Search Results (24)

The Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia found itself outlawed after its violent liquidation by the brachial communist power in 1950, and the members of this church were forced to convert to the Orthodox faith. This study explains the difficult process of renewal of the Greek Catholic Church and its structures in the context of the Ostpolitik of the Holy See, represented by the Vatican diplomat and later secretary of state Agostino Casaroli, and in the context of the political relaxation in Czechoslovakia in 1968, during the so-called Prague Spring. In addition to the scientific literature, this study is based on historical research carried out in the historical archive of the Secretariat of State in the Vatican within the Agostino Casaroli fund, which has so far been processed little. In the study, the author describes the most significant steps which lead to the official legalization of the Greek Catholic Church on June 13, 1968, as well as the difficult process of negotiating the terms of the restored church with the state-enforced Orthodox Church. Full article

This article examines humanist anecdotes about the turbulent times of the mid-twentieth century by F. C. Weiskopf and Lenka Reinerová. It provides a comparative reading of Weiskopf’s Elend und Größe unserer Tage. Anekdoten 1933–1947 (1950) and Reinerová’s “Tragischer Irrtum und richtige Diagnose” (published in Mandelduft, 1998). The anecdotal form of these texts harks back to the popular Enlightenment (Volksaufklärung) anecdotes of Heinrich von Kleist and Johann Peter Hebel, published in 1810–1811 during the Napoleonic Wars. The anecdote as a literary form is particularly well suited to the representation of wartime and political repression. While Weiskopf’s anecdotes explore cruelty and heroism under the Nazi dictatorship, Reinerová’s autobiographical text juxtaposes crisis points in her own life—her time as a political prisoner in France in 1939 and in Czechoslovakia in 1952–1953; her return to Prague as her family’s sole survivor; and her periodic cancer treatment from 1948 onwards. Reinerová describes how the kindness of ordinary people, and her own optimism and resilience, helped her through the worst times. Her lived experience gives her authority as a storyteller in Walter Benjamin’s sense. Both authors contrast human extremes—the good and the bad—yet both remain optimistic about the human capacity for good. Full article

This paper analyzes eleven Central and Eastern European countries after the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. It investigates the heterogeneity in the labor market among the selected countries based on the youth inactivity, secondary education attainment, and income share of the bottom fifty percent of the population. A hierarchical cluster analysis with Ward’s method and k-means clustering generated diverse cluster solutions. A comparative analysis of the four-cluster solutions for 2008 and 2020 showed multiple changes in the cluster composition. The joint groupings of geographically and historically close countries, such as the Baltics, the former Czechoslovakia, and the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia, were identified for 2008. Lithuania emerged as a singleton in 2020. The youth inactivity, educational levels, and income inequality reveal the status of the youth in Central and Eastern Europe during these crises. Full article

In 1990, three years after Andy Warhol’s death and one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) organized the first one-man show of this pop artist in Eastern Europe. The Prints of Andy Warhol, although never shown at the MoMA in New York, traveled to the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Jouy-en-Josas, France, the Národní Galerie in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the Staatliche Kunstsammlung in Dresden, the GDR, the Mücsarnok in Budapest, Hungary, and the Muzeum Narodowe in Warsaw, Poland. The current paper analyzes the cultural–political context of The Prints of Andy Warhol. It first discusses the place of both American pop art and Eastern Europe in MoMA’s International Program (IP) and then explores the organizational challenges, art historical contents, and public reception of the exhibition. The paper concludes by examining the broader impact of The Prints of Andy Warhol on both the growing awareness of American pop art in Eastern Europe and MoMA’s cultural diplomacy in this region after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Full article

The study focuses on changes of surnames among Czech and Moravian Jews. The changes are tracked until the start of the German occupation in 1939. The source material is comprised of Jewish birth registers from 1867 to 1918 from Prague, as this was the most populous Jewish community of the region. These records are part of fund No. 167 stored in the Czech National Archive. More than 17,000 Jewish children were born in Prague during this period and only 350 of them changed their surnames. Surnames were mostly changed by young men under the age of 30. A large wave of renaming occurred mainly at the beginning of the 1920s shortly after the formation of Czechoslovakia (1918). Renaming was part of the assimilation process but was not connected to conversion to Christianity. The main goal was the effort to remove names perceived as ethnically stereotypical, which could stigmatize their bearers (e.g., Kohn, Löwy, Abeles, Taussig, Goldstein, etc.). Characteristic of the new surnames was the effort to preserve the same initial letter from the original surname. The phenomenon is compared with the situation in neighboring countries (Germany, Hungary, and Poland). Full article

The paper deals with privatization processes in five selected countries of the communist regime and their comparative analysis. Most countries have historically encountered the need to privatize state-owned enterprises. A closed and inefficient economic system would reach the brink of resilience and change was necessary. Privatization was a conceptual solution. Due to diversified economic systems, internal social and political differences, as well as the complexity of the privatization process itself, the ways in which it has been implemented vary greatly from country to country. However, the aspiration has generally always meant overall economic improvement, and the implementation of rapid, formal, as painless as possible, preferably spontaneous, and transparent privatization. Still, everything took place in several stages and there was a mass, and most often coupon, privatization in one of the phases. It was concluded that each privatization process is specific, but there are still some overlaps. The main distinguishing criteria are related to the approach towards privatization (modular or inflexible) as well as centralization (Croatia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland) and decentralization (Slovenia and Hungary) of the system that implements and controls privatization. In addition, in some countries there has been a lack of public support due to numerous embezzlements, frauds and attempts to exploit positions of power at a given time, while on the other hand orderliness, legitimacy, and innovation have resulted in an in-flow of foreign capital and successful privatization supported by the public. Full article

This article shows the life and work of Gerty Cori, a woman born in Czechoslovakia and who later became a naturalized American, who spent her whole life researching, together with her husband, in the laboratory to find the cause of some diseases, particularly those of a metabolic type, and to be able to find substances that alleviate their effects. The result of this joint work was the obtaining by both, together with the physiologist Bernardo Houssay, of the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1947. The objective of this article is to complete the scarce existing biographies about this woman with new data that highlight the most outstanding events of her life, quite a few of which are still largely ignored. A relatively complete information on the presence of female chemists in the awarded Nobel Prizes is also shown. Full article

After the Communist coup in February 1948, all areas of society in Czechoslovakia were indoctrinated by the ideology of Marxism–Leninism. The Christian Churches became the biggest internal enemies of the state, since, especially in Slovakia, they had a strong tradition and numerous representations. The government tracked representatives and members of the Church and controlled all their activities. The activities of religious orders were prohibited, which de facto abolished them. The only possibility of their preservation was to continue the life, education and work of individual orders in secret. Our goal was to examine how the Salesian order survived in this situation; specifically, we focused on the forms of formation and illegal study of the Salesians during the totalitarian regime. Research in these activities is rather demanding, since they could not be documented for security reasons. So-called memoir literature, the oral history method, and private archival sources were used in the research. Despite the fact that it seems that religious orders would not survive in this historical situation, the opposite was true: in the period of persecution, the orders were not only able to survive, but also raised a new generation that ensured their continuity and the continuation of their activities. Full article

Tomáš Halík (born 1 June 1948) has established himself as one of the most thoughtful commentators on public cultural witness in a time of change and uncertainty, especially in central Europe. As an academic at Charles University (founded 1348) and a Catholic priest in the “Academic Parish of Prague”, Halík played an important role during and following the collapse of Marxism in Czechoslovakia in the “Velvet Revolution” of November—December 1989, even being mentioned as a possible successor to Czech President Václav Havel, while at the same time offering reflections on religious engagement with a complex and changing secular culture. This article engages some leading themes of Halík’s approach to cultural witness, focusing especially on cultural quests for false certainties, the need for churches to create liminal spaces enabling seekers to grasp what lies at the heart of the Christian faith, the dangers of romanticizing a lost past of faith which encourages disengagement with the present, and the need to understand faith in terms of a constant movement of thought rather than a fixed system of ideas. The article considers how these ideas can find wider application in engaging the challenges of cultural witness, particularly in a European context, and what can be learned from them. Full article

This study focuses on examining the requirements forming the concept of the right to effective administration in relation to the communication of local governments with their residents. We pay attention to the electronization of public administration and the ambition to strengthen it through public participation in decision making concerning important matters of self-government, as the implementation of effective public administration is linked to the right management approach. In the first part of the study, we analyze European jurisprudence and legislation, and we further address the question of how the European concept of local government influences the communication of local authorities with their inhabitants in relation to the realization of the means of direct democracy. We focus our attention on the current state of the electronization of public administration and its development, including cyber security. The main goal of this study is to use critical analysis to assess the legal regulation of the activities of the Slovak public administration. In addition to the main goal, we also have several sub-goals, such as making a comparison of the development of the electronization of public administration in the countries of the former Czechoslovakia. Especially with the use of critical analysis and other scientific methods of investigation, we look for and find answers to selected application problems from practice. We also use scientific and doctrinal interpretation as well as scientific literature and jurisprudence. As a result of our study, recommendations are made to ensure the more efficient functioning of smart cities in the Slovak Republic. Full article

Water-powered facilities (WPFs) have traditionally been a pillar of the economy and social development. Therefore, the state took an interest in having these objects recorded and mapped in relevant maps and registers. This article focuses on identifying and localizing WPFs in the Moravice River basin in the so-called Sudetenland, Czechia, between the years 1763 and 2021. Specifically, the evolution and (dis)continuity of the WPFs are assessed through an analysis of cartographic and archival sources, reflecting the wider socioeconomic and demographic context as explanatory variables. The cartographic sources included old military topographic maps of Austria-Hungary and Czechoslovakia from four periods (the mid-18th century, mid-19th century, end of the 19th century, and mid-20th century) on the one hand and two state water-powered facility registers from 1930 and 1953 on the other. The archival sources included funds from regional and state archives. The results show that the count of WPFs peaked during the 19th century, after which there occurred a steep decline caused by societal and economic changes, namely, the expulsion of the local German population, nationalization in the postwar period, and economic and organizational transformations in the socialist era. Special attention is paid to hydropower plants, whose evolution reflects the outlined economic processes. Full article

This article analyzes the question of how the change of geopolitical position in the rural region of Eastern Moravia, which was shifted from the center of the state on its border, is reflected. The paper shows how the originally marginal region transformed from an area with shepherd agriculture to an industrial area with a skilled workforce during the existence of Czechoslovakia and questions how to cope with the consequences of the reverse change into a marginal geopolitical position on the eastern border of Czechia. The paper considers the balance of migration, supplemented by the construction of new dwellings, to be a relatively complex indicator. It states that the region of Eastern Moravia is problematic in terms of further development, except for the northern part, which is affected by the suburbanization of Ostrava. As a result, it proposes to supplement the current orientation toward the manufacturing industry by creating conditions for the development of cultural tourism. Full article

This study seeks to explain the differences in the perception of social and pastoral service after the first and second wave pandemic in 2020 among the inhabitants of two neighbouring states, both parts of the former unified Czechoslovakia. Our research study compares subjective perception, needs, and participation among inhabitants of eastern Slovakia and north-western Czech Republic in social and pastoral service during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research sample consisted of a healthy population from the Czech Republic (n = 496) and Slovakia (n = 484) over 16 years of age, of which 63% (n = 617) were women and 37% (n = 363) men. The level of education ranged from primary to postgraduate. The research sample consisted of 623 (63.6%) participants with religious affiliation and 357 (36.4%) without religion. The level of perception, needs, and participation of the participants in social and pastoral service was obtained based on a non-standardised questionnaire. The results of our study confirmed several differences in the areas studied. Full article

This article traces the century-old history of using a thermal and acoustic insulation panel called SOLOMIT. It presents some of Sergei Nicolajewitsch Tchayeff’s patents, on the basis of which production and installation took place. The survey section provides examples of the use of this building component in Australia, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the Soviet Union and Spain. It pays attention to applications in the 1950s and 1960s in collectivized agriculture in Czechoslovakia. It also presents the results of measuring the thermal conductivity of a panel sample, which was obtained during the reconstruction of a cottage built in the 1950s and 1960s of the 20th century. Even today, SOLOMIT finds its application all over the world, mainly due to its thermal insulation and acoustic properties and other features, such as low maintenance requirements, attractive appearance and structure and cost-effectiveness. Full article