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The Evolution of Historical Memory of World War Two in Switzerland
Müller, Joseph ; Matějka, Ondřej (advisor) ; Bauer, Paul (referee)
The subject of the diploma thesis is an analysis of how the official Swiss institutions worked with the reference of World War II, thus contributing to the formation of collective memory of the Second World War in Switzerland. World War II and, above all, Switzerland's role in it, was covered in myths by official institutions in order to maintain a positive attitude towards the actions of Switzerland during the Second World War until the second half of the 1990s. For this purpose, three major myths were made during the war and post-war years in Switzerland around which the official remembrance of World War II was build - the myth of Réduit Alpin, the myth of neutrality and the myth of Swiss solidarity. Main institutions that influenced collective memory in Switzerland during World War II and subsequently in the post-war years were the army headed by General Henri Guisan and the Swiss government. This diploma thesis analyzes the evolution of the perception of the legacy of World War II in Switzerland in two periods. The first one is the period of the Second World War and immediately afterwards. The second one is the period from the second half of the 1990s, when the International Commission of Experts was established which was an important milestone in the debate on the Swiss role in the Second...
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Jan Masaryk as radio commentator in wartime BBC
Dvořáková, Anna ; Bednařík, Petr (advisor) ; Cebe, Jan (referee)
This thesis focuses on Czechoslovak radio broadcasting on BBC from September 1939 (when the separate Czech program started there) to the end of World War II in which there were participating political representatives of Czechoslovakia after partial recognition of Czechoslovak government in the exile by the British government in summer of 1940. Main theme of the thesis are the radio speeches of Jan Masaryk, the former (longtime) Czechoslovak ambassador in London and future Minister of Foreign Affairs of the exile government. He launched the Czech Programme of BBC for listeners in the Protectorate on 8th September 1939 and began to appear on the waves regularly once a week in February 1940. The thesis analyzes how he tried (in his speeches and comments) to encourage self-confidence of the nation, how he tried to nullify germanization endeavors of occupiers and quislings to reinterpret Czech historical narrative and by usage of what ideological weapons he was creating the image of small, but internally strong and mature Czechoslovak nation, morally exceeding its inherent German enemy. He used this story as a rhetorical shield against the Nazi interpretation of the Czech tribe, who returned to the womb of the modern Holy Roman Empire, where it belongs as natural part - by the words of the Nazi propaganda.
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National Stereotypes: The Case of Czechs in the 19th Century
Neugebauer, Petr ; Rak, Jiří (advisor) ; Konrád, Ota (referee)
The main aim of this thesis is to explore the birth, the use and the disappearance of national stereotypes on the example of Czechs in the 19th century, focusing on the formation of Czech national autostereotypes. To this end, it utilizes a combination of classical study of literature dealing with said subject and with use of caricature. In the first chapter of the thesis basic terms such as the nation, the stereotype and the national stereotype are defined with the help of sociological knowledge mainly. Then the relation between autostereotypes and heterostereotypes is described. The first chapter thereby constitutes a theoretical framework for the whole thesis. The second chapter deals with Czech national stereotypes in the 19th century and is further divided in two parts. In the first part the history of Czech national movement is briefly introduced. Then the national stereotypes based on historical myths are examined, the main subjects being the relationship to the Catholic Church and Protestantism (especially the Hussites), the rejection of aristocracy, the sacralisation of plebeianism and the heterostereotypes about Germans, Slavs and the Habsburg monarchy. The second part focuses on the use of national stereotypes in the tense 1890s from the point of view of the Young Czech Party, the...
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