressing social-political demands as well as a means of demarcating various notions of community and belonging. The authors apply an interdisciplinary understanding of violence informed by sociological and psychological theories as well as by rigorous empirical historiographical approach. First, they examine the most severe kind of physical violence—murder—against the backdrop of shifting scientific and media discourses during the war and its immediate aftermath. Second, the authors use numerous cases of collective violence, ranging from less serious everyday conflicts to massive hunger demonstrations and riots, to unravel its “language,” thus deciphering the attitudes and values shared among an ever-growing group of perpetrators. This book thus fundamentally rethinks some key topics currently debated in the scholarship on early twentieth century Central Europe, the First World War, violence, nationalism, and modern European comparative social and cultural history.

Ořechov IV je lokalita bohunicienu ležící v Bobravské vrchovině, přibližně 7 km jihozápadně od Bohunic, tedy již mimo vlastní brněnskou kotlinu. Po mnoho let (od objevu na počátku 20. století) byla známá jako povrchová lokalita, v průběhu několika posledních let na ní však byla objevena dvě místa s intaktními situacemi. Poloha byla zřejmě opakovaně osídlována na počátku mladého paleolitu, a představuje tak palimpsest. Předběžné analýzy naznačují přítomnost mladého bohunicienu, který se chronologicky i technologicky odlišuje od dosud známých lokalit bohunicienu v Bohunicích a na Stránské skále.

Digital methods and tools for the humanities also change historical research into the Holocaust. The European funded Holocaust project EHRI has developed various digital tools and methods that facilitate Holocaust research. This paper will describe a number of them and discuss how they affect scholarship into the annihilation of European Jews.

Academic reviewing, one of the communal academic practices, is a vital genre, in which epistemic virtues have been cultivated. In our article, we discuss reviews as a form of institutionalized critique, which historians could use to trace the changing epistemic virtues within humanities. We propose to use them analogously to Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s treatment of atlases in their seminal work Objectivity as a marker of changing epistemic virtues in natural sciences and medicine. Based on Aristotle’s virtue theory and its neo-Aristotelian interpretation in the second half of the 20th century, as well as on its most recent applications in the field of history and philosophy of science, we propose a general conceptual framework for analyzing reviews in their historical dimension. Besides, we contend that the analysis of reviews should be carried out taking into account their historical context of social, political, cultural and media-environment. Otherwise, one may risks presupposing the existence of an autonomous, disconnected community of scholars.

While the history of science in Polish language has a long history, both intellectual and institutional, it became less visible internationally following the fall of the Iron Curtain. This article looks into the institutional state of history-of-science writing in Poland, and discusses several key focal points that emerged in recent years. By distinguishing between the core history of science, written at institutions devoted to this discipline, and broader academic discussions concerning science's past, I claim that, in recent decades, more important topical and theoretical innovation has come from what we can term the “esoteric” circle (referring to Ludwik Fleck)—that is, scholars who do not identify themselves as historians of science. Given that those scholars from abroad who are interested in Polish history of science are in fact general historians, we get a strong impression that we are witnessing a deeper turn in the field, one with diminishing specialization and greater attention paid to situating science in a broader range of societal processes.

Abstract Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the only socialist country that participated in the Western-led international refugee regime and acted as a transit zone for refugees hoping to reach the Western Bloc. Those transiting were mainly, but not exclusively, escapees from various countries in the Soviet bloc. A few refugee groups also settled in Yugoslavia against the backdrop of shifts in international constellations, tense relationships with neighboring countries, and transnational mobilizations. This article will first investigate the dichotomy between transit and the few instances of refugees integrating into socialist Yugoslavia. Next, it will investigate the ease of the resettlement process by exploring how the length of time spent in the country was influenced by hierarchies among different refugee groups based on ethnic origin, political allegiances, class, and which opportunities for resettlement were available to whom. Finally, it will reflect on how the changing role of temporary refuge or permanent haven that Yugoslavia ascribed to itself was constructed and challenged by the host society, potential countries of resettlement, and the refugees themselves.

Abstract This article discusses the public violence that occurred in the Bohemian lands after the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918. It follows the tension between the self-empowered people, who expected a profound change in their daily lives, and the state, which sought stabilisation through the continuity of institutions. Using the examples of the Železná Ruda mutiny in July 1919 and the workers’ general strike in December 1920, the article shows that public violence was relatively easily manageable by a combination of negotiations and force, for it did not pursue a clear vision opposing Czechoslovakia but rather tried to participate in its formation.

Julian Ochorowicz (1850-1917) belonged to the first generation of psychologists who regarded this discipline as a scientific, positive endeavor. At the same time, he was a representative of psychic sciences, following a strictly positivist attitude to researching psychic phenomena. This article discusses the key event of his career, experiments with the famous medium Eusapia Palladino, in Warsaw, between late 1893 and early 1894. Ochorowicz's séances with Palladino attracted wide local and international attention and improved his standing as an internationally leading psychic researcher. In Warsaw, however, these experiments were fiercely controversial and, as a result, Ochorowicz was discredited and left the city. As I argue, this dissociation of credibilities was the outcome of a changing media landscape in the late nineteenth century. While Ochorowicz's strategy of boundary-work and asserting his credibility aimed at scholarly media, it proved fatal when facing intensive, daily coverage in the popular press.

This article deals with the relationship between the democratic transformations in Czechoslovakia after 1918 and 1989 and the armed forces. The democratic ideal of transformation seemed to be alien to the military institution, which upheld the old regime and paradigmatically represented undemocratic patterns of governance. In order to accommodate the popular demand to ‘abolish’ the army, the new political elite strived to initiate an institutional transformation that would re-legitimize the armed forces. Whereas after 1918 the military improved its reputation by changing into a ‘school of nation’, after 1989 the military, expected to become fully professional, went through a period in which its inner organisational culture was liberalized and personal freedoms of the soldiers were strengthened. The decline of previous authorities and the rise of civic self-confidence connected to the process of democratisation also led to the demoralisation of the soldiers. The liminal phase of military transformation was marked by the experience of the first ‘post-war war’, the Czechoslovak-Hungarian War in 1919 and the Gulf War in 1991, which indicated the needs of the new security environment and gave the idealistic thinking about the democratic military a touch of reality.

It has been previously proposed that syllable and word boundaries in Gregorian chant texts can be used to segment chant melodies in a more meaningful way than segmentation methods that do not take textual information into account, based on how accurately the mode of a melody can be determined from the presence of such melodic segments. This was evidenced by empirical measurements on antiphons and responsories with fully transcribed melodies available from the Cantus database. We show that for antiphons, however, this result does not hold, as in these experiments, differentiae were not removed from the transcribed melodies. With appropriate data cleaning, the modality of a melody can be determined from segments that ignore textual boundaries just as accurately, and the resulting classification scores are not significantly better than those obtained from pitch profiles. Thus, while the idea is clearly attractive, there is currently no reason to suspect that textual boundaries lead to a more meaningful segmentation of chant melodies.

The 1930s and 1940s were a formative period in the development of family policy as a relatively independent branch of the state’s social policy in the Bohemian lands. During this time, several political regimes followed one another (liberal democracy, a conservative authoritative regime, the national socialism of the occupation, and postwar people’s democracy). Despite these political changes, family policy was determined by the discourse of the waning Western industrial society and intensifying nationalism throughout the period in question. The articulation of the national threat created the conditions necessary for active state intervention in the sphere of marital cohabitation and managed support of population growth. This entailed compensating families for preserving the nation as a whole by giving birth to a populous new generation. These efforts were often in conflict with the movement for equality among men and women and increased women’s participation in the labor market. The first part of this article describes the discourse of the nation under threat and its political consequences. The second half focuses on the formation of the social reform consensus during the Second World War and after peace was restored. The third part confronts experts’ proposals with political practice: despite the low number of positive legislative measures, this analysis reveals the evident continuity of efforts to create a conceptual, state-led family policy regardless of the vastly different ideologies of the political regimes mentioned.