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."

Since 1918, Czechoslovakia has been known as East-Central Europe's most devoted democracy, an outpost of Western values in the East. While the country has had more democratic experience than its neighbors, this book argues that the claim that Czechs are "native democrats, " devoted to liberal ideas, emerged from nationalist myth. Battle for the Castle tells the story of that myth's creation during the First World War, used to persuade the Great Powers to create Czechoslovakia out of pieces of Austria-Hungary. Tomas Masaryk and Edvard Benes, the two academics crafting the myth and employing it for wartime propaganda, became Czechoslovakia's first president and prime minister. They tried to use the myth to outmaneuver political opponents at home and Czechoslovakia's enemies abroad. Those enemies, and the European Great Powers, also conducted their own propaganda campaigns targeting Czechoslovakia as a symbol of the postwar order. At home, while proclaiming themselves the protectors of democracy, Masaryk and Benes played political hardball through their powerful political machine, the "Castle, " and defended their legacy against their detractors. 1938 and Nazi occupation seemed to prove out the Castle myth's claims about pacifist Czechs and aggressive Germans. During the war, Benes remade the myth to reflect changed international circumstances, particularly the Soviet Union's new power. After the war and the 1948 Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, the myth entered Anglo-American historiography of Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe. Within academic histories of Czechoslovakia - many of them written by Masaryk's students or Castle colleagues - the myth was transmuted into fact.