Společnost a kultura v Českých zemích 1939–1949

The period treated in the present collection of papers covers the brief duration of the so-called Second Republic, i.e. the Czechoslovakia after The Munich Agreement followed by its subsequent collapse and the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by the Nazi Germany the horrors of The Second World War – both inside and outside the country – and eventually the period of post-war Czechoslovakia with the following milestones: the elections in 1946, the communist coup d’état in February 1948 and the beginning of political trials in 1949.

These watershed moments – the establishment of the Protectorate followed by the closure of all Czech universities on one hand and the beginning of political trials along with the nationalization of the publishing industry on the other hand – came hand in hand with a forcible oppression of the civic society.

The authors of individual chapters of this collective publication do not perceive its topic purely from the point of view of a political history marked by important historical shifts – the rise of two totalitarian regimes. Instead, they focus on the transformation of the society and culture of the period from the perspective of the cultural and social history and of related branches of science – the history of everyday life, historical anthropology, ethnology and literary history.