Between the wars a personality cult grew around Masaryk. These three volumes constitute the first balanced critical assessment of the actual achievement of the university professor who became the first president of Czechoslovakia. In this the first volume scholars from Europe and North America offer new insights into the career and ideas of Masaryk during the three decades preceding the outbreak of World War I. They appraise his role as critic of injustice and outworn tradition, providing a most significant interpretation of his place in modern history.

Between the wars a personality cult grew around Masaryk. These three volumes constitute the first balanced critical assessment of the actual achievement of the university professor who became the first president of Czechoslovakia. In this the first volume scholars from Europe and North America offer new insights into the career and ideas of Masaryk during the three decades preceding the outbreak of World War I. They appraise his role as critic of injustice and outworn tradition, providing a most significant interpretation of his place in modern history.

Between the wars a personality cult grew around Masaryk. These three volumes constitute the first balanced critical assessment of the actual achievement of the university professor who became the first president of Czechoslovakia. In this the first volume scholars from Europe and North America offer new insights into the career and ideas of Masaryk during the three decades preceding the outbreak of World War I. They appraise his role as critic of injustice and outworn tradition, providing a most significant interpretation of his place in modern history.

Between the wars a personality cult grew around Masaryk. These three volumes constitute the first balanced critical assessment of the actual achievement of the university professor who became the first president of Czechoslovakia. In this the first volume scholars from Europe and North America offer new insights into the career and ideas of Masaryk during the three decades preceding the outbreak of World War I. They appraise his role as critic of injustice and outworn tradition, providing a most significant interpretation of his place in modern history.

Throughout the Second World War, the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile broadcast over the BBC from London, hoping to reach out to their former compatriots living in a divided and occupied Europe. As the only way of projecting their authority, President Beneš and his colleagues relied on the radio as a stage on which to perform as the government they wished to be, representing a Czechoslovak state they hoped to recreate after the war. Despite a ban on listening to foreign broadcasts in the German-occupied Protectorate and Slovakia, many tuned in to hear ‘London calling’ and the broadcasts provided the strongest connection between the London Czechoslovaks and the audience at home. This work examines this government programme for the first time, making use of previously unstudied archival sources to examine how the exiles understood their mission and how their propaganda work was shaped by both British and Soviet influences. This study assesses the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the government’s radio propaganda as they navigated the complexities of exile, with chapters examining how they used the radio to establish their own authority, how they understood the past and future of a Czechoslovak nation, and how they struggled to include Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia within it.

This book takes a new approach to interwar Prague by addressing religion as an integral part of the city's cultural history. Berglund views Prague's cultural history in the broader context of religious change and secularization in 20th-century Europe. Based on detailed knowledge of sources, the monograph explores the interdisciplinary linkages between politics, architecture and theology in the building of symbolism and a "new mythology" of the first Czechoslovak republic (1918-1938). Berglunds text provides an important service for understanding both Czech history as well as current Czech political debate. The author's method can be characterized as culture history, able to connect several disciplines, emphasizing common topic (religion, politics, symbolics). Modern Czech elites, superficially characterized as "ateistic", appears in a new light to be deeply religious, a transition from more traditional, (mostly) Catholic religiosity, to a concept of a new, modern, ethical religion. The study incorporates biographical research, focusing on three principal characters: Tomás Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's first president; his daughter Alice Garrigue Masaryková, founding director of the Czechoslovak Red Cross; and Joze Plecnik, the Slovenian architect who directed the renovations of Prague Castle.