In 1935, the Sudeten German Party (SdP), originally founded as
Sudeten German Heimatfront (SHF) just 20 months before, gained more than 63 percent of the German voters and became suddenly the most important voice of the German minority in the Czechoslovak Republic. The victory was the first step on the way to the secession of the German inhabited areas of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany by the Munich agreement in 1938. The article
analyses the election campaign of the party in 1935 on the basis of archival documents from the Czech national archives. It aims to find out how it was possible for a completely new movement to gather so much support in such a short time. The examination of the constitution of the party and strategies used to mobilize voters has proved that the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) played the most important role for the political
success of the SHF/SdP. However, the meaning of the term Volksgemeinschaft, used also by the Nazi movement in Germany, was adjusted by SHF/SdP leaders to the specific Czechoslovak political and social reality. Besides that, an excursion into the
finances of the party has revealed the suspicion that SHF/SdP was financed from the Nazi Germany to be only partly true. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
The article deals with a dissent discourse against celebrations of October 28th in the era of the First Czechoslovak republic found in court records. Primarily, is researched a discourse of members of the German and Polish community in the Czech lands. Besides ways of shaping a negative image of the celebrations there are researched also attempts to create alternative festivities which could connect the citizens with certain political movements.
Studie analyzuje román Němci (2012) české prozaičky Jakuby Katalpy jako pokus o nový pohled na problematiku života německé menšiny v Československu od meziválečného období až po divoké vyhánění a následné organizované vysídlení německy mluvících obyvatel po skončení druhé světové války. Román představuje skrytou polemiku s ideologicky a morálně akcentovanými přístupy k tématu – v české próze do roku 1989 výrazně protiněmecky orientované, od devadesátých let naopak často adorující sudetské Němce jako kladné hrdiny. Na rozdíl od svých dřívějších experimentálních próz psaných složitým jazykem vytvořila autorka v románu Němci zajímavou kombinaci kultivovaného současného jazyka, věcného stylu a stále se větvící narativní struktury, ve které dominuje každodenní život intenzivně vnímaný všemi smysly. and The study analyzes the novel Němci (The Germans, 2012) of the Czech prose writer Jakuba Katalpa as an attempt at a new perspective on the issue of the life of the German minority in Czechoslovakia from the interwar period to the wild expulsion and subsequent organized displacement of German-speaking inhabitants after the end of the Second World War. The novel represents a concealed polemic with ideologically and morally accented approaches to the subject – in Czech prose until 1989 significantly anti-German oriented, since the nineties on the contrary, often adoring Sudeten Germans as positive heroes. Unlike its earlier experimental narrations written in a complex language, the author made in the novel Němci (The Germans) an interesting combination of cultivated contemporary language, material style and ever-branching narrative structure dominating everyday life intensely perceived by all senses.