The Struggle for Pekař's Chair: Václav Chaloupecký, František Hrubý, and the Generational Shift in 'Czechoslovak' Academic Historiography during the First Republic
Abstract
Up to now the generational, ideological and methodological shift of the Czech, or more precisely Czechoslovak historiography used to be connected especially with the First Congress of the Czechoslovak historians in 1937. Thus the goal of this study is to put the previous interpretations under renewed questioning and besides that to describe the circumstances, under whose the so called Josef Pekař's Chair of Czechoslovak History at the Charles University was entrusted to Pekař's pupil Václav Chaloupecký.
Besides that the paper tries to problematise the concept of Czechoslovakism as the traditional ideological conceptualisation of the inter-war Czechoslovak historiography, as well as the question of the /dis/continuity of the so called "Goll school" era and the rise of the marxist historiography. The coveted goal of this study, or more likely an essay, is to offer a broader contextualisation of the problem than the one traditionally focused on the Prague university centre and its key personalities.
Due to the extensive field of the aformentioned questions the text lays claim not to cover the whole range of the topic, yet rather to offer a certain (let's say Slovakia-included) point of view as a kind of prolegomenon, a cross-section to the field of problems.