Download or read book Prague 1938 written by Dara Kavanagh and published by Dedalus Original English Language Fiction In Paperback. This book was released on 2021-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prague 1938 is a coming-of-age novel, or a novel of lost illusions, set in a Czechoslovakia threatened with incorporation into the Third Reich. Centred on the 15 year old Guido Hayek, it traces his infatuation with Leah Meisel, an orphaned Jewish girl several years older than him who, he discovers, is part of a street-gang of con-artists and petty thieves. His initiation into their world occurs when Leah challenges him to steal a ring from a jewellers. Soon he is enmeshed. Guido is aware that Leah's grandfather Ezra Meisel, an antiques dealer, has plans to emigrate to Odessa with her, particularly as the Sudeten Crisis comes to a head. Guido's own crisis comes to a head when he discovers that his father Emil, an art-dealer whom he adores, is bent on cheating old Meisel, and he must choose between aiding the Meisels or helping his own half-sister, the 'degenerate' artist Katya, who also has the 'taint' of Jewish blood, emigrate to the New World. The streets of Prague take centre stage in this smorgasbord of a novel: coming-of-age, familial upheaval, political unrest, artistic intrigue, rag order existence, the folly of youthful infatuation, the warp and woof of flight to a new world; and all of it played out under the looming shadow of war, of a world approaching the precipice. This is elegant, vibrant and read-on storytelling at its very best. - Alan McMonagle [Dara Kavanagh] has written a vivid coming-of-age morality tale set in pre-WWII Prague that holds a magic mirror up to our own strange and disrupted times - Paul Lynch

Download or read book The Bell of Treason written by P. E. Caquet and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined material, this staggering account sheds new light on the Allies’ responsibility for a landmark agreement that had dire consequences. On returning from Germany on September 30, 1938, after signing an agreement with Hitler on the carve-up of Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlain addressed the British crowds: “My good friends…I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” Winston Churchill rejoined: “You have chosen dishonor and you will have war.” P. E. Caquet’s history of the events leading to the Munich Agreement and its aftermath is told for the first time from the point of view of the peoples of Czechoslovakia. Basing his work on previously unexamined sources, including press, memoirs, private journals, army plans, cabinet records, and radio, Caquet presents one of the most shameful episodes in modern European history. Among his most explosive revelations is the strength of the French and Czechoslovak forces before Munich; Germany’s dominance turns out to have been an illusion. The case for appeasement never existed. The result is a nail-biting story of diplomatic intrigue, perhaps the nearest thing to a morality play that history ever furnishes. The Czechoslovak authorities were Cassandras in their own country, the only ones who could see Hitler’s threat for what it was, and appeasement as the disaster it proved to be. In Caquet’s devastating account, their doomed struggle against extinction and the complacency of their notional allies finally gets the memorial it deserves.

Download or read book From Prague After Munich written by George Frost Kennan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In August 1938 George F. Kennan was assigned as Secretary of Legation in Prague. After the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939, he stayed on in that country when most other Western observers had left. These diplomatic papers, letters, and notes are on-the-spot observations by a skilled and sensitive historian and diplomat. They offer a unique record of one of the tragic events in modern European history. Depicted here are the attempts at Germanization of Czech life, the cynical exploitation of various native organizations, the German insistence on a program of anti-Semitism, the take-over of Czech business and industry, the problems of currency and inflation. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Russia Abroad written by Catherine Andreyev and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war, approximately one-and-a-half million Russians fled their country. Many settled in Prague, where they were welcomed and supported by the newly formed Czechoslovak Republic. This book presents the first full account of Prague's Russian emigre community from 1918 to 1938, when the Nazi invasion scattered the inhabitants yet again. Russia Abroad examines the life of this vibrant community, its activity, achievement, and importance. Catherine Andreyev and Ivan Savicky explore the reasons that Czechoslovakia embraced the Russian immigrants, the evolution of the Russian community, and why the original idea of supporting Russian emigres and creating an academic centre of progressive Russians had to be modified in the light of national and international politics. The story they tell not only illuminates aspects of Russian life and culture of the period but also offers insights into later diasporas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Download or read book Prague in Black written by Chad Bryant and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the heels of the Munich Agreement, Hitler’s troops marched into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its eventual consequences for the region.

Download or read book Hermann Goering Blumenkrieg from Vienna to Prague 1938 39 written by Blaine Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reveals Hermann Goering's full role in forcing the Allies of World War I to back down repeatedly as he and Hitler bloodlessly occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Memel during 1938-39. In addition, the Luftwaffe's vaunted Legion Kondor helped win the Spanish Civil War, with air experience gained.

Download or read book The Optimum Imperative Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle 1938 1968 written by Ana Miljacki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Optimum Imperative examines architecture’s multiple entanglements within the problematics of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia. Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia’s entrance into World War II, and the Warsaw Pact troops’ occupation of Prague in 1968, the book investigates three decades of Czech architecture, highlighting a diverse cast of protagonists. Key among them are the theorist and architect Karel Honzík and a small group of his colleagues in the Club for the Study of Consumption; the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels; and SIAL, a group of architects from Liberec that emerged from the national network of Stavoprojekt offices during the reform years, only to be subsumed back into it in the wake of Czechoslovak normalization. This episodic approach enables a long view of the way that the project of constructing Socialism was made disciplinarily specific for architecture, through the constant interpretation of Socialist lifestyle, both as a narrative framework and as a historical goal. Without sanitizing history of its absurd contortions in discourse and in daily life, the book takes as its subject the complex and dynamic relationships between Cold War politics, state power, disciplinary legitimating narratives, and Czech architects’ optimism for Socialism. It proposes that these key dimensions of practicing architecture and building Socialism were intertwined, and even commensurate at times, through the framework of Socialist lifestyle.

Download or read book Munich 1938 written by David Faber and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew back to London from his meeting in Munich with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. As he disembarked from the aircraft, he held aloft a piece of paper, which contained the promise that Britain and Germany would never go to war with one another again. He had returned bringing “Peace with honour—Peace for our time.” Drawing on a wealth of archival material, acclaimed historian David Faber delivers a sweeping reassessment of the extraordinary events of 1938, tracing the key incidents leading up to the Munich Conference and its immediate aftermath: Lord Halifax’s ill-fated meeting with Hitler; Chamberlain’s secret discussions with Mussolini; and the Berlin scandal that rocked Hitler’s regime. He takes us to Vienna, to the Sudentenland, and to Prague. In Berlin, we witness Hitler inexorably preparing for war, even in the face of opposition from his own generals; in London, we watch as Chamberlain makes one supreme effort after another to appease Hitler. Resonating with an insider’s feel for the political infighting Faber uncovers, Munich, 1938 transports us to the war rooms and bunkers, revealing the covert negotiations and scandals upon which the world’s fate would rest. It is modern history writing at its best.

Download or read book The Last Palace written by Norman Eisen and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Runciman Mission to Czechoslovakia 1938 written by P. Vysny and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-04-30 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lord Runciman's mediation in Central Europe provides a sharp insight into British policy on the eve of the Second World War. Without clear objectives - other than to avoid war - his mission did little more than pressure Czechoslovakia for concessions. Runciman was manipulated into that position by Sudeten German separatists and also by those in Britain who sought to secure a rapprochement with Germany. The Mission's pursuit of that objective led directly to Chamberlain's fateful flying visits to Hitler.

Download or read book Prague Winter written by Madeleine Albright and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A riveting tale of her family’s experience in Europe during World War II [and] a well-wrought political history of the region, told with great authority. . . . More than a memoir, this is a book of facts and action, a chronicle of a war in progress from a partisan faithful to the idea of Czechoslovakian democracy.” -- Los Angeles Times Drawn from her own memory, her parents’ written reflections, and interviews with contemporaries, the former US Secretary of State and New York Times bestselling author Madeleine Albright's tale that is by turns harrowing and inspiring Before she turned twelve, Madeleine Albright’s life was shaken by some of the most cataclysmic events of the 20th century: the Nazi invasion of her native Prague, the Battle of Britain, the attempted genocide of European Jewry, the allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War. In Prague Winter, Albright reflects on her discovery of her family’s Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland’s tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation. Often relying on eyewitness descriptions, she tells the story of how millions of ordinary citizens were ripped from familiar surroundings and forced into new roles as exile leaders and freedom fighters, resistance organizers and collaborators, victims and killers. These events of enormous complexity are shaped by concepts familiar to any growing child: fear, trust, adaptation, the search for identity, the pressure to conform, the quest for independence, and the difference between right and wrong. Prague Winter is an exploration of the past with timeless dilemmas in mind, a journey with universal lessons that is simultaneously a deeply personal memoir and an incisive work of history. It serves as a guide to the future through the lessons of the past, as seen through the eyes of one of the international community’s most respected and fascinating figures in history. Albright and her family’s experiences provide an intensely human lens through which to view the most political and tumultuous years in modern history.

Download or read book The Jew in Czech and Slovak Imagination 1938 89 written by Hana Kubátová and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-29 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jew in Czech and Slovak Imagination,1938-89 is the first critical inquiry into the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices in both main parts of former Czechoslovakia. The authors identify anti-Jewish prejudices over almost fifty years of the twentieth century, focusing primarily on the post-Munich period and the Second World War (1938–45), the post-war reconstruction (1945–48), as well as the Communist rule with both its thaws and returns to hardline rule (1948–89). It is a provocative examination of the construction of the image of ‘the Jew’ in the Czech and Slovak majority societies, the assigning of character and other traits – real or imaginary – to individuals or groups. The book analyses the impact of these constructed images on the attitudes of the majority societies towards the Jews, and on Holocaust memory in the country. "This meticulously researched study covers the late 1930s to the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, then when Slovakia became a separate country under Nazi domination during WW II and much of the Czech Republic was a German 'protectorate.'...Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, professionals." - R.M. Seltzer, emeritus, Hunter College, CUNY, in: CHOICE 55.12 (2018)

Download or read book At the Price of the Republic written by James Ramon Felak and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slovak nationalist sentiment has been a constant presence in the history of Czechoslovakia, coming to head in the torrent of nationalism that resulted in the dissolution of the Republic on January 1, 1993. James Felak examines a parallel episode in the 1930s with Slovak nationalists achieved autonomy for Slovakia-but "at the price" of the loss of East Central Europe's only parliamentary democracy and the strengthening of Nazi power. The tensions between Czechs and Slovaks date back to the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Slovaks, who differed sharply in political tradition, social and economic development, and culture, and resented being governed by a centralized administration run from the Czech capital of Prague, formed the Slovak People's Party, led by Roman Catholic priest Ankrej Hlinka. Drawing heavily on Czech and Slovak archives, Felak provides a balanced history of the party, offering unprecedented insight into intraparty factionalism and behind-the-scenes maneuvering surrounding SSP's policy decisions.James R. Felak is associate professor of history at the University of Washington.

Download or read book Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler written by Igor Lukes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A diplomatic history of events leading up to the Munich crisis in 1938 in which Great Britain and France decided to appease Hitler's demands to annex the Sudentenland. The book aims to integrate a full understanding of the Czech role with wider events.

Download or read book Hitler s War written by Harry Turtledove and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2009-08-04 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stroke of the pen and history is changed. In 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, determined to avoid war, signed the Munich Accord, ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. But the following spring, Hitler snatched the rest of that country, and England, after a fatal act of appeasement, was fighting a war for which it was not prepared. Now, in this thrilling alternate history, another scenario is played out: What if Chamberlain had not signed the accord? In this action-packed chronicle of the war that might have been, Harry Turtledove uses dozens of points of view to tell the story: from American marines serving in Japanese-occupied China and ragtag volunteers fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain to an American woman desperately trying to escape Nazi-occupied territory—and witnessing the war from within the belly of the beast. A tale of powerful leaders and ordinary people, at once brilliantly imaginative and hugely entertaining, Hitler’s War captures the beginning of a very different World War II—with a very different fate for our world today. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Harry Turtledove's The War that Came Early: West and East.

Download or read book History of the Jews in the Bohemian Lands written by Martin Wein and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In History of the Jews in the Bohemian Lands, Martin Wein traces the interaction of Czechs and Jews, but also of Christian German-speakers, Slovaks, and other groups in the Bohemian lands and in Czechoslovakia throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This period saw accelerated nation-building and nation-cleansing in the context of hegemony exercised by a changing cast of great powers, namely Austria-Hungary, France, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. The author examines Christian-Jewish and inner-Jewish relations in various periods and provinces, including in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, emphasizing interreligious alliances of Jews with Protestants, such as T. G. Masaryk, and political parties, for example a number of Social Democratic ones. The writings of Prague’s Czech-German-Jewish founders of theories of nationalism, Hans Kohn, Karl W. Deutsch, and Ernest Gellner, help to interpret this history.

Download or read book 44 Days in Prague written by ANN. SHUKMAN and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic story of a last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe in Europe, on the eve of the Second World War.