Abstrakt
The First Czechoslovak Republic was a state born out of modern war, in whose shadow it collapsed. To understand its existence, it is therefore important to trace the relationship between the military and wider society.
One useful tool is research into the status of the professional officer corps. In the era of mass armies, professional officers play a key role in organising and preparing the population for armed conflict.
They are therefore a frequent object of research in military sociology and socially oriented historical works, represented by István Deák's research on the Habsburg officer corps. Orthodox social history, nowadays, is methodologically insufficient to illuminate a phenomenon such as the perception of the interwar officer corps.
Prestige, honour and social status were and are not objectively given quantities, but constructed values. Officers, often consciously trying to establish themselves in society, were important actors in shaping them.
The application of cultural-historical approaches allows us to capture these processes. The army was a living institution with its own culture that set symbolic frameworks for how issues were perceived, interpreted and processed.
Officers constituted an important subculture that had to come to terms with the new contexts of a proclaimedly democratic army, as well as its post-Habsburg heritage and the realities of a totalitarian institution. The position of the officer as representative of the ideal of hegemonic masculinity was shattered.
His place in society was intellectually reassessed by the actors shaping public discourse. And it is only by applying the approaches of the history of emotions that reveals how fundamental feelings such as honor, pride, or frustration were for officers.
The aim of this paper is to illustrate the possibilities of approaches seeking to capture the often ephemeral relationship of a social group to wider society, drawing on the methodological legacy of the cultural turn. Given its matter, it also aims to highlight the productivity of sociocultural approaches in military affairs.