After World War I, diplomats and leaders at the Paris Peace Talks
redrew the map of Europe, carving up ancient empires and
transforming Europe's eastern half into new nation-states. Drawing
heavily on the past, the leaders of these young countries crafted
national mythologies and deployed them at home and abroad.
Domestically, myths were a tool for legitimating the new state with
fractious electorates. In Great Power capitals, they were used to
curry favor and to compete with the mythologies and propaganda of
other insecure postwar states.
The new postwar state of Czechoslovakia forged a reputation as
Europe's democratic outpost in the East, an island of enlightened
tolerance amid an increasingly fascist Central and Eastern Europe.
In Battle for the Castle, Andrea Orzoff traces the myth of
Czechoslovakia as an ideal democracy. The architects of the myth
were two academics who had fled Austria-Hungary in the Great War's
early years. Tomaas Garrigue Masaryk, who became Czechoslovakia's
first president, and Edvard Benes, its longtime foreign minister
and later president, propagated the idea of the Czechs as a
tolerant, prosperous, and cosmopolitan people, devoted to European
ideals, and Czechoslovakia as a Western ally capable of containing
both German aggression and Bolshevik radicalism. Deeply distrustful
of Czech political parties and Parliamentary leaders, Benes and
Masaryk created an informal political organization known as the
Hrad or "Castle." This powerful coalition of intellectuals,
journalists, businessmen, religious leaders, and Great War veterans
struggled with Parliamentary leaders to set the country's political
agenda and advance the myth. Abroad, the Castle wielded the
national myth to claim the attention and defense of the West
against its increasingly hungry neighbors. When Hitler occupied the
country, the mythic Czechoslovakia gained power as its leaders went
into wartime exile. Once Czechoslovakia regained its independence
after 1945, the Castle myth reappeared. After the Communist coup of
1948, many Castle politicians went into exile in America, where
they wrote the Castle myth of an idealized Czechoslovakia into
academic and political discourse.
Battle for the Castle demonstrates how this founding myth became
enshrined in Czechoslovak and European history. It powerfully
articulates the centrality of propaganda and the mass media to
interwar European cultural diplomacy and politics, and the tense,
combative atmosphere of European international relations from the
beginning of the First World War well past the end of the Second."
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