Download or read book Czech German and Noble written by Rita Krueger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Czech, German, and Noble examines the Habsburg realm, finding that the nobility, which presumably would be the most resistant to change, rather than intellectuals, were the driving force behind the creation of a Czech national identity.

Download or read book Noble Nationalists written by Eagle Glassheim and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illuminating study examines the dramatic transformation of Bohemian noble identity from the rise of mass politics in the late nineteenth century to the descent of the Iron Curtain after World War II. At the turn of the twentieth century, some 300 noble families owned over a third of the Habsburg Bohemian Crownlands. With the Empire's demise in 1918, the once powerful Bohemian nobility quickly became a target of the nationalist revolution sweeping the new Czechoslovak state. Eagle Glassheim traces the evolving efforts of the nobles to define their place in this revolutionary new order. Nobles saw little choice but to ally with Czech and German national parties, initially in the hopes of assuaging radical land reform. Yet they retained aristocratic political and social traditions that continued to shape their national identities after 1918. Some moved toward a hybrid national identification, embracing a form of German internationalism and a vision of pan-European unity that led many to support Hitler's expansionist efforts in the late 1930s. Others trumpeted their new-found Czech nationalism in resisting the Nazi occupation. Noble Nationalists offers valuable insights on the nationalization of a conservative political elite, as well as on the national and social revolutions that recast Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Noble Nationalists written by Eagle Glassheim and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illuminating study examines the dramatic transformation of Bohemian noble identity from the rise of mass politics in the late nineteenth century to the descent of the Iron Curtain after World War II. At the turn of the twentieth century, some 300 noble families owned over a third of the Habsburg Bohemian Crownlands. With the Empire's demise in 1918, the once powerful Bohemian nobility quickly became a target of the nationalist revolution sweeping the new Czechoslovak state. Eagle Glassheim traces the evolving efforts of the nobles to define their place in this revolutionary new order. Nobles saw little choice but to ally with Czech and German national parties, initially in the hopes of assuaging radical land reform. Yet they retained aristocratic political and social traditions that continued to shape their national identities after 1918. Some moved toward a hybrid national identification, embracing a form of German internationalism and a vision of pan-European unity that led many to support Hitler's expansionist efforts in the late 1930s. Others trumpeted their new-found Czech nationalism in resisting the Nazi occupation. Noble Nationalists offers valuable insights on the nationalization of a conservative political elite, as well as on the national and social revolutions that recast Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Prague in Black written by Chad Bryant and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1938, the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany. Six months later, Hitler’s troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—the first non-German territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Chad Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its consequences for the region. To make the Protectorate German, half the Czech population (and all Jews) would be expelled or killed, with the other half assimilated into a German national community with the correct racial and cultural composition. With the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich, Germanization measures accelerated. People faced mounting pressure from all sides. The Nazis required their subjects to act (and speak) German, while Czech patriots, and exiled leaders, pressed their countrymen to act as “good Czechs.” By destroying democratic institutions, harnessing the economy, redefining citizenship, murdering the Jews, and creating a climate of terror, the Nazi occupation set the stage for the postwar expulsion of Czechoslovakia’s three million Germans and for the Communists’ rise to power in 1948. The region, Bryant shows, became entirely Czech, but not before Nazi rulers and their postwar successors had changed forever what it meant to be Czech, or German.

Download or read book Prague in Danger written by Peter Demetz and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2009-04-14 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's great capital during the Nazi Protectorate With this successor book to Prague in Black and Gold, his account of more than a thousand years of Central European history, the great scholar Peter Demetz focuses on just six short years—a tormented, tragic, and unforgettable time. He was living in Prague then—a "first-degree half-Jew," according to the Nazis' terrible categories—and here he joins his objective chronicle of the city under German occupation with his personal memories of that period: from the bitter morning of March 15, 1939, when Hitler arrived from Berlin to set his seal on the Nazi takeover of the Czechoslovak government, until the liberation of Bohemia in April 1945, after long seasons of unimaginable suffering and pain. Demetz expertly interweaves a superb account of the German authorities' diplomatic, financial, and military machinations with a brilliant description of Prague's evolving resistance and underground opposition. Along with his private experiences, he offers the heretofore untold history of an effervescent, unstoppable Prague whose urbane heart went on beating despite the deportations, murders, cruelties, and violence: a Prague that kept its German- and Czech-language theaters open, its fabled film studios functioning, its young people in school and at work, and its newspapers on press. This complex, continually surprising book is filled with rare human detail and warmth, the gripping story of a great city meeting the dual challenge of occupation and of war.

Download or read book Budweisers into Czechs and Germans written by Jeremy King and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of a single town in Bohemia casts new light on nationalism in Central Europe between the Springtime of Nations in 1848 and the Cold War. Jeremy King tells the story of both German and Czech-speaking Budweis/Budæjovice, which belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy until 1918, and then to Czechoslovakia, Hitler's Third Reich, and Czechoslovakia again. Residents, at first simply "Budweisers," or Habsburg subjects with mostly local loyalties, gradually became Czechs or Germans. Who became Czech, though, and who German? What did it mean to be one or the other? In answering these questions, King shows how an epochal, region-wide contest for power found expression in Budweis/Budæjovice not only through elections but through clubs, schools, boycotts, breweries, a remarkable constitutional experiment, a couple of riots, and much more. In tracing the nationalization of politics from small and sometimes comic beginnings to the genocide and mass expulsions of the 1940s, he also rejects traditional interpretive frameworks. Writing not a national history but a history of nationhood, both Czech and German, King recovers a nonnational dimension to the past. Embodied locally by Budweisers and more generally by the Habsburg state, that dimension has long been blocked from view by a national rhetoric of race and ethnicity. King's Czech-Habsburg-German narrative, in addition to capturing the dynamism and complexity of Bohemian politics, participates in broader scholarly discussions concerning the nature of nationalism.

Download or read book Women as Essential Citizens in the Czech National Movement written by Dáša Francíková and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-05-31 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study uses the Czech national movement in the Austrian Empire between the late 1820s and the late 1850s to examine the complex set of social, physical, physiological, and moral requirements through which women became crucial social and political actors responsible for the existence of modern national communities. Situated within the larger frameworks of public and private spheres, contemporary Czech discussions of the positionality of women, and an understanding of the categories of gender and “woman” as fluid concepts, this book analyzes how Czech nationalists—in relation to and in comparison with other nineteenth-century nationalist movements—proposed that women become the central agents of the process to guarantee the continuity of the nation.

Download or read book Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria written by Laurence Cole and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria examines the interplay between popular patriotism and military culture in late imperial Austria. Laurence Cole suggests that two main questions should be asked regarding the western half of the Habsburg Monarchy during the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of war in 1914. Firstly, how far did imperial Austrian society experience a process of militarization comparable to that of other European countries? Secondly, how far did the military sphere foster popular patriotism in the multinational state? Various manifestations of military culture, including hero cults and, above all, military veterans associations, provide the main subject for analysis in this volume. After exploring the historical development of military culture in the Habsburg Monarchy, Cole explains how the long reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I constituted a decisive phase in the militarization of Austrian society, with the dynasty and state emphasizing the military's role as the locus of loyalty. Popular manifestations of military culture, such as the hero cult surrounding Field Marshal Radetzky and military veterans associations, complemented the official agenda in many respects. However, veterans associations in particular constituted a political mobilization of the lower middle and lower classes, who asserted their own interests and position in civil society, as is shown by case studies of regions of the Austrian state with significant Italian-speaking populations (Trentino and the Littoral). State attempts to assert greater control of veterans activities led to national and political opposition at a time when tensions over 'militarism' and foreign policy increased. Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria thus raises the question of whether the military was really a bulwark of the multinational state or rather a polarizing force in imperial Austrian society.

Download or read book Czechoslovakia in European History written by S. Harrison Thomson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1943, this volume aims to trace the development of several of the more acute problems of Czechoslovak life and history in a country which has been highly sensitive to the disturbances which have shaken the rest of Europe and which has never been far from the tumult and the clash of arms. Only through historical analysis and quiet explanation of the facts can we fairly judge, in the light of past event, the ultimate value of a free Czechoslovakia to a free Europe.

Download or read book The Square and the Tower written by Niall Ferguson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller. A brilliant recasting of the turning points in world history, including the one we're living through, as a collision between old power hierarchies and new social networks. “Captivating and compelling.” —The New York Times "Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book...In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind. Do it." —The Wall Street Journal “The Square and the Tower, in addition to being provocative history, may prove to be a bellwether work of the Internet Age.” —Christian Science Monitor Most history is hierarchical: it's about emperors, presidents, prime ministers and field marshals. It's about states, armies and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change? The 21st century has been hailed as the Age of Networks. However, in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks have always been with us, from the structure of the brain to the food chain, from the family tree to freemasonry. Throughout history, hierarchies housed in high towers have claimed to rule, but often real power has resided in the networks in the town square below. For it is networks that tend to innovate. And it is through networks that revolutionary ideas can contagiously spread. Just because conspiracy theorists like to fantasize about such networks doesn't mean they are not real. From the cults of ancient Rome to the dynasties of the Renaissance, from the founding fathers to Facebook, The Square and the Tower tells the story of the rise, fall and rise of networks, and shows how network theory--concepts such as clustering, degrees of separation, weak ties, contagions and phase transitions--can transform our understanding of both the past and the present. Just as The Ascent of Money put Wall Street into historical perspective, so The Square and the Tower does the same for Silicon Valley. And it offers a bold prediction about which hierarchies will withstand this latest wave of network disruption--and which will be toppled.

Download or read book From Peoples Into Nations written by John Connelly and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 968 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is a history of East Central Europe since the late eighteenth century, the region of Europe between German central Europe and Russia in the East. Connelly argues the region, for which it is frequently hard to define exact boundaries and which is sometimes treated country-by-country in a way seemingly separate from the broader trends of European history, was one of shared experience despite most of the peoples being divided by linguistic, geographic, and political barriers. Beginning in the 1780s, an unwitting Habsburg monarch -- Joseph II -- decreed that his subjects would use only German, as he hoped to mold a common nationality using German over the disparate subjects. Instead, he unleashed the energies and struggle for the emergence of new nations that pitted small peoples armed with an idea against empires. The author argues that the underlying national self-assertion which emerged under imperial rule in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries shows deep connections to subsequent histories, to the creation of nation states of the regions after World War I, the failure of democratic rule in these states during the interwar years, the submersion of the region under Nazi then Soviet rule after 1939, and to the reinvention of sovereign states (and then the break up of two of them) after 1989. The book interconnects major themes and country histories for first time, chronicling this diverse region over many generations, from the time of Joseph, through democratic and socialist revolutions, genocide and Stalinism, through civil society movements struggling for liberal democracy, into our own day, when illiberal politicians come to power by exploiting very old fears"--

Download or read book Artists and Nobility in East Central Europe written by Halina Beresnevičiūtė-Nosálová and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book analyses the collective career of the artistic profession in Brno and Vilnius and the necessity to copy the behavior of the elites of the Old Regime. The "noble" values, which shaped the artistic careers in the 19th century press, were charity, good taste, cosmopolitism and patriotism. The newspaper discourse disposed potential to integrate and to smuggle novelties by exposing old values.

Download or read book Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands written by Eagle Glassheim and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Germans and the East written by Charles W. Ingrao and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The editors present a collection of 23 historical papers exploring relationships between "the Germans" (necessarily adopting different senses of the term for different periods or different topics) and their immediate neighbors to the East. The eras discussed range from the Middle Ages to European integration. Examples of specific topics addressed include the Teutonic order in the development of the political culture of Northeastern Europe during the Middle ages, Teutonic-Balt relations in the chronicles of the Baltic Crusades, the emergence of Polenliteratur in 18th century Germany, German colonization in the Banat and Transylvania in the 18th century, changing meanings of "German" in Habsburg Central Europe, German military occupation and culture on the Eastern Front in Word War I, interwar Poland and the problem of Polish-speaking Germans, the implementation of Nazi racial policy in occupied Poland, Austro-Czechoslovak relations and the post-war expulsion of the Germans, and narratives of the lost German East in Cold War West Germany.

Download or read book The Devil s Wall written by Mark Cornwall and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legend has it that twenty miles of volcanic rock rising through the landscape of northern Bohemia was the work of the devil, who separated the warring Czechs and Germans by building a wall. The nineteenth-century invention of the Devil's Wall was evidence of rising ethnic tensions. In interwar Czechoslovakia, Sudeten German nationalists conceived a radical mission to try to restore German influence across the region. Mark Cornwall tells the story of Heinz Rutha, an internationally recognized figure in his day, who was the pioneer of a youth movement that emphasized male bonding in its quest to reassert German dominance over Czech space. Through a narrative that unravels the threads of Rutha's own repressed sexuality, Cornwall shows how Czech authorities misinterpreted Rutha's mission as sexual deviance and in 1937 charged him with corrupting adolescents. The resulting scandal led to Rutha's imprisonment, suicide, and excommunication from the nationalist cause he had devoted his life to furthering. Cornwall is the first historian to tackle the long-taboo subject of how youth, homosexuality, and nationalism intersected in a fascist environment. "The Devil's Wall" also challenges the notion that all Sudeten German nationalists were Nazis, and supplies a fresh explanation for Britain's appeasement of Hitler, showing why the British might justifiably have supported the 1930s Sudeten German cause. In this readable biography of an ardent German Bohemian who participated as perpetrator, witness, and victim, Cornwall radically reassesses the Czech-German struggle of early twentieth-century Europe.

Download or read book Liberalism and the Habsburg Monarchy 1861 1895 written by J. Kwan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often the liberal movement has been viewed through the lens of its later German nationalism. This presents only one facet of a wide-ranging, all-encompassing project to regenerate the Habsburg Monarchy. By analysing its various nuances, this volume provides a new, more positive interpretation of Austro-German liberalism.

Download or read book Gerta written by Kateřina Tučková and published by AmazonCrossing. This book was released on 2021-02 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning novel by Czech author Kateřina Tučková--her first to be translated into English--about the fate of one woman and the pursuit of forgiveness in a divided postwar world. 1945. Allied forces liberate Nazi-occupied Brno, Moravia. For Gerta Schnirch, daughter of a Czech mother and a German father aligned with Hitler, it's not deliverance; it's a sentence. She has been branded an enemy of the state. Caught in the changing tides of a war that shattered her family--and her innocence--Gerta must obey the official order: she, along with all ethnic Germans, is to be expelled from Czechoslovakia. With nothing but the clothes on her back and an infant daughter, she's herded among thousands, driven from the only home she's ever known. But the injustice only makes Gerta stronger, more empowered, and more resolved to seek justice. Her journey is a relentless quest for a seemingly impossible forgiveness. And one day, she will return. Spanning decades and generations, Kateřina Tučková's breathtaking novel illuminates a long-neglected episode in Czech history. One of exclusion and prejudice, of collective shame versus personal guilt, all through the eyes of a charismatic woman whose courage will affect all the lives she's touched. Especially that of the daughter she loved, fought for, shielded, and would come to inspire.