An English translation of a successful title by the first post-1989 Czech ambassador to Israel, Miloš Pojar. The book is a result of the author’s life-long interest in this difficult and taboo theme. Starting with the first publication of the samizdat collection, TGM and Our Present Day, Czech anti-Semitism has been newly researched in a broad context. This book presents a useful summary of Tomás Garrigue Masaryk’s stances from his writings and political activities, including a detailed description of the historic first visit of the head of the state to Palestine in 1927. The English edition contains a preface by Shlomo Avineri and a personal essay by Petr Pithart.
Translated by Dora Round Tomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937) was a philosophy professor who became the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia (1918-1935) and was a leading figure in world affairs between the wars. Capek, author of 'War with the Newts', and Czechoslovakia's most prominent writer during these years, interviewed Masaryk at great length and produced this volume that tells Masaryk's unique story.
Berlin, 1948. Still occupied by the four Allied powers and largely in ruins, the city has become the cockpit of a new Cold War. The legacies of the war have become entangled in the new Soviet-American conflict, creating a world of bizarre and fleeting loyalties—a paradise for spies. As spring unfolds, a Western withdrawal looks increasingly likely. Berlin’s German inhabitants live in fear of the Soviet forces who occupy half the city, and whose legacy of violence has ripped apart many families. John Russell works for both Stalin's NKVD and the newly created CIA, trying his best to cut himself loose from both before his double-agency is discovered by either. As tensions between the great powers escalate, each passing day makes Russell’s position more treacherous. He and his Soviet liaison, Shchepkin, seek out one final operation—one piece of intelligence so damning it could silence the wrath of one nation and solicit the protection of the other. It will be the most dangerous task Russell has ever taken on, but one way or the other, it will be his last.
In this biography of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937), the founder of the Czechoslovak republic, and of his son Jan Masaryk (1886-1948), who became foreign minister in the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London during World War II, the author retraces their lives against the dramatic background of the history of Central and Eastern Europe. “Zeman is sympathetic to his subjects but completely honest in presenting them as men, not myths.” — John C. Campbell, Foreign Affairs “Dr. Zeman draws an interesting portrait of [T.G. Masaryk] the ‘scholar President’, an individualistic, curiously apolitical and yet far-sighted figure... The author has written a sound biography, at its best in the descriptions of Masaryk’s attempts to found the new state.” — Lisanne Radice, International Affairs “Zeman’s portrait of the Masaryks is engagingly written and may be profitably read by the non-specialist.” — Victor S. Mamatey, The American Historical Review
This study of T.G. Masaryk deals with his pre-1914 career as a professor and persistent dissenter. For three decades he was a constant and unrelenting critic of conventional wisdom, established institutions and customary practices in Bohemia and Austria-Hungary. At every stage he was a radical dissident in all questions of public life as well as in private matters: religion, the nationality problem the place of women, labour and the social question, parliament and government in the Monarchy, its foreign affairs and foreign policy institutions, education, the courts and legal system, the Catholic Church, and clericalism, the university establishment, Czech politics and Czech political parties, the interpretations of Czech history, and anti-semitism.
After World War I, diplomats and leaders at the Paris Peace Talks redrew the map of Europe, carving up ancient empires and transforming Europe's eastern half into new nation-states. Drawing heavily on the past, the leaders of these young countries crafted national mythologies and deployed them at home and abroad. Domestically, myths were a tool for legitimating the new state with fractious electorates. In Great Power capitals, they were used to curry favor and to compete with the mythologies and propaganda of other insecure postwar states. The new postwar state of Czechoslovakia forged a reputation as Europe's democratic outpost in the East, an island of enlightened tolerance amid an increasingly fascist Central and Eastern Europe. In Battle for the Castle, Andrea Orzoff traces the myth of Czechoslovakia as an ideal democracy. The architects of the myth were two academics who had fled Austria-Hungary in the Great War's early years. Tomáas Garrigue Masaryk, who became Czechoslovakia's first president, and Edvard Benes, its longtime foreign minister and later president, propagated the idea of the Czechs as a tolerant, prosperous, and cosmopolitan people, devoted to European ideals, and Czechoslovakia as a Western ally capable of containing both German aggression and Bolshevik radicalism. Deeply distrustful of Czech political parties and Parliamentary leaders, Benes and Masaryk created an informal political organization known as the Hrad or "Castle." This powerful coalition of intellectuals, journalists, businessmen, religious leaders, and Great War veterans struggled with Parliamentary leaders to set the country's political agenda and advance the myth. Abroad, the Castle wielded the national myth to claim the attention and defense of the West against its increasingly hungry neighbors. When Hitler occupied the country, the mythic Czechoslovakia gained power as its leaders went into wartime exile. Once Czechoslovakia regained its independence after 1945, the Castle myth reappeared. After the Communist coup of 1948, many Castle politicians went into exile in America, where they wrote the Castle myth of an idealized Czechoslovakia into academic and political discourse. Battle for the Castle demonstrates how this founding myth became enshrined in Czechoslovak and European history. It powerfully articulates the centrality of propaganda and the mass media to interwar European cultural diplomacy and politics, and the tense, combative atmosphere of European international relations from the beginning of the First World War well past the end of the Second.
