Possibilities and limits of development of technical museums in Ostrava region in the nineteenth–twenty-first centuries

Abstract

The paper analyses the ways in which the idea of the technical museum developed in the industrial region of Ostrava in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The issue is determined by political, economic and cultural changes in the following time periods: from the end of Austro-Hungarian monarchy (until 1918); the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938); WWII (1938–1945); post-war development, the so called Third Republic (1945–1948); the communist era (1948–1989); and from 1989 to the present. The development was always determined by whether the idea of the regional technical museum was interesting to powerful and intellectual elites, and what the response was from broader society – hence the significance of newspaper articles and other period reflections of the situation.