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Tomb of a known soldier. De-anonymization of war memorials and mass graves as a modernization process
Kessler, Vojtěch ; Michlová, M. ; Šrámek, J.
This article focuses on perceiving the anonymity of fallen soldiers in the mid-19th century war memorials in Bohemia. The researchers working in Central Europe can draw surprisingly different conclusions than Anglo-American works. This article compensates for this lack of research. The anonymity of war memorials in the Czech lands almost disappeared during the first half of the 19th century. We are looking for an explanation in the four main changes that took place at that time. Firstly, fundamental changes in society, secondly, evolving aesthetics reflected in war memorials, thirdly, a difference in the way of waging war, and finally, changings emotions towards the fallen, the homeland and family.
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Unconquered Yet Defeated. Fortress Towns of Bohemia and Moravia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866
Kessler, Vojtěch ; Šrámek, J.
Authors of the essay have attempted, based on ego-documents, to reveal the borderlines of the discrepancy between the expected standard of intensity and duration of the Austro-Prussian conflict and the subsequent reality. One of the 19th-century mnodernizing processes condensed in the short and intense clash in the summer of 1866 when in consequence of increased density of the traffic infrastructure and the introduction of new communication and infrastructure networks, the world seemed „smaller“ and „faster“. The essay brings an analysis of the period discrourse that the autohors understand not only as a frame within which memories and events were performed, but also as a poduct of mnemonic processes.
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Sepulchral palimpsest? The translocation of the monument and memory based on the example of the fallen in the War of 1866 in Köslin/Koszalin and Poznań
Ćwiek-Rogalska, K. ; Kessler, Vojtěch ; Šrámek, J.
The article aims at analyzing two war memorials, established after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 in the Prussian cities of Köslin (now Koszalin) and Poznań, subsequently in the years 1867 and 1870. They commemorated the successes of Prussian armies in the battles of Hradec Králové and Náchod, as well as the fallen Prussian soldiers, often of Polish nationality. However, the reception of both monuments changed during the 19th century. Both war memorials were perceived as „Prussian“, or respectively „German“, which led to their demise after the re-Polonization of both cities after 1918 (Poznań) and 1945 (Köslin/Koszalin). Thus, these war memorials constitute an interesting example of specific phenomena concerning treatment of sepulchral-military monuments, which defy general classification and theoretical concepts commonly accepted both at the cultural-historical and commemoration-historical level. Their specificity lies in the unusual degree of translocation, when soldiers of nationality „A“ fell in country „B“ for the interests of state „C“, while a monument devoted to their memory was built in locality „D“. Furthermore, the analyzed monuments represent a certain „monument utilitarianism“, as their meaning was rewritten, and they were themselves destroyed and their parts secondarily used. The range of these factors, integrally connected with both memorials, then becomes an interesting subject of historical analysis, concerning the study of historical and collective memory.
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Small-town drama: The Search for Identity in Dvůr Králové nad Labem in the period of the Great War and the Revolution
Rejchrt, Ivo ; Hlavačka, Milan (advisor) ; Šedivý, Ivan (referee) ; Kessler, Vojtěch (referee)
Submitted work aims on studying changes of life, identity, and loyalty of citizens in Dvůr Králové nad Labem during World War I. The first step is to describe economy, self-governance, and state administration in a town which was developing dynamically in the last pre-war decade thanks to significant industrialization. Self-governance and state administration, which cooperated to maintain order even during the coup days in 1918, tried to reduce war and economic difficulties, poverty, and supply shortages. District National Council was able to enforce the dismissal of the district governor, but then the administrative continuity of the district governor office was maintained. The democratisation of the right to vote changed the distribution of political power in the town, but the victory of the Czechoslovak Socialists and the second place of the National Democrats (contrary to national results) demonstrate maintaining the dominance of voters' national feelings. The second step is the analysis of contemporary press. Two newspapers gradually closed (one in the meantime published a Russian manifesto), but the third survived the entire war and witnessed changes in censorship and propaganda. The third step is research into local education, which reflects state propaganda, "mobilization" of the background...
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The memory places of the battle of Kulm
Kessler, Vojtěch ; Hlavačka, Milan (advisor) ; Randák, Jan (referee)
In current czech historiography the concept incurred from french historians (such as Pierre Nora), such as the concept of places of memory, is hardly used. As an example we can see the broad edition of Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, which tries to understand and describe important "moments" of the history of German nation in an entirely new way. The German authors include a wide variety of phenomenons such as abstract functionally-symbolic products of intelect as well as raw material monuments into these "pockets of hibernation" into which the society stores and delegates their cultural memory in order to prevent them from perishing. The neighbourhood of the Ústí nad Labem city, in the direction to the Czech- Saxon border, is covered with a number of such stone monuments. These memorials, calling to the battles of 1813, silently store a memory, which was stored in them in a feeling of patriotic flame_and the most deep love for the inherited Hapsburg home, furnished for years by a friendship with the German Brethren and the offspring of the companion-in-arms in the epoch of Befreiungskriege, completedly silented after the 1945, when the departure of German inhabitants from the border region takes away as well the memories that the memorials represented. In my work I focused on the processes, by which a purely...
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Military monuments and Historical Memory. Toward the reception of sepulchral-military monuments of Wars between 1757 and 1914 in the Czech Lands
Kessler, Vojtěch ; Šedivý, Ivan (advisor) ; Hojda, Zdeněk (referee) ; Bělina, Pavel (referee)
Vojtěch Kessler Military monuments and Historical Memory Toward the reception of sepulchral-military monuments of Wars between 1757 and 1914 in the Czech Lands Abstract Topic of the thesis is reception of war monuments on territory of Czech Republic with relation to events between Seven Years' War and Prussian-Austrian war. In thesis war monuments are perceived as specific places of memory. Their so called second life modifies historical awareness about mentioned war events of Czech - or more precisely German- Czech-society in watched period. Changes of relationships to historical monuments are usually dynamic. Distinctive discontinuities - such as changes of government, social systems or departures of whole ethnic groups - influence also reception changes of places, objects and historical memory that are formed woth such places.
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Bohemian lands and the War of 1813
Kessler, Vojtěch ; Stellner, František (advisor) ; Bělina, Pavel (referee)
In my work I try to analyze the war events of the year 1813, which took place on our land. I focused mostly on the reactions to the events from the inhabitants of the cities and the countryside. Therefore the key questions were - how did the inhabitants see and understand the major war events of their time. I also kept in mind the reflection about the economical difficulties caused by the military actions, or by a simple passing of the armies. For the obvious reasons I focused on the inhabitants of the north of the Bohemia region. It turned out that the war is still understood by a simple man of the beginning of the 19 century as a God's deal or as a caprice of the mighty. The people realized it's destructive potential only if it directly affected them. We could say that the level of the disagreement and the laments is inversely proportional to the distance between the places where the battles took place or where the armies were passing and the residences of the people manifesting them. Despite the sufferings of the war and the economic exhaustion, very soon after the battles had stopped, news about the natural cycles and the harvest started to reappear in the chronicles. Those were undoubtedly the events of a great importance for a person of that time.
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Landscape as a fixator of human memory - an example of the Hradec Králové battlefield from 1866
Kessler, Vojtěch ; Šrámek, J.
The relationship between man and the landscape in the 19th century is usually viewed through the prism of fundamental contemporary phenomena, i. e. primarily the industrial revolution, the construction and densening of the railway network and urbanization. The authors focus on a different level, namely the approach to the question how the landscape has changed due to the events of the war and the development of contemporary memory culture and historicism. An example of this is the scene of the largest battle of the 19th century in the Czech lands, the battlefield of the Prussian-Austrian war near Hradec Králové (Sadová). Using this example, they demonstrate the transformation of the former war field into a specific reverential and sepulchral locality and subsequently a monument area, whose existence survived not only the changes of the 20th century, but above all became an influential fixation of the 1866 war not only in the immediate region. However, according to their judgment, the landscape itself, which has not been fundamentally changed since the 19th century due to the heritage care, is an important factor in this reception.
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The Town in Seclusion: the Fortress Chapter in the History of Hradec Králové in the 19th Century
Kessler, Vojtěch ; Šrámek, J.
The liberalisation political-social transformation in the 1860s marked the birth of structures and institutions which in many cases form the framework of civil society up to this day. In the Hapsburg monarchy (including the Czech Lands) at that time, social relationships and connections were formed not only on the state and national level, but also within municipal communities. Working with the example of Hradec Králové, the article focusses on the limiting or, on the contrary, activation frameworks that served for the creation of the social complex of towns, which were simultaneously military objects, i.e., fortresses. Friction grew between military authorities and local government institutions primarily in connection with the gradual decline in the dominant role of the fortress command and, in contrast, the rising confidence of the town government face to face with military events in the Austro-Prussian conflict.
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Should the fallen be forgotten it is as if they died for the second time. Sepulchral monuments at the Hradec Králové Battlefield of 1866
Kessler, Vojtěch ; Šrámek, J.
Monuments of the Austro-Prussian War have in their overwhelming majority memorial dimension. Thanks to their commemorative character, the monuments survived the year of 1918 and were not deliberately destroyed during the Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. Monuments of the Austro-Prussian War in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia present a heterogeneous group with its Centre in Hradec Králové. Thanks to them a completely unique set of funerary sculpture and architecture is still in existence until these days. Its uniqueness lies not only in its artistic, memorial and revential basis. For historians monuments of the Austro-Prussian War represent an interesting object in their study of historical memory, its function and impact, as memorials were primarily intended to fix a memory.
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