Work

From Greatness to Ruins: The Hundred Years Between “The German Minority in Czechoslovakia” by Wacław Junosza (1929) and the Present

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This paper offers a critical reflection on the article “Mniejszość niemiecka w Czechosłowacji” [The German Minority in Czechoslovakia] by Wacław Junosza, published in Sprawy Narodowościowe in 1929. The article under discussion provides an overview of civic associations of the German-speaking minority in the interwar First Czechoslovak Republic. The present study deepens this perspective by looking at contemporaneous reflections on ethnic relations and current academic research on this period of Czechoslovak history. Referring to examples from the spheres of education and industry, which are covered by Junosza, the author examines the possibilities and limits of the coexistence of national groups in Czechoslovakia. The present work focuses on periods both before and after the 1920s: it shows how clear national categories used by Junosza were created, and how inequalities and struggles between these invented national categories led to the fall of multinational Czechoslovakia.

Source: Sprawy Narodowościowe Seria nowa

DOI: 10.11649/sn.3346

Author: Karina Hoření

Institutions: Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences

Language: English

Topic: Central European national history

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: European Commission, HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme, HORIZON EUROPE European Research Council

Award: Recycling the German Ghosts. Resettlement Cultures in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia after 1945