Milan Ducháček | Technical University of Liberec (original) (raw)

Papers by Milan Ducháček

Soudobé dějiny, Sep 12, 2022

Dějiny – teorie – kritika

Generační, ideová a metodologická proměna české, potažmo československé historiografie je dle dos... more Generační, ideová a metodologická proměna české, potažmo československé historiografie je dle dosavadních interpretací spojována především s 1. sjezdem československých historiků v roce 1937. Smyslem následujícího textu je toto tvrzení podrobit tázání a zároveň nastínit okolnosti, v jejichž důsledku se dědicem Pekařovy pražské stolice československých dějin stal Václav Chaloupecký. V pozadí stati pak stojí pokus o problematizování stereotypu tzv. čechoslovakismu coby nosné ideje psaní o dějinách v meziválečné ČSR a tázání po (dis)kontinuitě historiografie „Gollovy školy“ a období nástupu tzv. marxistické historiografie. Meritem věci by pak měl být nástin interpretačního rámce založeného na širším kontextu, než jaký nabízí dosavadní soustředění na pražské univerzitní centrum a jeho ústřední osobnosti. Pro šíři tématu si ovšem předkládaný text nečiní nárok na důsledné zmapování proměn domácí historiografie řečeného období, představuje pouze dílčí úhel pohledu, promýšlený coby možné pr...

Czechoslovakism, 2021

This article analyses Czechoslovakism as the state ideology of the First Czechoslovak Republic. T... more This article analyses Czechoslovakism as the state ideology of the First Czechoslovak Republic. The main purpose is to shed light on an understudied a part of the history of Czechoslovakism: namely, how Czech politicians used the concept of a Czechoslovak nation in parliamentary debates during the First Republic. Czechoslovakism held that Czechs and Slovaks were one nation, or alternatively, that Slovaks were part of the Czech nation. While Slovak autonomists bitterly opposed this ideology and national minority representatives were often critical toward it, it garnered little or no Czech opposition. A close reading of all government inauguration debates between 1918 and 1938 reveals that Czech MPs were more likely to evoke the concept than MPs representing Slovak autonomist or national minority parties, although there were differences in the manner and frequency of use between parties. The concept occurred most often in the context of the topics of a Czechoslovak nation-state and Czechoslovak national unity. Finally, the author addresses the question whether it is possible to speak of Czechoslovakism, at the time, as a concept of a political nation. She maintains that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that any MP in the First Republic regarded all citizens (including national minorities) as part of a Czechoslovak nation

The aim of the presented PhD thesis is to deal with the historiographical legacy of Czech histori... more The aim of the presented PhD thesis is to deal with the historiographical legacy of Czech historian Václav Chaloupecký (1882-1951), the pupil of Josef Pekař and Jaroslav Goll. During the First Czechoslovak republic Chaloupecký kept the professorship of Czechoslovak history at the newly established Comenius University in Bratislava. His historiographical work has its basis in mediaevistic studies yet it also deals with the questions of contemporary history. The roots of his creativity, however, lie in poetry. Chaloupecký's work is often marked as "czechoslovakist" and positivist and due to this fact usually viewed as methodologically and ideologically obsolete. The aim of this thesis is to rethink Chaloupecký's historiographical legacy from the non-nationalistic and ideologically open minded point of view. The core of this critical approach is to show the stereotypes bound with Chaloupecký's name and last but not least to reveal the specific ideological backgrou...

AUC HISTORIA UNIVERSITATIS CAROLINAE PRAGENSIS

Acta Ethnographica Hungarica

This paper is devoted to how the Slovaks were staged, encountered and recognized by the Czechs at... more This paper is devoted to how the Slovaks were staged, encountered and recognized by the Czechs at the Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition organized in Prague in 1895. The Slovaks, living during the last period of the Hungarian Kingdom, were perceived by the Czechs as an ostensibly familiar collective of ‘Slavic relatives.’ The less the Czech urban society in the last decades of the 19th century kept its ties with the slowly, but inevitably modernized countryside, the more the picture of the ‘Czechoslavic’ imagined community required a different area for placing its ‘native cottages’ into. In reconceptualizing the modern Czech ‘geography of knowledge’, even the most notable Czech specialists in Slavic studies have adopted the notion that Slovaks were in fact an ‘eastern branch’ of the ‘Czechoslavic people settled in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia as well as the Northwest of Hungary’. Consequently, the idea of an ethnocentric, ‘national’ exhibition needed a demonstrative extension of the ‘Czech territory’ on to the East. To achieve a public demonstration of the idea, the later renowned architect Dušan Jurkovič invited a small group of people from the Trenčín and Zvolen/Detva regions to act as ‘Slovaks’ at the exhibition and so they did, wearing ‘typical’ folk costumes, singing and dancing in a peculiar style. They were viewed as a strangely exotic ‘Slovak colony’ by visitors and Czech journalists alike. The public response to the show only reinforced the petrification of the Czech collective stereotype of the ‘Slovak people’ as an underdeveloped poor community, ‘unspoiled’ by ‘western’ civilization, yet still resisting Hungarization. This ingrained discourse of ‘otherness’ survived among most of the Czechs until the establishment of the Czechoslovak republic in 1918, resulting in a growing wave of mutual misunderstandings.

Slovenský Národopis, 2018

This paper is about the monograph on the Slovak village Cerovo, published in 1906 by Karel Chotek... more This paper is about the monograph on the Slovak village Cerovo, published in 1906 by Karel Chotek, the first professor of ethnography at the Comenius University in Bratislava and the pioneer of qualitative field research in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and later in Czechoslovakia. Following Lubor Niederle's demographical data published in the map of the Slovak community living in Hungary, Cerovo, a village in the Hont region, shows Chotek's first attempt to cover the set of questions related to the monograph's focus on people in their cultural setting via field research and direct experience. Though still partly immersed in stereotypes related to Czech utilitarian conceptualisation of Slovak collective identity, Chotek's monograph shows the first step on the way to an ambitious serial (though mostly unfulfilled) project of regional monographs, known as Národopis lidu českoslovanského (The Ethnography of Czechoslavic People, 1918–1940). In the early 1950s, working al...

in: Adam Hudek - Michal Kopeček - Jan Mervart (eds.), Čecho/slovakismus, Praha: NLN - Ústav pro soudobé dějiiny AV ČR v.v.i. 2019, s. 149-181., 2019

The paper turns to the transmutation of the primarily cultural idea of Czechoslovak reciprocity i... more The paper turns to the transmutation of the primarily cultural idea of Czechoslovak reciprocity into a state- building political idea. It does not replicate the traditional disputes surrounding constitutional documents and statistical praxis, it rather focuses on how the newly launched "Czechoslovak sciences" dealt with public and state requests for scientific justification of Czechoslovakism to help fortify the national consiousness. Using concrete examples from the social sciences, including jurisprudence, historiography, geograpgy, linguistics, ethnography and literary studies - represented by the well known exponents odf Czechoslovakism, such as Viktor Dvorský, Václav Chaloupecký, Albert Pražák, František Trávníček, Emanuel Chalupný et al, the paper attempts to determine to what extent their various efforts to scientifically legitimize Czechoslovakism were either semantically or argumentatively dependent on older, pre-war polemics and stereotypes, or to what extent new argumentative strategies emerged with the creation of the common state. The central argument here is that despite the thriving of Czech and Slovak social sciences, the overwhelming majority of approaches merely repicated antecedent concepts. Ultimately, when confronted with social reality and the changing geopolitics, these scientific pursuits of letitimacy failed. Over the course of the 1920s, Czechoslovakism became nothing more than a hackneyed old phrase, rolled for official festivities..

Václav Chaloupecký a generace roku 1914. Otazníky české a slovenské historiografie v éře první republiky. Milan Ducháček – Jitka Bílková a kol., Liberec – Praha – Turnov 2018, s. 38–68.

The chapter in the collective monograph attempts to seach for the possible inspiration by the con... more The chapter in the collective monograph attempts to seach for the possible inspiration by the concepts of German „Geisteswissenschaft“, in particular the concepts of Wilhelm Dilthey, but also the thought of Ernst Troeltsch and the Baden neo-Kantians in Czech historiography of the first half of the 20th century, with special respect paid to the generation of Václav Chaloupecký, the pupil of J. Goll and J. Pekař.

Woitsch, Jiří - Jůnová Macková, Adéla Etnologie v zúženém prostoru. Jiří Woitsch, Adéla Jůnová Macková a kolektiv. Vydání 1. Praha : Etnologický ústav Akademie věd České republiky, v.v.i., 2016. 498 stran [300 výtisků] ISBN:978-80-88081-10-4, 2016

The paper is an attempt to re-think the development and key issues in Czech and Slovak enthnograp... more The paper is an attempt to re-think the development and key issues in Czech and Slovak enthnography from the breakthrough Czechoslavic Ethnographic exhibition in Prague 1895 through the republican era after 1918 up to the re-establishment of the Czecho-Slovak relations in 1945. The study questions the national, personal, academic, methodological and publication issues of the discipline emphasising the stereotypical misinterpretation (positivism), the problem of Czech-German and Czecho-Slovak relations in the field of ethnography and finally the methodological and ideological innovations and divisions during the late 30´s and 40´s up to the re-establishment of the Czechoslovak republic after WW2.

Cizí, jiné, exotické v české kultuře 19. století : sborník příspěvků z 27. ročníku sympozia k problematice 19. století : Plzeň, 22. - 24. února 2007 /Kateřina Bláhová - Vácav Petrbok (eds.), Praha : Academia : KLP, 2008

Marginalia historica : časopis pro dějiny vzdělanosti a kultury Praha : Univerzita Karlova v Praze Roč. 5, č. 2 (2014), s. 45-63., 2014

The paper focuses on the process of the takeover of the archival and bibliothecal institutions by... more The paper focuses on the process of the takeover of the archival and bibliothecal institutions by the Czechoslovak state power in the region of former Upper-Hungary during the first years after the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic. As shown here, the takeover of the Upper-Hungarian archival institutions had been the result of the cooperation between two persons, the former Lobkowicz family archivist and
librarian, the historian Václav Chaloupecký (1882–1951), and his older colleague Jan Emler (1877–1951), the Prague-based librarian, who was (due to Chaloupecký´s impulse) established as the fi rst director of the University Library in Bratislava and also the first lecturer of library science/studies at the new Comenius University in Bratislava. Their
cooperation, based on friendship and mutual respect, lasted until the late 1930´s, last but not least in the granting of a number of the Czech books (Bohemica) acquired from the Lobkowicz Prague library in benefit of the Comenius University. However, some of Chaloupecký´s and Emler´s plans and intensions remained unfulfi lled, their efforts during the first chaotic years in Slovakia resulted in the establishment of the centralised and organised Slovak library system, thus creating the founding condition for the newly established Slovak university studies at the Comenius University.

Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 64 (1), 2019

This paper is devoted to how the Slovaks were staged, encountered and recognized by the Czechs at... more This paper is devoted to how the Slovaks were staged, encountered and recognized
by the Czechs at the Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition organized in Prague in 1895. The
Slovaks, living during the last period of the Hungarian Kingdom, were perceived by the Czechs
as an ostensibly familiar collective of ‘Slavic relatives.’ The less the Czech urban society in
the last decades of the 19th century kept its ties with the slowly, but inevitably modernized
countryside, the more the picture of the ‘Czechoslavic’ imagined community required a different
area for placing its ‘native cottages’ into. In reconceptualizing the modern Czech ‘geography
of knowledge’, even the most notable Czech specialists in Slavic studies have adopted the
notion that Slovaks were in fact an ‘eastern branch’ of the ‘Czechoslavic people settled in
Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia as well as the Northwest of Hungary’. Consequently, the idea of an
ethnocentric, ‘national’ exhibition needed a demonstrative extension of the ‘Czech territory’
on to the East. To achieve a public demonstration of the idea, the later renowned architect
Dušan Jurkovič invited a small group of people from the Trenčín and Zvolen/Detva regions to
act as ‘Slovaks’ at the exhibition and so they did, wearing ‘typical’ folk costumes, singing and
dancing in a peculiar style. They were viewed as a strangely exotic ‘Slovak colony’ by visitors
and Czech journalists alike. The public response to the show only reinforced the petrification of
the Czech collective stereotype of the ‘Slovak people’ as an underdeveloped poor community,
‘unspoiled’ by ‘western’ civilization, yet still resisting Hungarization. This ingrained discourse
of ‘otherness’ survived among most of the Czechs until the establishment of the Czechoslovak
republic in 1918, resulting in a growing wave of mutual misunderstandings.

Hrdina, Martin - Piorecká, Kateřina Historické fikce a mystifikace v české kultuře 19. století: sborník příspěvků z 33. ročníku sympozia k problematice 19. století : Plzeň, 21.–23. února 2013. uspořádali Martin Hrdina a Kateřina Piorecká. Vyd. 1. Praha : Academia, 2014. 334 s., 2014

This study attempts to point out several paradoxes which during the last four decades before the ... more This study attempts to point out several paradoxes which during the last four decades
before the Great War gave rise to the Czech idea of the „Slovaks“ and „Slovakia“. e
initial thesis is that the idea of a „Czechoslovak nation“, adopted by a considerable
proportion of Czech society in the decades leading up to the Great War, was to a large
extent a self-mystification, but that at the same time it formed a logical part of their
collective imagination, basically independent of the Upper Hungarian reality and the
changing face of modern Slovak society. Although thanks to the Hlasists and the
activities of Czechoslovak Unity before the war Czech-Slovak contacts intensified,
the majority population did not reflect this change. After the declaration of an
independent Czechoslovakia the deep-rooted stereotypical image of a „poor but
hospitable people beneath the Tatra mountains“, which was not actually based on
authentic experience, became one of the sources of communication difficulties
between the Czech and Slovak societies.

Soudobé dějiny, Sep 12, 2022

Dějiny – teorie – kritika

Czechoslovakism, 2021

AUC HISTORIA UNIVERSITATIS CAROLINAE PRAGENSIS

Acta Ethnographica Hungarica

Slovenský Národopis, 2018

in: Adam Hudek - Michal Kopeček - Jan Mervart (eds.), Čecho/slovakismus, Praha: NLN - Ústav pro soudobé dějiiny AV ČR v.v.i. 2019, s. 149-181., 2019

Marginalia historica : časopis pro dějiny vzdělanosti a kultury Praha : Univerzita Karlova v Praze Roč. 5, č. 2 (2014), s. 45-63., 2014

Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 64 (1), 2019

This paper is devoted to how the Slovaks were staged, encountered and recognized by the Czechs at... more This paper is devoted to how the Slovaks were staged, encountered and recognized
by the Czechs at the Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition organized in Prague in 1895. The
Slovaks, living during the last period of the Hungarian Kingdom, were perceived by the Czechs
as an ostensibly familiar collective of ‘Slavic relatives.’ The less the Czech urban society in
the last decades of the 19th century kept its ties with the slowly, but inevitably modernized
countryside, the more the picture of the ‘Czechoslavic’ imagined community required a different
area for placing its ‘native cottages’ into. In reconceptualizing the modern Czech ‘geography
of knowledge’, even the most notable Czech specialists in Slavic studies have adopted the
notion that Slovaks were in fact an ‘eastern branch’ of the ‘Czechoslavic people settled in
Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia as well as the Northwest of Hungary’. Consequently, the idea of an
ethnocentric, ‘national’ exhibition needed a demonstrative extension of the ‘Czech territory’
on to the East. To achieve a public demonstration of the idea, the later renowned architect
Dušan Jurkovič invited a small group of people from the Trenčín and Zvolen/Detva regions to
act as ‘Slovaks’ at the exhibition and so they did, wearing ‘typical’ folk costumes, singing and
dancing in a peculiar style. They were viewed as a strangely exotic ‘Slovak colony’ by visitors
and Czech journalists alike. The public response to the show only reinforced the petrification of
the Czech collective stereotype of the ‘Slovak people’ as an underdeveloped poor community,
‘unspoiled’ by ‘western’ civilization, yet still resisting Hungarization. This ingrained discourse
of ‘otherness’ survived among most of the Czechs until the establishment of the Czechoslovak
republic in 1918, resulting in a growing wave of mutual misunderstandings.

by Milan Ducháček, Bohumil Jiroušek, Roman Pazderský, Adam Hudek, Marek Ďurčanský, Jitka Rauchová, Nina Milotová, Miro Lysy, Martin Kindl, Vojtěch Čurda, Dalibor Státník, Hana Kábová, Václav Nájemník, Milica Lustigová Bunčáková, Zdenka Gláserová Lebedová, and Tomáš Pánek

Václav CHALOUPECKÝ a generace roku 1914. Otazníky české a slovenské historiografie v éře první republiky, 2018

The 100 years anniversary of the establishment of Czechoslovak Republic seems to be a suitable oc... more The 100 years anniversary of the establishment of Czechoslovak Republic seems to be a suitable occasion for exploring the legacy of “the 1914 generation“ in historiography (as it was metaphorically called by Czech historian Jaroslav Werstadt), especially with the emphasis on the Czechoslovak perplexities, continuities and discontinuities of topics of the historiography of inter-war Czechoslovakia.
The book aspires to question the discourse of the traditional interpretation of Czech and Slovak historiography in Modern Age (esp. the late 19th and fi rst half of the 20th century), prefering problem-based questions to biographical issues. The emphasis lies here on methodology, the use of nationalist political agenda behind a historiographical framework and the question of generational (dis)continuity, especially concerning the emergence of Marxism within the Czech and Slovak social sciences during the 30’s.
The individual chapters of this collective monograph focus mainly on the historical context and the reflection of the work of Václav Chaloupecký (1882–1951), a distinguished Czech historian, the pupil of Jaroslav Goll and Josef Pekař, professor of Czechoslovak history and also (in 1937/38) the rector of the Comenius University in Bratislava, who after the Munich treaty and again after 1945 continued his academic career at the Charles University in Prague.
Due to recently published monographs on Václav Chaloupecký and Karel Stloukal, two of the most important academic figures of the “1914 generation”, biographical and overview chapters are not part of this monograph. Via Chaloupecký’s web of social and professional connections, the authors rather focus on particular subject matters and problems open to interpretation. Chaloupecký’s role as the Bratislava-based promoter of the newly forged “picture of Czechoslovak history” serves here as a pars pro toto, a crossroad leading to a different contemporary field of questions.
The monograph attempts to address mainly the critical reception of Chaloupecký’s theses and works, usually and generally linked to the “Czechoslovakism” label and the issues of historiographical pratice and public actions of Chaloupecký’s Czech and Slovak professional companions including teachers, colleagues and pupils as well.

by Frantisek Bahensky, Jiří Woitsch, Petr Janecek, Vera Frolcova, Očková Katarína, Magdalena Parikova, Hana Dvořáková, Lukáš F. Peluněk, Milan Ducháček, Margita Jágerová, and Alexandra Navratilova

Collective monograph describing and analyzing essential institutional, personal and theoretical a... more Collective monograph describing and analyzing essential institutional, personal and theoretical and methodological developments and changes of ethnology and related scientific disciplines in the 2nd half of the 20th century. The very first work published after 1989, which extensively and critically deals with the history of ethnology in a broad social, political and cultural contexts, with an emphasis the development in the former Czechoslovakia and other Central European countries.

http://www.usd.cas.cz/za-rovnocennost-evropskych-plemen-ceskoslovenska-antropologie-tvari-v-tvar-rasismu-a-nacismu/ Program a linky na konferenční příspěvky. / Conference program, abstracts & weblinks / podcasts

Centrum dějin vědy Ústavu pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR v. v. i. si Vás dovoluje pozvat k poslechu a ... more Centrum dějin vědy Ústavu pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR v. v. i.
si Vás dovoluje pozvat k poslechu a nahlédnutí do konferenčních příspěvků online konference ZA ROVNOCENNOST EVROPSKÝCH PLEMEN… ČESKOSLOVENSKÁ ANTROPOLOGIE TVÁŘÍ V TVÁŘ RASISMU A NACISMU /
Centre for the History of Science s and Humanities - Institute for Contemporary History - Czech Academy of Sciences invites you to listen and look into the conference papers of the online conference FOR THE EQUIVALENCE OF EUROPEAN RACES… CZECHOSLOVAK ANTHROPOLOGY CONTESTING RACISM AND NAZISM (Podcasts/presentations in Czech)

http://www.usd.cas.cz/za-rovnocennost-evropskych-plemen-ceskoslovenska-antropologie-tvari-v-tvar-rasismu-a-nacismu/