Cloth: 978-90-485-7655-5

eISBN: 978-90-485-8084-2 (ePub)

eISBN: 978-90-485-7656-2 (PDF)

National holidays were among the most ambitious tools the new Czechoslovak state employed in its attempt to forge loyalty among a diverse population after 1918. This volume offers the first comprehensive examination of how ordinary citizens, officials, and political elites alike constructed, contested, and lived the interwar republic's political calendar whose celebrations ranged from Independence Day through the Feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius and Saint Wenceslas, to May Day. Drawing on numerous primary sources, the contributors demonstrate how state-sponsored commemorations sought to translate the political narrative of a unified Czechoslovak nation into everyday ritual, even as they excluded or provoked many of the non-national peoples. The book also analyzes alternative and resistance celebrations that flourished outside, and often against, the official calendar, revealing the limits of Czechoslovak state-building alongside its successes.

Dagmar Hájková is Deputy Director and Senior Researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, specializing in modern Czech and Czechoslovak history. She has published widely in this field, including the award-winning Republika ceskoslovenská: 1918–1939 (2018).Nancy M. Wingfield is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita at Northern Illinois University and the recipient of the Czech Academy of Sciences' Frantisek Palacky Medal for contributions to the historical sciences. She has published widely on Habsburg Central Europe, including the award-winning The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria.

National Holidays in Czechoslovakia Between the World Wars: Celebrate the Republic examines how a new state sought to transform political power into popular loyalty through multiple rituals of celebration and public remembrance. The volume shows how holidays became a crucial arena in which competing visions of history and identifications were negotiated in one of Central Europe’s most diverse societies. Far from being a neutral record of the past, the political calendar defined who belonged to the nation, which memories deserved public recognition, and which were forget or marginalized. By illuminating the relationships among state-building, collective memory, and national identifications, this book offers fresh insights into enduring questions of sovereignty, legitimacy, and loyalty. It speaks not only to historians of Central Europe, but also to readers interested in contemporary debates about nationhood, democratic cohesion, and the pitfalls of assimilationist policies in multiethnic societies.
Prof. Borut Klabjan, Science and Research Centre Koper

Political Ideologies, Europe, Political Science, History

License: OA CC BY-NC-ND