Jewish power and powerlessness: Prague Zionists and the Paris Peace Conference

This article explores how perceptions of Jewish power shaped the negotiations between Czechoslovak leaders and Jewish minority representatives at the time of the Paris Peace Conference. In the aftermath of the First World War, Prague-based Zionists embarked on a mission to convince Czechoslovak elites that attacks on Jews were detrimental to the internal stability of the new state and to Czechoslovak interests abroad. As Edvard Bene?, the head of the Czechoslovak delegation in Paris, worked to cultivate an image of the new state as more “Western” and “civilised” than other successor states – a strategy meant to garner international support for Czechoslovak territorial demands and its projected absorption of large minority populations – Jewish activists encouraged his uncertainty with regard to Jews' influence on Western audiences and statesmen. They did so in order to convince him to accept their demands for special protection clauses for the new country's Jews. The paper thus shows that the unprecedented victimisation of Jews and the upsurge in antisemitism during and after the war coexisted with a new bold and public Jewish activism. Yet, Jewish leaders did not in the end have the ability to convince Bene? and his colleagues to give in to international Jewish demands for special protection. Instead, they sought to cultivate a strategic alliance between the state's Czech elite and the Jewish minority which centred on the claim that Czechoslovakia was a particularly welcoming and tolerant place for Jews, an image that would evolve into a significant component of the myth of Czechoslovakia as an island of democracy in Eastern Europe.     

Mystification as an Artistic Strategy in Milan Kundera's Work

ABSTRACT

Using close reading of Kundera's texts, Jan ?ulík argues that many arguments in Milan Kundera's literary works are deliberate provocations. Kundera's approach is undoubtedly related to post-modernism, although he used his mystification techniques long before the arrival of postmodernism, as early as in the Stalinist 1950s when he published fake quotes from Lenin in official Stalinist publications. In Jan ?ulík's view, it is the purpose of Milan Kundera's systematic use of false facts, distortions and disrupted logic to warn his readers against against the unreliability of words and human communication. Kundera seems to argue that the world in its complexity is basically unknowable and the only thing that is left for us is, in despair, in our ignorace of what is going on around us, to carry out pranks.     

Developing the new socialist Czechoslovak state: abortion,eugenics, and the politics of choice between 1945 and 1962

ABSTRACT

The author analyzes the political and medical discourses surrounding the legalization of abortion in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and the establishment of the institution of abortion commissions to approve women’s demands. Through a genealogical intersectional lens, she explores the continuity of this rationality, which started to fear the degeneration of the collective more than its depopulation. As the Cold War commenced, for the first time in history Czechoslovak women obtained reproductive rights, particularly when a pregnancy was recognized as a threat to women’s and children’s health. Drawing on biopolitical theories and other critical feminist scholarship that have problematized the liberal underpinnings of choice and autonomy, the author demonstrates how eugenics trespassed from expert circles into politics, and, with the help of planned parenthood, recreated a complex system of socio-biological classes, determining who should reproduce and whose life was worth living, and worth protecting. The text defies the classic totalitarian thesis that divides peoples and society into two types, the totalitarian subject and its liberal counterpart. The author argues that, regardless of the political system, abortion rights operate as a regulatory strategy of power aimed at maintaining a certain population optimum by re-defining women’s responsibilities to deliver a healthy child into a healthy environment.     

The power(lessness) of Czechoslovak Jews during the Second World War

The article evaluates the perceptions of Jewish power among the Czechoslovak exiles in Britain during the Second World War. The analysis documents the apparent persistence of prejudices against the Jewish minority among the Czechoslovak non-Jewish authorities that eventually formed the government-in-exile (1940–5), under the presidency of Edvard Bene? (1884–1948). The Czechoslovak exiles believed that the Jewish minority, in particular the Jewish nationalists (Zionists), had vehement supporters within Jewish circles in Western countries. Furthermore, they believed that the Jewish press played a significant role in the formation of public opinion in Britain and especially in the United States. In the early 1940s, the government-in-exile embarked on a policy of national homogenisation of post-war Czechoslovakia and was anxious to give concessions to the political representatives of the ethnic minority groups in exile, in particular the Germans, Hungarians and Jews. Yet the concerns about Jewish influence in liberal democracies granted several political concessions to the Jewish minority, in particular the appointment of a Zionist representative, Arno?t Frischer (1887–1954), to the exile parliament. This notwithstanding, by analysing the internal situation among the Czechoslovak Jewish groups in London, the article documents the internal weakness and disputes among the Jewish groups which gradually revealed the utter powerlessness of the Jewish exiles during their negotiations with the Czechoslovak authorities. The Jewish groups (the assimilationists, Orthodox and secular nationalists) were divided by mutual as well as internal disputes which were not concealed from outside observers and were utilised by the exile government. What emerges from the analysis is an impression of quarrelling groups that could not agree on any of the fundamental issues and whose only power was the ability to court the support of Western Jewish groups, which were perceived by the non-Jewish exiles as influential actors in US and British society.     

Lectures,murder, and a phony terrorist: managing “Jewish power and danger” in 1960s communist Czechoslovakia

The Slánský Affair of 1952 introduced a specific matrix of ideas about Jewish power and the danger that Jews posed to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. These ideas, with roots in earlier discourses, conditioned Jewish–state relations for decades, providing party-state officials and even Jewish functionaries with a language for articulating demands of the government and a framework for understanding the place of Jewish citizens in the socialist nation. Inter- and intra-ministerial conflicts reveal that differences in purview and philosophy often led officials to prioritise different aspects of the Jewish power–danger matrix. The paternalistic responsibility to protect domestic Jewry from the negative influences of foreign “Zionists” frequently clashed with the objective of appeasing Western Jewry, whose influence in the US Czechoslovak communists overestimated. While the latter consideration – and others – often moved the Ministry of Culture to advocate in favour of the Czechoslovak Jewish communities, the former concern – taken remarkably seriously – led the secret police to oppose them at every turn, often in the most conspiratorial of ways. To that end, this article introduces new information and perspective on the murder of Charles Jordan in 1967 and its repercussions and political uses in the years that followed.     

“Every Jew is a Zionist,and every Zionist is a spy!” The story of Jewish social assistance networks in Communist Czechoslovakia

This article explores some of the major operations of the Czechoslovak secret police (State Security Forces, StB) against individuals involved in organising Jewish social assistance networks during the 1950s, as documented by fragments of case files preserved in the Security Services Archive in Prague. While there is much focus on victims of the Prague show trial of the so-called “Conspiracy Centre,” all of whom were members of the top echelons of the Communist Party, the individuals who tried to revive Jewish life and secure the well-being of the needy in a country swept by anti-Jewish sentiment raked up by that trial remain largely unknown. In this work, we learn who these people were and what they did, and how the Communist regime punished them for their involvement. As an original contribution, the article details the search for safe methods of delivering humanitarian aid to Czechoslovak Holocaust survivors after the expulsion of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in 1950, from the initial attempts to use Israeli channels to the gradual legalisation of JDC aid under Swiss cover organisations.     

Propaganda stories in Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s: Believe it or not?

The collapse of the communist totalitarian regimes in Eastern and Central Europe and the end of the Cold War is one of key historical milestones in the history of the 20^th century. However, the process itself and the consequences differed immensely from state to state: e.g., from peaceful so-called Velvet Revolution in former Czechoslovakia to the brutal civil war in former Yugoslavia. Our aim was to analyze the preconditions of the political and societal change in the Czechoslovak media – were there any signs of the change? How did the ruling party present the Soviet perestroika, which signalized a step towards democratization? The nomenklatura (ruling elite) was rather surprised by Gorbachev’s plans and feared the resemblance with the Prague Spring 1968. Nevertheless, they had to comply with the official Soviet dictate. We used Wodak’s discoursive–historical approach to analyze official propaganda reports and press agency news. We found that the Czechoslovak official nomenklatura used several argumentation and persuasive strategies to present perestroika not as a political change, but as an ongoing path towards Communism. Perestroika was presented as an accelerated path towards a classless society, however, the words were often vague or meaningless. We show that the nomenklatura welcomed perestroika verbally, but the disparity between the words and actions was omnipresent. Citizens could “read between the lines”, which meant that they revealed inner inconsistencies and problems of the regime from discoursive strategies. The aim to communicate perestroika thus served merely as an evidence of the inner disintegration of the system.     

美国在关贸总协定机制下的对捷政策(1948-1951)

作为对捷克斯洛伐克"二月事件"的反应,美国在关贸总协定机制下的对捷政策随即发生了根本性转变,其战略意图就是孤立和排斥捷克斯洛伐克,其主要目标是寻求中止对捷克斯洛伐克的关贸总协定义务.凭借美国在关贸总协定机制中占据主导地位的影响力并经过积极的外交努力,美国的战略意图和政策目标基本实现.因此,1948-1951年间美国在关贸总协定机制下的对捷政策再次表明,美国在一定意义上已经将1947年关贸总协定机制作为推行"冷战"战略和遏制政策的有力工具.     

The Local History of an International Type: The Structural Panel Building in Czechoslovakia

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the state-run system of architectural offices as a mediator between politics and practice, this article considers how the 1948 Communist Party takeover of Czechoslovakia affected architectural practice and the establishment of housing types in the early 1950s. The legacy of a strong local construction industry before 1948 was critical to these developments. At the new Institute of Prefabricated Buildings, created in 1952, architects and engineers continued earlier research on prefabricated construction technologies. Through this work, the Czechoslovak government and its architectural administration soon concluded that its best long-term option for solving the country's housing crisis was the use of structural panel construction. Fifty years later, one in three Czechs still lives in the more than one million apartments built with this technology between 1954 and 1990. Structural panel construction was not a Soviet import; instead it developed out of local wartime experimentation at the Bat'a Shoe Company in Zlín, independently of similar research undertaken in the Soviet Union and other parts of the Eastern Bloc in the same years. Although buildings that look similar were constructed in the region and similar housing types appeared across Europe after the Second World War, this article argues that structural panel technology in Czechoslovakia is an example of local continuities in the building industry, rather than evidence of the homogenization of the postwar European landscape.     

浅析二战初期德国《绿色方案》未实施的原因

《绿色方案》是1937年6月24日纳粹德国针对捷克斯洛伐克制定的进攻行动代号,准备从政治、军事和宣传方面落实进攻捷克斯洛伐克的方案,但实质上是一个以武力征服为主的军事方案。纳粹德国征服了奥地利后,入侵捷克斯洛伐克的计划很快被提上了日程。但由于德国自身实力不足,加上德国高层的反对,《绿色方案》最终没能成功实施,可还是利用了英法的绥靖政策,采取分裂、瓦解的手段侵占了捷克斯洛伐克。本文拟对《绿色方案》未实施的原因展开分析。