When Ladislav Holy precipitately left Czechoslovakia for the UK in 1968 he was already one of the leading anthropologists in Central Europe. In the following decades he made important field studies in Africa. Since 1986 he has been engaged in research in the Czech Republic, and he brings to this timely study of national identity the skills of a seasoned researcher, a cosmopolitan perspective, and the insights of an insider. Drawing on historical and literary sources as well as ethnography, he analyses Czech discourses on national identity. He argues that there were specifically 'Czech' aspects to the communist regime and to the 'velvet revolution', and paying particular attention to symbolic representations of what it means to be Czech, he explores how notions of Czech identity were involved in the debates surrounding the fall of communism, and the emergence of a new social system.

When Ladislav Holy precipitately left Czechoslovakia for the UK in 1968 he was already one of the leading anthropologists in Central Europe. In the following decades he made important field studies in Africa. Since 1986 he has been engaged in research in the Czech Republic, and he brings to this timely study of national identity the skills of a seasoned researcher, a cosmopolitan perspective, and the insights of an insider. Drawing on historical and literary sources as well as ethnography, he analyses Czech discourses on national identity. He argues that there were specifically 'Czech' aspects to the communist regime and to the 'velvet revolution', and paying particular attention to symbolic representations of what it means to be Czech, he explores how notions of Czech identity were involved in the debates surrounding the fall of communism, and the emergence of a new social system.

The novelist and essayist Libuše Moníková (1945-1998) made a unique contribution to German, Czech and world literature, writing in German from a distinctly Czech perspective in a manner which can best be described as encyclopaedic and highly intertextual. Positively received abroad, particularly in Germany and the US, her works remained until recently relatively unknown in the land of her birth. This volume, whose appearance marks what would have been the sixtieth anniversary of her birth, is the first in-depth study of the work of this truly European writer. It contains specially commissioned articles by Czech, German, US and British scholars, as well as an appreciation by her friend and fellow writer F.C. Delius, an English translation of one of her last interviews, and the first comprehensive bibliography. The essays range from close readings of a single text, in particular the satirical, picaresque novel Die Fassade and the posthumously published Der Taumel, to surveys of themes, techniques or motifs within her œuvre, for example nation, exile, history and myth, and studies of Moníková’s intertextual references, particularly to film and the work of Arno Schmidt. The contributions emphasise the comic, the personal and the ambiguity in her works, as well as the sheer breadth of Moníková’s interests and sources.

"The pages of history recall scarcely any parallel episode at once so romantic in character and so extensive in scale." -- Winston S. Churchill In 1917, two empires that had dominated much of Europe and Asia teetered on the edge of the abyss, exhausted by the ruinous cost in blood and treasure of the First World War. As Imperial Russia and Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary began to succumb, a small group of Czech and Slovak combat veterans stranded in Siberia saw an opportunity to realize their long-held dream of independence. While their plan was audacious and complex, and involved moving their 50,000-strong army by land and sea across three-quarters of the earth's expanse, their commitment to fight for the Allies on the Western Front riveted the attention of Allied London, Paris, and Washington. On their journey across Siberia, a brawl erupted at a remote Trans-Siberian rail station that sparked a wholesale rebellion. The marauding Czecho-Slovak Legion seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and with it Siberia. In the end, this small band of POWs and deserters, whose strength was seen by Leon Trotsky as the chief threat to Soviet rule, helped destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire and found Czecho-Slovakia. British prime minister David Lloyd George called their adventure "one of the greatest epics of history," and former US president Teddy Roosevelt declared that their accomplishments were "unparalleled, so far as I know, in ancient or modern warfare."

The material effects of World War II, in combination with Eastern Europe's disappointingly undemocratic interwar history, placed radical social change on the postwar agenda across the region and shaped the debates that took place in immediate postwar Czech society. These debates adopted both a cultural form, in struggles over the meaning of the recent past and the nation's position on the East-West continuum, and a directly political form, in battles over the meaning of socialism. The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation examines the most important and politically resonant fields of historical and cultural debate in Czech society immediately after World War II. Bradley Abrams finds that communist public figures were largely successful in controlling debate over the nation's recent past--the interwar First Republic and the experiences of Munich and World War II--and over its location on the East-West continuum. This success preceded and was mirrored in the struggles over the political issue of the times: socialism. The communists engaged their political foes in the democratic socialist and Roman Catholic camps, and, surprisingly, found significant support from a major Protestant church. Abrams's careful reading of major publications re-creates a postwar mood sympathetic to radical social change, questioning the standard view of the communists' rise to power. This book not only contributes to the specific literature on Czech history, but also raises questions about the relationship between war and radical social change, about the communist takeover of the region, and about the role of intellectuals in public life.

Focused on the myths and mythologies of European cultural history, this volume seeks to address the present and past functions of foundation texts in the evolution of the European idea. One of the specific objectives of this volume is to reconsider, in the context of ongoing European expansion and integration, the functionalist approach of Benedict Anderson, according to whom "imagined communities . . . are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined." The common denominator of each of the essays contained in this volume is the problem of the discontinuity of time in relation to tradition, cultural and individual memory, as well as in relation to historical and literary narratives. Time becomes "the locus of its own reflexivity: it is self-temporalized. It undergoes endless reiteration within itself, and needs a semantics which sets valid accents for specific moments." (Jean Bessiere)