Studie je biografickým portrétem Eduarda Wintera (1896-1982), významného církevního historika a sudetoněmeckého katolického intelektuála z Čech, v jehož životě i historiografickém dílu se zrcadlí politické zvraty středoevropských dějin 20. století. Pozornost je věnována Winterovi v roli historika českých duchových dějin a dějin náboženského myšlení, který v politických zlomech svého století hledal prostřední cestu k reformně katolickému výkladu minulosti mezi vyhroceným nacionalismem první poloviny století a dogmatickou verzí komunistického idealismu. Těžiště studie leží na jeho působení v Praze před rokem 1945. Šest let nacistické okupace českých zemí je analyzováno podrobněji, protože je autor považuje za temnou, ale klíčovou epizodu Winterovy intelektuální biografie. ,The study is a biographical portrait of Eduard Winter (1896-1982), an important ecclesiastical historian and Sudeten-German Catholic intellectual from Bohemia, whose life and work reflect some of the greatest political upheavals in 20th-century Central European history. This study focuses on Winter as a historian of intellectual history and the history of religious thought in the Czech lands, who tried to find a way to be a professional historian during three political regimes covering democracy, Catholicism, nationalism, and National Socialism and communism. The focus of the study is on his work in Prague before 1945. Particular attention is paid to the six-year-period of the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands as the author considers this to be a dark though crucial episode in Winter's intellectual biography.
The hugely popular author of children's literature Jaroslav Foglar wrote stories about boys on the threshold of adolescence undergoing a personality transformation under the influence of a positive example of friendship and an active lifestyle. However, the themes of honesty, of health and physical activity, and of living in natural surroundings cannot alone justify why this fiction is also viewed from the perspective of the science of religion using terms such as "cult", "mystery", "evangelistic text", "initiation", "functional equivalent of religion", or "implicit religion". Empirical research within the framework of a larger questionnaire survey therefore addresses the question of whether the readers of these books are recruited from backgrounds that are religious, spiritual, or indifferent, whether they are aware of this literature for children having a certain spiritual component, and whether they perceive it as a way of realizing spiritual experience. The group of respondents in the research (n = 1135, of whom 666 were men and 464 women) were most often in the 30-55-year-old age group, with a university degree, living in a larger city with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and with diverse relationships to religious faith and spirituality. According to the results, we found that this literature offered some form of spiritual inspiration to 48% of the respondents, that 30% of the respondents perceived this spiritual component intensely, and that 29% believed that they had applied some of the spiritual values associated with the books in their daily lives. The theoretical interest of religious studies in this literature for boys is thus empirically justified.
This article examines the sense of a crisis of Christian faith in the wartime correspondence of Rudolf Ohlbaum (1912–2006), doctor of philosophical sciences and former active member of the German Catholic youth movement Staffelstein, which was renowned for its efforts to integrate Christianity and nationalism. The author attempts to consider what caused this intimate sense of a loss of faith and whether it might possibly be interpreted as a consequence of the change in political regime in the years 1938/1939, or the ideological influence of national socialism.
The article deals with the early beginnings of Nazi reorganization of scientific institutions in Prague in December 1941 on base of new founded papers, which was in 1942/1943 finished with a constitution of already well known Reinhard Heydrich's Foundation for Scientific Research (Reinhard Heydrichs Reichsstiftung für wissenschaftliche Forschung in Prag).