This cultural history maps the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish artists and intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the 20th century. It explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished.

On the heels of the Munich Agreement, Hitler’s troops marched into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its eventual consequences for the region.

Scott Spector’s adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called "Prague circle" and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and practice. With the collapse of German-liberal cultural and political power in the late-nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, Prague’s bourgeois Jews found themselves squeezed between a growing Czech national movement on the one hand and a racial rather than cultural conception of Germanness on the other. Displaced from the central social and cultural position they had come to occupy, the members of the "postliberal" Kafka generation were dazzlingly productive and original, far out of proportion to their numbers. Seeking a relationship between ideological crisis and cultural innovation, Spector observes the emergence of new forms of territoriality. He identifies three fundamental areas of cultural inventiveness related to this Prague circle’s political and cultural dilemma. One was Expressionism, a revolt against all limits and boundaries, the second was a spiritual form of Zionism incorporating a novel approach to Jewish identity that seems to have been at odds with the pragmatic establishment of a Jewish state, and the third was a sort of cultural no-man’s-land in which translation and mediation took the place of "territory." Spector’s investigation of these areas shows that the intensely particular, idiosyncratic experience of German-speaking Jews in Prague allows access to much broader and more general conditions of modernity. Combining theoretical sophistication with a refreshingly original and readable style, Prague Territories illuminates some early signs of a contemporary crisis from which we have not yet emerged.

In this first up-do-date, single volume history of the Czechs, Agnew provides an introduction to the major themes and contours of Czech history for the general reader from prehistory and the first Slavs to the Czech Republic's entry into the European Union."

The objective of this book is to analyze changes in the landscape of Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic since the first half of the 19th century. The text focuses not only on describing these considerable changes by means of statistical and spatial data, but also on explaining the processes, societal, economic, political and institutional forces that drive them. Drawing on more than two decades of experience with land use research, the authors have combined methods and approaches from the fields of human geography, cartography, landscape ecology, historical geography and environmental history. The authors understand land use research as a way of analyzing nature-society interactions, their development, spatial aspects, causes and impacts. Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic serves as an example, combining general processes occurring in landscapes of developed countries with the results of regionally specific driving forces, most of them political (world wars, communism, return to market economy etc.).

These essays, written in the course of half a century of research and thought on German and Jewish history, deal with the uniqueness of a phenomenon in its historical and philosophical context. Applying the "classical" empirical tools to this unprecedented historical chapter, Kulka strives to incorporate it into the continuum of Jewish and universal history. At the same time he endeavors to fathom the meaning of the ideologically motivated mass murder and incalculable suffering. The author presents a multifaceted, integrative history, encompassing the German society, its attitudes toward the Jews and toward the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazi regime; as well as the Jewish society, its self-perception and its leadership.

This report provides a framework to understand the changing relationships between urban and rural areas. Specifically, it documents the characteristics of these partnerships and the factors that can hinder as well as enable rural-urban co-operation.