The Ethnic Removals of Ukrainians and Poles in Eastern Europe after the World War II and their Impact on Post-war Czechoslovakia

Regional assemblage in the postwar Czechoslovakia: Another piece to the puzzle of other geographical traditions?

Social Change and Stratification in Postwar Czechoslovakia. Political and Social Processess in Eastern Europe

The issue of displacement of the German speaking population of Czechoslovakia after the Second World War has been a subject of a broader Czech, German and international debate for several decades. This article examines the position of German-speaking Jews from Czech lands returning from emigration or concentration camps after the end of the war and the process of the nationalization of citizenship and property rights in post-war Czechoslovakia. As Jews, these former citizens of Czechoslovakia were undoubtedly victims of the National Socialist terror. As people of German (or at least non-Czech) nationality, however, they fit into particular categories affected by presidential decrees. This article shows how state authorities, and local officials especially, tried to use the post-war situation to eradicate all aspects of what was called “Germanness.” The story of German-speaking Jews in post-war Czechoslovakia is an element in the process of the disintegration of the state of law in post-war central-eastern Europe.

Within the region of Eastern Europe in the early postwar years, Stalin had the ability to consign the concept of sovereignty to the dust-heap of history by incorporating the states occupied by Soviet troops into the USSR. In the interwar period the Soviet Union had been forced by the prevailing balance of power to limit its policy objectives in the region to the pursuit of limited and conventional security interests. Any ‘aspirational’ ambitions which Soviet policy makers might have entertained about the possibility of a dramatic westward shift of the USSR’s boundaries would have been dismissed as fanciful in the sobering light of political and military realities: the outcome of the Second World War opened up an array of policy options for the Soviets which would have previously been deemed impracticable. There is some evidence which suggests that Stalin was not unmindful of one tantalisingly attractive policy option — the prospect of wholesale territorial expansion in Eastern Europe — which had been brought within the bounds of possibility by the outcome of the War.

The year of 1918 was a crucial point in the history of Europe. Its importance does not only stem from the end of World War I, but also from the establishment of new states. Eastern Europe was particularly an arena where many new states emerged after the dissolution of tsarist Russia. The abovementioned process was correlated with the outcome of World War I (the defeat of the Central Powers on the Western Front and their victory on the Eastern Front against the tsarist Russia resulting in imposing their protectorate over Eastern Europe) but simultaneously it was influenced by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution originating from a structural crisis of Russia. The legacy of nation-building processes, taking place in the period of 1917–1921 in the European part of the tsarist Russia— even when some of the states did not manage to survive— occupies a key role in the historical memories of those countries. The importance of this legacy originates from the fact that these states often constituted the most progressive nation-building efforts in the world. The wider context of these developments and the important interlinkages existing between them are very often unfamiliar to many Europeans today. Despite that, the state-building attempts, undertaken in Eastern Europe between 1917 and 1921, had a huge impact on the trajectory of European history. Contextualising this particular academic enquiry with the events of 1918 and benefiting from methodological advantages of process tracing, our project represents an attempt to restore (or, if necessary, build from scratch) a communicational system for sending a historical message to a wider Europe. A century after, while celebrating the Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish truly big anniversaries in 2017–2018, Europeans have already forgotten how interconnected and interlinked the 1918-bound events had been and by how much those events had affected the entire European continent as well as the international system.

The Emerging Europe of the 1990s

Was the outcome of the First World War on a knife edge? In this major new account of German wartime politics and strategy Holger Afflerbach argues that the outcome of the war was actually in the balance until relatively late in the war. Using new evidence from diaries, letters and memoirs, he fundamentally revises our understanding of German strategy from the decision to go to war and the failure of the western offensive to the radicalisation of Germany's war effort under Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the ultimate collapse of the Central Powers. He uncovers the struggles in wartime Germany between supporters of peace and hardliners who wanted to fight to the finish. He suggests that Germany was not nearly as committed to all-out conquest as previous accounts argue. Numerous German peace advances could have offered the opportunity to end the war before it dragged Europe into the abyss.

A GERMAN PERSPECTIVE ON EASTWEST RELATIONS Karsten Voight Xhe essential question facing the Western alliance is how and when nato should react to martial law in Poland in order to pursue the common goals ofthe Western alliance with the greatest possible success. Again, the question is not whether the alliance should react, but how. One answer lies in an analysis of the European political power constellation , as a product of World War II and Yalta. As a result of power shifts after World War II, the Soviet Union was able to spread its influence across Eastern and parts of Central Europe without encountering any great resistance and, at times, with the approval of the Western allies. However, various forces in Eastern and Central Europe have demonstrated their resistance to this situation. The workers' revolt in East Berlin, the Hungarian rebellion, the Prague Spring, and the recurring protest and reform movements in Poland are clear signs of this resistance. In Eastern Europe and the West, there are many ongoing discussions about this situation, whether it can be changed, and if so, how. Two possible solutions can be eliminated from the start. The first solution is that only force can change the situation. Even during the most critical stages of the cold war, this approach was never seriously considered in the West, although the United States had an atomicweapons monopoly at that time. The second alternative—a return to the cold war—must also be rejected. This was the politics of crisis speculation—pressure escalating to the brink of war, which the Americans referred to as "brinkmanship." The attempt to Karsten Voight is the parliamentary foreign affairs spokesman for the present Social Democratic government in the Federal Republic of Germany. This article was translated by Pamela M. Kesting, an M.A. candidate at SAIS. 73 74 SAIS REVIEW implement change through military pressure ended in a fiasco. During this "roll-back" period the Soviets became an atomic power, then a world power, and finally an equal world power. The cold war had only two consequences for Germany and Europe: it deepened the chasm between Germany and Europe and allowed the German Democratic Republic (gdr) to become a state. A return to a cold war philosophy would be a masochistic political move. The West must abandon its posture of "verbal radicalism." It should not voice support for reform movements in the Eastern bloc as though it were willing to intervene forcefully in Central and Eastern Europe. Hungary is a classic example ofpolitical rhetoric that creates the illusion that reform movements in the Eastern bloc will receive preventive help from the West. As long as we realize that this kind of help would lead to a new world war, it cannot even be considered in theory, let alone in practice. The people of Eastern Europe would foot the bill in the long run. The West's policy must be to initiate change through rapprochement. It is not as though we are bereft of any means of influencing the developments in the Eastern bloc. The rejection of force—which is the core of rapprochement—has allowed the West during the past ten years to pursue détente in Eastern Europe. As a result, gradual progress was made in the field of human rights. Détente facilitated numerous human contacts and began to penetrate the so-called Iron Curtain. Sports, cultural, economic, and political contacts among the peoples of Europe have begun to reunite them, helping to relax the cold war atmosphere. Thus, détente has picked up on the old European tradition of human rights, which was confirmed in Helsinki, even by the Soviets. The basis for détente is the December 13, 1967, Harmel Report from nato, which clarifies the two primary functions of the Atlantic Alliance. "The first objective is to maintain a sufficient military strength and political solidarity in order to weaken aggressions and other forms of pressure, and to protect the member-states in the event of possible aggression. Under these conditions, the members of the alliance will maintain the potential necessary for balanced military forces and thus create a climate of stability, security and trust." This is necessary in order...

New Trends in Museum and Memory Studies:A Way Forward for Central and Eastern Europe? Tadeusz Wojtych (bio) Smith, Laurajane. Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites. Routledge Abingdon and New York, 2021. xiv + 338 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. References. Index. £130.00; £36.99; £27.74 (e-book). Jaeger, Stephan. The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Narrative, Memory, and Experience to Experientiality. Media and Cultural Memory, 26. De Gruyter Berlin and Boston, MA, 2020. viii + 354 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £91.50; £21.00; open access e-book. Maruszewski, Tomasz. Gdzie podziewa się nasza pamięć: Od pamięci autobiograficznej do pamięci zbiorowej. Mistrzowie Psychologii. Smak Słowa, Sopot, 2019. 296 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. Zł49.90. Introduction In 2017, the historically-minded public in Poland — and soon elsewhere in Europe and America — was polarised by developments at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. The museum's director Karol Nawrocki, freshly appointed by the ruling populist-conservatives, unveiled a new vision for the permanent exhibition: the existing, more transnational narrative was to be replaced by a tale of Polish heroism and martyrdom.1 [End Page 728] Nawrocki's plans not only caused heated debates in the press and on social media, but also led to the creation of two online counter-museums — one on a website, and the other on Facebook — which remained loyal to the exhibition's original narrative.2 The debates around the Museum of the Second World War, which intensified in 2017 and continue to this day, encapsulate several trends characteristic of the collective memory landscape in Central and Eastern Europe. Since the 1990s, with Communist-era censorship no longer in place, unconstrained discussions about the past have shifted from the private to the public sphere. Just like the controversy around the Museum of the Second World War, other debates about the past and its role in the present have become heated and politicized. As access to the Internet grew, the online sphere became yet another platform for voicing opinions about the past. History-themed social media groups and online museums flourished — yet the debates remained divisive, to the point that Ellen Rutten and Vera Zvereva termed them 'web wars'.3 Researchers discussed to what extent the collective memory landscape of Central and Eastern Europe — shaped by the legacy of Communism, the hardships and opportunities of economic transformation and the rise of digital technologies — was unique on a European and global scale. Three monographs published between 2019 and 2021 form the point of departure for this article. Each of the books proposes or pioneers a new avenue in research on museums and collective memory: large-scale studies of museum visitors that utilize a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods; research of experientiality in museum exhibitions; and a psychological approach to collective memory. These three works rely heavily (though not exclusively) on case studies from the Western world. This article argues, however, that the methodological frameworks proposed by their authors have more universal applications. The second section of the article, therefore, asks how these three approaches may benefit research on Central and Eastern Europe and, conversely, how research on the region [End Page 729] can contribute to — and sometimes challenge — the frameworks used in global museum and memory studies. These questions are discussed with regard to three elements of the research process: subject (i.e. what or who is researched), methods (i.e. how it is researched), and the researcher (i.e. who conducts the study and why). This article does not aspire to be an exhaustive literature review on museum and memory studies in Central and Eastern Europe. Rather, it discusses how these recent works by Smith, Jaeger and Maruszewski may create new links between research on Central and Eastern Europe and the Western world. Three new works on museum and memory studies In her 2021 book, Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites, the Australian museologist Laurajane Smith asks how visitors approach heritage sites. To find an answer, Smith interviews 4,502 museum visitors to forty-five museums in three countries: England, the United States and Australia. She then uses...

The 1930s witnessed the intensification of violence in the two major states neighbouring Central and Eastern Europe: Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. With the outbreak of the Second World War in late 1939, this chapter argues that these two totalitarian states directed their violence outwards. Their imperialist policies, often supported by local governments, accounted for the unparalleled dimensions of violence, mass murder and genocide perpetrated in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe during the war, which may be described as a ‘war of extermination’. Both powers aimed to destroy the heterogeneous fabric of the region’s population, which produced a variety of violent ethnic and political conflicts fought out in the aftermath of occupation.

Historians have long recognized the role of economic resources and organization in determining the outcome of World War II: the Nazi economy lacked the economic resources and organization to oppose the combined might of the U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R. A minority view is that the Germans were defeated not by economics, but by Hitler's many strategic and tactical mistakes, of which the most important was the invasion of the Soviet Union. Compared to this debate about the outcome of the war, there has been less attention to economics as the cause of World War II. This is a review article of a new economic history of the Nazi economy by Adam Tooze which cuts through the debate between economics and Hitler's mistakes as fundamental causes of the outcome. Instead, Tooze argues that the invasion of the Soviet Union was the inevitable result of Hitler's paranoia about the land-starved backwardness of German agriculture as contrasted with the raw material and land resources of America's continent and Britain's empire. The American frontier expansion that obliterated the native Indians provided Hitler with a explicit precedent, which he often cited, for pushing aside the native populations in the east to provide land for German Aryan farmers. Germany's agricultural weakness is summarized by its low land-labor ratio, but Poland and the Ukraine had even less land per person. Thus simply acquiring the land to the east could not solve Germany's problem of low agricultural productivity without removing the native farming populations. Far better than other histories of the Third Reich, Tooze reveals the shocking details of General Plan Ost, the uber-holocaust which would have removed, largely through murder, as many as 45 million people from eastern agricultural land. Tooze, like the Nazis before him, fails to emphasize that the solution to Germany's agricultural problem was not acquiring more land for the existing German farm population, but rather by raising the land-labor ratio by making the existing German land more efficient, mechanizing agriculture and encouraging rural-to-urban migration within Germany.

In the years between the two World Wars democracy was nearly wiped out of Europe. Such a large crisis of the political systems we are used to define liberal democracies is due not only to their traditional enemies, but also to their inner weakness because they are a compromise between different demands and traditions. In the aftermath of the Great War those systems were ever and ever badly criticized by a large number of intellectuals, because of the international scene, the going of economy and the institutional techniques. Only the outcome of Second World War and the USA hegemony allowed the return of liberal democracy in Western, and further on in Eastern Europe, after the break down of the Communist regimes.

When looking at the impact of the political, territorial, and social transformations which occurred in Central and Eastern Europe after the defeat of the Central Powers in the First World War, an evidence check suggests that sport was deeply influenced by the sudden disappearance of the Habsburg Empire. This article examines the shift triggered in the relation between a ‘centre’ (e.g. Bucharest) and a ‘periphery’ (former Austro-Hungarian provinces) of sporting life by the political outcome of the First World War. The joy and difficulties surrounding the emergence of ‘Greater Romania’ were well highlighted in the field of sport by tensions which appeared mostly in internal competitions and debates, rather than in the international arena.

Since 1989, the German-Czech relationship has been burdened by the problem of a just assessment of World War II and the following forced transfer of the Sudeten Germans. Why are democrats on both sides, who acknowledge the same values and principles, unable to reach an agreement about crucial events in the past? The political and legal differences imply a moral dissent which is not being discussed systematically. The article tries to investigate the deficits of the moral arguments on both sides. Czech Sociological Review, 1998, Vol. 6 (No. 2: 173-186) 1. Problems with the Recognition Controversy When in 1989/1990 Vaclav Havel publicly expressed a moral apology for the expulsion of Germans from post-war Czechoslovakia, he hardly suspected that the very foundations of detente policy – which had been interpreted by East Europeans as a German step towards reconciliation, based on their acknowledgement of the political status quo resulting from World War II – could ever be questioned. German unification was seen as the sine qua non of peaceful European integration and was consequently welcomed with something approaching euphoria. It was not only because of the East German and Czech (Czechoslovakian) revolutions of November 1989 that Vaclav Havel selected Munich and Berlin as the destinations for his first foreign trips. His apology was intended as a gesture which would contribute to overcoming the burdens of the past and reflected the policy later advocated by the Czech government, i.e. making a clean break with the past, at least on a political and legal level. If the only reactions to Havel’s apology had been the amiable reply of then German Federal President Weizsacker and the prompt signing of a new friendship treaty between the two neighbours, many of the tensions which later arose would have been avoided. But the Sudeten Germans, the audience which Havel was in fact addressing, were – at least as far as their strongest public voice, the Sudetendeutsche Landsmanschaft (SL), was concerned – incapable of a similarly generous gesture. Instead, Havel’s words were interpreted as a Czech “admission of guilt”, which must be followed by practical steps *) Due to lack of space, part of the original text of this article was excluded. This part described and assessed the typology of moral discourses (e.g. the Christian ethic of forgiving, the ‘ius talionis’ ethic, discourse from the point of view of the victim, the sceptical use of morality and war as the end of morality, empathetic discourse on morality), which are found in many studies and articles on German-Czech relations. This text is based on a study entitled Moralischer Diskurs und die Deutsch-tschechischen Beziehungen carried out at the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universitat Bremen (Research Institute for Eastern Europe at the University of Bremen). A German version (Moralisch-politischer Dissens in den deutsch-tschechischen Beziehungen) was published in WeltTrends 19, Sommer 1998, pp. 67-68. **) Direct all correspondence to: Dr. Jan Pauer, Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universitat Bremen, Osteuropa-Gebaude, Klagenfurter Str. 3, D-28359 Bremen, e-mail: pauer@osteuropa.uni-

The question of minorities or majorities is the relationship between different types of social groups, which are usually characterized by their different characteristics and social status. They are the result of different developments by which individual social groups have undergone a shorter or longer development. They determined their properties and social status. It is a global process of how individual social groups are formed in different countries, states, continents or cultures. How they live and have been formed, strengthened, gained their position, or became disintegrated. From this point of view, they have a powerful relations and importance in their given previous wider society in which they live. One of the most important ways of controlling life, changes in culture and the existence of minorities has been the use of European and other majority languages and religions. In particular, well organized new educational and religious organizations suffered at the expensed original minority tradition. From an historical point of view it is a long-term process the foundations of which lay in the time of long-term movement of individuals and currents from the formation of human communities. The most extensive trials took place during Colonialism, when the European states colonized and took control of the countries of America, Africa and Asia, which fell victim to them, in a relatively short process. Not only immediately as Indians, but also, for example, millions of slaves transferred to America. Their relations between minorities and the majority last to the presence. As we deal with Europe, their internal conditions have shaped their development. As one of the tendencies, determined especially in the so-called “Drang nach Osten”, especially the Germans (Germans and Austrians), with some successes, but also a general inability to assert their ideas in Central and Eastern Europe, as was the case in the two world wars. This concerned the communities, on their way especially to Eastern and Central Europe. They fought with the idea of their complete power control, as was and is the case with the Hungarian tribes. On their long way to Eastern and Central Europe while occupying long-inhabited areas. In all those processes, we must realize that the individual power units by force and their idea of their “permanent” control, as the so-called minority or minorities. They are a permanent and partially open process as to our days. In our case, these are similar processes of changing countries with a process of their permanent control. In the case of my contribution, the problem is the incoming social groups of the Roma and Sinti, who have formed in all European countries by their arrival since the late middle Ages in individual European states and minority areas. However, they developed over the centuries but remained in the position of a memorial, ruled in all proportions as a minority existing under the majority, as is the case today.