Construction of Professional Officer in the Works of Emanuel Moravec Construction of Professional Officer in the Works of Emanuel Moravec
Abstrakt
Career officer in the era of mass armies constructs and represents the identity and prestige of his profession, army and image of warfare, in the clash with public opinion and state politics. Interwar Czechoslovak republic, as a successor state of defeated Austria-Hungary, had to create the identity of the new officer corps.
The corps, on the other hand, had to convince the anti-militaristically disposed society about the value, importance and prestige of its calling. This negotiation of social status was conducted by a wide array of means and one of them was the construction of public image of professional officers in general, and the Czechoslovak one in particular, by several publicly active writers.
One of the most prolific of these authors, contributor to Lidové noviny and revue Přítomnost, officer himself, and later the most infamous Czech collaborationist, was Emanuel Moravec. I want to illustrate, using the example of his texts, how the construction of the image of the professional officer, as a form of representation before the majority of society, took place.