Social policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, from mid-March 1939 to early May 1945, is a key topic in contemporary research on the history of this brief period. The article is concerned with the possible approaches to research with regard to the latest trends in research on National Socialism. It begins with an outline of the historiography of social policy in the Protectorate, which is marked chiefl y by a predominant uniformity of argumentation, a lack of systematic approach to interpretation, and Czech and Czechoslovak historians’ limiting themselves to the ethnically Czech population. Research conducted so far has completely failed to put social policy into the context of social history. The author thus fi rst provides an outline of the social framework, which represents the concept of a Volksgemeinschaft (national/ethnic/racial community), in which ideas about the purpose and function of social policy were formed and implemented. In the next part, she focuses on the defi nition of the term ''social policy'' as understood by Nazi theorists after 1933. In the last part of the article, she seeks to defi ne the new social relations in the CzechGerman environment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and suggests possibilities of its analysis in the area of the implementation of social policy. She believes that it will be fruitful to study the implementation of the relevant criteria in the Reich and the Protectorate at the level of discussions among experts, and to research social policy in practice. The author sees the most important aspects of the implementation of social policy as residing in the various motivations of the regime when implementing social policy in relation to different parts of the population, ranging from social exclusion to forms of social protectionism.
In this article the author raises several theoretical questions connected to an insuffi ciently researched topic, Czech society in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (15 March 1939-8/9 May 1945). He considers, on the one hand, possible theoretical starting points, which he sees as residing in the thorough application of sociological approaches to historical research, and, on the other hand, the debates over the terms ''collaboration'' and ''resistance''. The term ''collaboration'' (kolaborace) was imported into the Czech milieu, and is generally used to mean dishonourable work with, or for, the enemy. The author therefore sees the use of this term as being chiefl y in research on public policy, in which the extant sources usually provide enough information to form a reliable picture of the individual actors and their motives. In this respect the author also refers to the views of some Czech historians who have already pointed out that when discussing the behaviour of Czech society in the Protectorate it is extremely diffi cult to set a clear, universally valid boundary between resistance and collaboration. For actual research on Czech society in the Protectorate the author prefers semantically neutral terms, free of moralizing connotations. He sees inspiration in sociology, whose approaches enable the development of a more complex model than the hitherto widely held view of a society that lived in some kind of permanent dilemma between resistance and collaboration. Apart from research on everyday life in the Protectorate - the milieu which the individual actors moved about in - the author recommends exploring also the ''extent of adaptation'' (the way theactors accommodated themselves to the conditions of the new regime) and the ''extent of identifi cation'' (whether the actors identifi ed with the new regime and to what extent they considered it something unchangeable). From a comparison of both factors the author then deduces the actors’ basic attitude to the regime (positive, neutral, potentially hostile, hostile) and their basic modes of behaviour (loyalty, law-breaking, opportunism, resistance). The ''extent of identifi cation'' in particular constitutes the dynamic factor whose value was dependent on a whole range of circumstances. In researching Czech society in the Protectorate one must therefore consider other important topics, for example, the effect of Nazi and Allied propaganda, the responses in Czech society to the news about the course of the war, and, last but not least, fear, an integral part of Protectorate reality. To understand the behaviour of Czech society in the years of the Second World War (and therefore its values and orientation at the time of Liberation), one must in historical research devote suffi cient consideration to the elementary fact that this society found itself in the grip of a totalitarian regime and was consequently not operating on the principle of freedom of choice.
Studie se zabývá sborníkem Prameny víry z roku 1943, jenž obsahuje patnáct povídek, vítězů literární soutěže nazvané Nový zítřek. Cílem bylo publikovat texty, které měly zobrazovat život v protektorátu v duchu nacistické propagandy. Inicioval ji aktivistický novinář Rudolf Novák, dosazený do nakladatelství Leopold Mazáč nacistickými úřady, v létě roku 1942. Soutěž obeslali převážně mladší autoři, kteří dosud nepublikovali, anebo vydávali nekomplikované prózy z oblasti populární literatury. Jediným známějším přispěvatelem byl Vojtěch Rozner. Přestože povídky měly umělecké ambice, žádná z nich nedosáhla vyšších uměleckých kvalit. Studie se věnuje zejména popisu a interpretaci motivů a témat nacistické propagandy, které se v těchto textech více či méně skrytě objevují. Téměř všudypřítomné je téma tzv. nové Evropy a jejího budování. V povídkách se často objevuje motiv dítěte jakožto budovatele nového světa, ve dvou textech je přítomné také antisemitské téma, charakterizující rasově čistou nacistickou Evropu., Budování je spojeno s tématem dělnické práce a sociální spravedlnosti: dělníci se mají v Nové Evropě lépe, radostně pracují v kamarádském kolektivu a jejich práce je spravedlivě oceněna. Několik povídek se snažilo také v aktivistickém duchu interpretovat nedávné události: sociální rozpory první republiky, její rozpad a vznik protektorátu. Nejasná byla otázka tzv. nového českého vlastenectví. Zatímco aktivističtí žurnalisté a propagandisté si pod ním představovali identifikaci s jednotnou nacistickou Evropou, autoři analyzovaných povídek zdůrazňovali motiv pragmatické záchrany národa a touhu dočkat se lepší budoucnosti. Podobnou soutěž se v následujících letech již nepodařilo zopakovat, a tak Prameny víry zůstávají ojedinělým pokusem stvořit českou aktivistickou literaturu., This study deals with the Sources of Faith anthology dating from 1943, which contains fifteen short stories that came out top in a competition titled New Tomorrow. The aim was to publish texts that were meant to depict life in the Protectorate in the spirit of Nazi propaganda. It was initiated by activist journalist Rudolf Novák, who had been assigned to the Leopold Mazáč publishers by the Nazi authorities in the summer of 1942. The competition was entered primarily by younger authors who had not previously published, or who had only published unsophisticated prose works of popular fiction. The only fairly well-known contributor was Vojtěch Rozner. Although these stories had literary ambitions, none of them achieved a very high literary standard. This study focuses in particular on describing and interpreting the motifs and subjects of Nazi propaganda which occur more or less implicitly in these texts., and Almost omnipresent is the subject of the „New Europe“ and its construction. These stories often present the motif of children as the builders of the new world. Two texts also include an anti-Semitic element characterizing a racially pure Nazi Europe. This construction also involves the subject of workers’ labour and social justice: workers are better off in the New Europe, they work happily in a comradely collective and their work is valued appropriately. Several stories also attempt to interpret recent events in an activist spirit: the social contradictions of the First Republic, its collapse and the creation of the Protectorate. The issue of what was known as the new Czech patriotism remained vague. While activist journalists and propagandists conceived it to be identification with a united Nazi Europe, the authors of the stories under analysis stressed the motif of pragmatic defence of the nation and the longing to live to see a better future. No competition of this kind was ever repeated in subsequent years, so Sources of Faith remains a unique attempt to create a Czech activist literature.