Literary Historiography in the 1950s and Early 1960s

After World War II the two Czechoslovak nations were reunited, but without Transcarpathian Ukraine, which fell to the Soviet Union. The German population was expelled. Germans now symbolized a “colonial power”, and the expulsion, which began immediately after liberation, and which often took place in a disorganized and brutal manner, was widely accepted by Czechs as the conclusive resolution of an old and conflicted relationship. The expulsion of Germans was accompanied by the erasure of German culture from Czechoslovakia. Before the Communist coup in February 1948, cultural activities, especially literature, enjoyed relative freedom. It was significant for the development of literature that many artists returned from exile, from concentration camps, and from prisons. Czech universities were reopened, while German ones in Czechoslovakia were closed. Pre-war developments were partly resumed, although many scholars, including literary historians, had died during or immediately after the war. (Pavlína Rychterová (2015, 128–129) discusses the works of the prematurely deceased Czech literary historian Jan Vilikovský (1904–1946). These suggest “new methodological approaches, which, unfortunately, could not be elaborated into a comprehensive narrative. For him, Czech literature was the sum of the literatures in all languages used in the given geographic area.”)