This diploma thesis deals with the polemic dispute between the subcultural magazines Tramp and Naše osady regarding the concept of the tramp identity and politicization of the subculture of tramping between the years 1929 to 1931. It examines the so-called red tramping - the inclination of part of the tramps towards communism as well as the related politicization of the subculture and its development, the platform of which is often considered to be the magazine Tramp; as well as criticism of this approach by Naše osady magazine, which advocates non-political tramping. The result of this work is the division of politicization of the subculture in the observed period into three stages: the efforts of MP Jiří Stříbrný and the media in his possession to politicize the subculture towards his politics, politicization and declaratively non-political members the culmination of a moral panic over tramping, and the communist politicization of tramps. The thesis concludes that Tramp magazine was a platform for red tramping, but only in the second half of its existence, not throughout the whole period, and that red tramping can be described as its leftist and later communist orientation, which remains largely ideological than to openly invoke the Communist Party. Furthermore, the thesis finds that the controversy,...

This thesis is based on my stay at a retro "ROH recreation - holidays in Tatras as 'then'" organized and provided by one Czech travel agency whose major customers are elderly people. The thesis focuses especially on the motivation of these people to buy such a product, and describes how they spend a holiday like that. This detailed description is an extremely important starting point for clarifying the phenomenon known as nostalgia, which is also in relation to post-communist countries referred to as 'ostalgia". Using the concepts of social memory I show that next to the officially accepted version of history there is a large number of alternative and often contradictory "memories" based on small personal histories of everyday life, which do not include Communism as a political system, but "ordinary" life in the communist times. The main goal of my thesis is to try to find the answers to the question, whether that what the older generation misses is really the communist regime itself, or the sentence "it was better under communism" hides something completely different from mere identification with a particular political establishment. Key words: ROH recreation; communism; retro; nostalgia; social memory; habitus

This dissertation analyses narratives of the Mašín brothers and their father, Josef Mašín senior. The Mašín brothers established what they called 'a resistance group' against the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, which between 1951 and 1952 killed three people. The brothers, alongside the other member of the group, Milan Paumer, escaped from the country in 1953, heading for the Western sectors of Berlin. Despite more than 20,000 East German and Soviet troops hunting them, the group reached West Berlin safely. Later, the brothers went to the USA where they joined the U.S. army. The dissertation analyzes a whole range of discourses including newspaper articles, historical papers, books, detective stories, novels, memoirs and also one episode of the Czechoslovak television series, Třicet případů majora Zemana ('Major Zeman's Thirty Cases'), entitled Strach ('Fear'), from 1975. The dissertation is conceptually embedded in cultural studies and critical theory. Drawing on Roland Barthesʼs work on mythologies, Hayden Whiteʼs theory of history and Slavoj Žižekʼs theory of ideology, the dissertation considers the relationship of the Mašín brothersʼ narrative representations with respect to the dominant ideology of the time. The first chapter of the dissertation deals with narratives produced in Communist...

THE SCREEN OF LAUGHTER AND REMEMBERING Collective Memory and Representations of State Socialism in Czech Cinematography This dissertation has very little to say about state socialism. Rather, it is a work about the memory of state socialism in the post-socialist Czech Republic, about the ways in which state socialism can be remembered in the present. From the perspective of collective memory, "it is not only the ancien regime that produced revolution, but in some respect the revolution produced the ancient regime, giving it a shape, a sense of closure" (Boym 2001, xvi). And there are indeed many, often conflicted modes of remembering this particular past. Françoise Mayer, for example, has identified several distinct types of remembering the "communism" in Czech society (Mayer, 2009). And her list is by no means exhaustive. At the centre of this treatise is the Czech post-socialist cinema. My dissertation thesis was prompted by the question of how cinematic representations bear on the collective memory of state socialism in the Czech Republic. . In the first chapter, I explore how cinema represents the past in comparison to historiography. In my work, it is evident that Czech cinema does not follow the epistemological criterion of referentiality that binds historians. A more important observation - and one...

"Communist Women in the 1920s" is about the women, who established the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and worked to build it up. It describes women of Czech nationality in the territory of the Czech lands during the period 1921-1929. The focus is mostly on the women's headquarters, which directed the work. Following political, social-economical and cultural levels, interest is also paid to the psychological aspect. The theses is divided into thematical chapters, each depicting events chronologically. The introductory chapter presents the reasons, why some women turned to the left and others to the right in the Social Democratic Party. Subsequent chapters describe the organization of women in the Communist Party, their concrete workload, life style of working-class women and functionaries, relations with the Soviet Russia, intraparty political development, comparison with other parties and biographies of female communist functionaries. In this work were used archival materials (mostly records of party meetings and personal materials located in the National Archive in Prague), contemporary women's newspapers and memoires of women.

This thesis deals with post-war lives of eighteen respondents who were according to the Nuremberg Laws labeled as Jews or half-Jews. They have been imprisoned in concentration camps, they had to hide or emigrate during the World War II. This thesis focuses on their lives after the war. It traces their return, not/regaining of their property, reunification with their family and friends, or their post-war emigration. The thesis also centers around their lives after the communist regime came to power in Czechoslovakia, it was a regime that many Jewish survivors supported in the beginning. The thesis also concentrates on their lives during anti-Semitic purges in the 1950s to which many family members of the respondents fell victims. In the 1960s, borders were a bit more "open" and this was welcomed my many because most of the Jewish families had relatives and friends abroad. Lots of the respondents decided to emigrate after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The following decades of normalization maintained the discourse of hidden anti-Semitism and restrictions of personal freedoms. Many respondents eagerly welcomed the Velvet Revolution. They were able to strengthen their own Jewish identity thanks to newly gained freedoms and emergence or re-creation of many Jewish organizations. Last but not...

This work is introducing the processes which undergone in the Czechoslovak Justice during period of years 1948 and 1953. These processes resulted in complex change of the entire legal system in Czechoslovakia (CS). Newly established communist regime managed to build tight grip on power during the analyzed period of time. Changes of the justice, legal education and advocacy was analyzed by many excellent Czechoslovak scholars from area of law and contemporary history but their free publication was enabled after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Important part of this work is analysis of the vital laws which was introduced during above mentioned period. First chapter is about important politician Alexej Cepicka, who was an architect of the whole judicial reform. Understanding of his role in the transformation of the society is necessary to understand the historical events. The second chapter focuses on the whole process of purification the society through mass organizations loyal to the communists and attempts to annihilate of the Catholic Church. The third chapter gives us an overview of the legal system transformation, with an emphasis on the new Constitution and vital repressive laws. In the following chapters, the transformation of the whole Czechoslovak justice, legal education and the...

Death is an ever-present fact in human life and it affects its life course. Stable form of funeral ritual is developed from the need for reconciliation with one's own mortality and loss of loved ones. Traditional funeral ceremony based on combination of lore and Christian ritual had changed due to changes in political and social life during the 20th century. Probably the biggest effect had the administration of communist party which lasted for 40 years and which used funeral ceremony as propaganda of its regime. The struggle with traditional Christian funeral was connected with an open fight with church as such and was caused by communist effort to dominate social life. Instead of traditional Christian funeral communism proclaimed cremation as an anticlerical burial option. Effects of communism then developed new funeral rituals. This text is motivated by the effort to identify perception of death and its changes in Czech republic in the second half of the 20th century, using literary and oral sources. It searches for an answer to the question of whether communist regime changed funeral ritual and tries to identify it in taped oral sources.

This thesis is dealing with the ways in which were reflected marxism and communism in the czech exile catholic magazine "Studie", that had been published in Rome in the period 1958-1990. In addition outlines the issues of the czechoslovak exile in the second half of the twenties century. This thesis also discusses the exile waves that occurred in 1948 and 1968. Particular attention is paid to the issue of catholic exile. As part of the activities of exile are discussed mainly its literary activities. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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