'From "Islands of Democracy" to "Transnational Border Spaces": State of the Art and Perspectives of the Historiography on the First Czechoslovak Republic since 1989
Abstrakt
The article provides an overview over the developments of the historiography on the First Czechoslovak Republic since the end of the Cold War. In the first part the authors focus on the Czech historiography in the 1990s, when the First Czechoslovak Republic experienced a revival in the public as well as in the historiography and was often idealized as an "island of democracy".
Though not exclusively, these writings were dominated by the paradigm of national history. This has changed since at least the first decade of the 21th century.
Recent writings on the First Czechoslovak Republic, which are discussed in the second part, analyze Czechoslovakia between the World Wars as a dynamic social, political, economic and cultural space with permeable and shifting borders in- and outside. Furthermore they place Czechoslovakia in its broader regional, European and global contexts.
Finally, the authors suggest the term "transnational border spaces" as formulated by Johannes Paulmann and Martin H. Geyer to outline these major changes and to open up further perspectives on the research of the First Czechoslovak Republic within a European and global history