Search

The article analyses the key motivations of Czech-speaking soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army at the beginning of the Great War, finding an important connection between their masculine identity and contemporary gender discourse. While loyalty of Czech soldiers to the Empire is often questioned, it is obvious that many of them were loyal to the image of war as a masculine enterprise: they considered the wartime society divided into the gendered spaces of war (the “front”) and peace (the “home”). By deliberately submitting themselves to the social pressure of collective behavior, and relying on the brevity of war, they hoped that it would bring them all the social capital attached to the hegemonic discourse of masculinity : status, power, access to resources and women. Although this motivation was usually not put in the foreground, their personal accounts make it clear it has played an important role in making them to follow the mobilization orders in July and August 1914. L’article analyse les principales motivations des soldats tchécophones de l’armée austro-hongroise au début de la Grande Guerre. Il existe un lien étroit entre leur identité masculine et les stéréotypes de genre de l’époque. Même si leur loyauté est souvent remise en question, ils considéraient la guerre comme une entreprise masculine. Ils pensaient qu’en temps de guerre, la société était divisée en deux espaces genrés, celui de la guerre (le front) et celui de la paix (le foyer). En se soumettant délibérément à la pression sociale exercée par les comportements collectifs, et persuadés que la guerre serait courte, ils espéraient bénéficier du capital social attaché au discours hégémonique de la masculinité : le statut social, le pouvoir, l’accès aux ressources et aux femmes. Quoique cette motivation ne fût d’ordinaire pas mise en avant, leurs récits personnels rendent évident le fait qu’elle pesa lourd dans leur décision de suivre les ordres de mobilisation en juillet et août 1914.

Au cours de cette table ronde, Étienne Boisserie (Inalco, CREE), Tomáš Kykal (Institut d'histoire militaire de Prague) et Jiří Hutečka (Université de Hradec Králové) évoqueront les dynamiques civiles et militaires à l'œuvre au cours de la Grande Guerre et dialogueront avec le public.

East against the West? Representations of war in egodocuments of British and Russian participants of Crimean War 1853-1856. Doctoral thesis Mgr. et Mgr. Petr Wohlmuth ABSTRACT This doctoral thesis adheres to genre of historical anthropology of war and military. It draws on two theoretical sources. The first consists of paradigms of cultural and social anthropol- ogy, more specifically symbolic historical anthropology in the tradition of Geertz, Darnton, Sahlins and others. The second represents the cultural history of war in the tradition of Kee- gan, Hanson, Lynn or Isabel Hull. The research question is focused on the culture of war during the Crimean War, especially during the Crimean campaign and siege and defense of Sevastopol in 1854/55, as its variables were represented in egodocuments of its Russian and British participants. Crimean War has been the subject of many historiographic texts, but most of them were essentially conservative, relying on national, ideological and civilizational labeling instead of deeper analysis. This doctoral thesis analyses in detail first the formal or- der of the above-mentioned culture of war, but more importantly, it analyses using the method of thick description its logico-meaningful relations, the hierarchy of levels of mean- ing in the sense how the culture of war...

Title: Forgotten Apocalypse - The Czech Reflection of the Retreat of the German Heeresgruppe Mitte Author: Mgr. Tomáš Jakl Abstract: There are war campaigns that can be described simply, others more difficult to describe, and some cannot be reconstructed by a continuous narrative at all. The events in the Czech Lands in the first two weeks of May 1945 belong to the most difficult to describe. The fact that there was the largest of last German fighting groups of armies is well known. It is also commonly known that it was the Central Army Group commanded by Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner. Significantly less is known that as a result of the outbreak of the Czech Uprising, this group of armies retreated across the rebellious territory to the demarcation line between the US and the Red Army The last desperate illusion of German soldiers was that they would contact the Americans and jointly drive the Russians out of Europe. Allied Commander-in-Chief in the West, General Dwight David Eisenhower, did not intend to do anything after the death of US President Roosevelt, which the Soviet dictator could even interpret as a similar development. Not only did he forbid General Patton from crossing the agreed line in advance with the Soviets, visually accommodating the retreating Germans, but the US troops also released...

This master's thesis builds on the author's bachelor thesis and advances one of its fields - the relationship of First World War soldiers towards the war horses and the perception of these animals. The broad scale of soldiers' and horses' relations is studied primarily through the analysis of biographical documents produced by soldiers of Czech, British and French origin. Written primary sources are complemented by visual sources such as photographs, illustrations and postcards. In analysing the soldiers' relations towards their war horses, the following questions are asked: How exactly did they relate to the horses, which factors shaped and altered their relationships? How significant the presence and proximity of an animal was for the soldiers on the battlefield and what forms did their everyday coexistence take? How did the soldiers view the engagement of horses in warfare and how did they bear the horses' suffering? What was the contemporary portrayal and discourse of war horses? The thesis attempts at a wider overlap by incorporating the sociocultural and anthropological aspects of the human- horse relationship and inserting them into the historical framework.

The Soldiers of the Kaiser. Identities, Experiences and National Awareness of Czech Participants of the First World War The topics of presented dissertation are identities and experiences of Czech soldiers of the First World War. The sources of the dissertation are ego-documents of Czech soldiers, in particular mostly their diaries, in lesser extent also pieces of field correspondence and memoirs. The aim of the dissertation is the analysis of representations of identities, experiences and national awareness of authors of analysed sources. The research questions of the dissertation inquire about representations of constructions of identities in the sources, particularly about national, regional, religious or social identities; about construction of the otherness and depiction of the enemy in texts, about relation to the otherness and potential conflict of loyalties to the Czech national society and to service in the Austro-Hungarian army; about their gender identity; and about the question of construction of corporeality and experience of corporeality and the body as the construct of masculine identity. The presented dissertation belongs to the discipline Historical Anthropology.