Imperial Nations and Subject Peoples: Czech nation in the Austrian Empire and After (17th – 21st centuries)
Syllabus
Course supervisor: David L. Robbins, PhD
Instructors: Mgr. Marcela Janíčková, prof. David L. Robbins, PhD, Blanka Maderová, PhD
Recommended number of ECTS credits: 6
Grading procedure:
- midterm: 40% of the final grade
- final exam: 40% of the final grade
- presentation: 20% of the final grade
- make-up exams are possible
Attendance:
Two absences are permitted. If you are absent more times, you will be asked to write a paper to make up for the class(es) missed.
COURSE CONTENT
Session 1 Introduction
Session 2 Lecture: Enlightenment in theory
Session 3 Enlightenment in practice: reforms under Maria Teresa and Joseph II
Session 4 Romanticism as a backlash against Enlightenment
Session 5 Birth of Nationalism; its growth during the Napoleonic wars
Session 6 Czech national revival and its phases: development of language, synthesis of the Czech cultural tradition including the history of the Czechs, creation of works that institutionalized Czech culture and formed Czech identity.
Weaknesses of the Czech national revival and gradual self-critique
Session 7 Springtime of Nations in the German Confederation – consequences of German unification movement on the relations between Bohemian Czechs and Bohemian Germans.
Plans for revamping of Austria
Session 8 Aftermath of the revolution of 1848 – Francis Joseph’s and Bach’s absolutism and its erosion
From constitutional monarchy to Austria-Hungary; beginning of the (Czech) political life in the Austrian Empire
Session 9 Czech politics and culture in Austria-Hungary from Ausgleich to 1910’s
Encounter of the "national culture" with cosmopolitan modernism
Session 10 Jews in Austria-Hungary (18th and 19th ct)
Session 11 WWI and Czech striving for independent Czechoslovakia
Session 12 Midterm exam
Session 13 First Czechoslovak Republic: experiment in building a pluralist society
State Right argument vs. right to national determination; Idea of the Czechoslovak nation state with minorities; geography, demographics, political system, economic situation.
Session 14 Continuation: First Czechoslovak Republic: experiment in building a pluralist society
Session 15 Attitudes of Slovaks to Czechoslovakia and Czechs: from establishment of the republic to the Munich agreement of 1938
Session 16 Attitudes of Bohemian Germans to Czechoslovakia and Czechs in the 1920's: from refusal to acceptance, from negativism to activism.
Bohemian Germans in the 1930's: from autonomist goals to destruction of the First Czechoslovak Republic.
Session 17 WWII in the Czech lands: the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
Session 18 Post-war changes in Central Europe and Czechoslovakia – crafting a welfare state: changes of the political system, expulsion and resettlement of populations, coping with the past (retribution decrees and amnesty law), first nationalizations in the economy.
Session 19 Communist seizure of power in February 1948, Construction of the Communist Utopia
Attractions and realities of life in the communist society in the 1950's
Session 20 Causes and the program of the Prague Spring reform movement
Session 21 Czechoslovak experience under Normalization
Session 22 Velvet Revolution of 1989; political transformation
Session 23 Break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993, establishment of the Czech Republic
Economic transformation and its crisis
Session 24 European Integration
Final Exam
Annotation
ANNOTATION
European students may have an impression that they went over the period of 17th – 20th centuries in Central Europe in great detail.
However, the purpose of the course is to provide novel interpretations of Central Europe and its dynamics.
The study of Central Europe has been misleadingly neglected in both Western Europe and the U.S. Prior to 1945, the cultural and geo-political construct of "Central Europe" comprised Germany, the (former) Hapsburg Empire (Austria, the Czech lands, Hungary, Slovenia), and Poland. After 1945, the Cold War displaced this "Central Europe" concept by redividing the continent into Communist "Eastern Europe" and non-Communist "Western Europe," Even now, decades after the end of the Cold War in 1989, the older conceptual formation of "Central Europe" has not quite been recovered as a geographic, cultural, and analytic category. Instead, we often hear about "East Central Europe" or "East Europe and the Balkans."
Yet Central Europe, through its multiculturalism, resistance to political consolidation, and other characteristic regional dynamics, has foundationally influenced the shape of 21st-century Europe.
There, in "Enlightenment" ideas were institutionalized in state structures and practices. There, ethnic nationalism arose and prospered, and from there spread continent- and world-wide. There, the practices of the paternalistic welfare state were initiated and tested. There, Marxism and Communism first provided a popular alternative to economic, political, and diplomatic exploitation by "capitalists" who through unrepresentative institutions maintained control over their states and some even over entire empires.
We shall examine the above by focusing on the Austrian Empire and interactions between the "ruling" ethnicities and the secondary ones, the division being that the language and culture of the ruling nations was the language and culture of the state (in our case German vs. Czech).
Students can also participate in the following trips at their own cost:
TRIPS
March 2 imperial castle Karlštejn and a hike in the vicinity (trip to Great America and Mexico limestone quarries)
March 15 concentration camp Terezín (day trip)
March 29 Dresden, Germany
April 5 medieval silver-mining town Kutna hora and a Bone chapel (Ossuary) in Sedlec
April 13 - 14 two/three-day trip to Southern Bohemia: medieval town of Cesky Krumlov, Cistercian monastery Golden Crown and a nice hike through the countryside
April 27 hiking trip to Bohemian Paradise (Rock town of Hruboskalsko)
May 2 - May 5 4-day trip to Vienna, capital of Austria