Weapon in Every Fist? The Vision of Violence as an Identity-making Instrument of Czech Society at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries
Abstract
War and violence are an integral part of the founding myths of modern European nations, including the Czech nation. Using specific examples from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the study shows that ideas of violence and battles with the enemy were a major factor forming the identity of the modern Czech society.
According to the ideas of the time, the Czechs fought hard for the life of the nation - the present and especially the future were meant to belong only to viable nations demonstrating their entitlement to existence in power-political, economic and cultural spheres. With the awareness of national rivalry and the fight for survival, the idea of a national enemy and pest was updated in the mindset of the Czech national movement in the form of Bohemian, Austrian and imperial Germans.
It may have been essential to have contact with them, but above to contend with them, whereas in the inds of many contemporaries, the fight was already taking place. The area which saw the most clashes was above all the language borders and German-language regions, expressed in the terminology of the time from a Czech perspective - threatened territories.
Ideas of conflict and violence towards rivals spread through the public space kept to an idealising auto-stereotype of purely defensive battles, or a vision of readiness to defend the nation. A battle construed as a matter of defence did not as such present a moral problem.
Furthermore, the Czechs did not undertake a frontal assault on their enemy, they did not develop a strategy of systematic physical clashes and guerilla attacks against their German rivals. Nevertheless, they were able to deal with their opponent sufficiently, often for example in the world of the imagination.
Czechs were given the option of an alternative drubbing of the Germans-pests by the world of national history and mythology, such as the nationalist understanding of the medieval Hussites slaughtering the German crusaders.