STANLEY Z. PECH PRIZE, 2024
(Articles published between 2022-2023)
John Paul Newman, Maynooth University, Ireland
“Suicide and the Hermeneutics of Political and National Community in the Interwar Czechoslovak Republic,” Slavic Review 82, no. 3 (Fall 2023): 595-615
In a truly original and impressive work of historical discovery and analysis, John Paul Newman examines a crisis that obsessed interwar Czechoslovakia but has been forgotten by posterity. In a nation that at times glorified young men who took their own lives (think Jan Palach), a purported rash of suicides in the new state challenged the national myth that the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy had freed the Czech people. The effort to explain the persistence of suicide spurred scholarly analysis of the phenomenon, national navel-gazing, and a search for blame. Newman’s innovative approach traces how contemporaries rationalized the allegedly national phenomenon as a patriotic individual choice or attributed it to a wider crisis within society. Through three clearly written and impressively documented case studies, Newman persuasively explains, “The prevailing tendency in the interwar period was less to apply solutions to the problem than it was to explain it in terms that were acceptable to the patriotic national culture of the times. The crux of this problem was the need to distort a linear statistical fact so that it bent towards the notion that the national present had broken decisively with the imperial past.” T.G. Masaryk’s scholarship on suicide influenced contemporaries to seek societal explanations with a particular emphasis on Habsburg authoritarianism and its legacy. The apparently high suicide rate among Czech immigrants in the United States, however, raised uncomfortable questions about national character, which scholars countered with claims that in Bohemia the regrettable phenomenon was more common in the German-speaking borderlands. The Legionary movement retrospectively lionized Colonel Jiří Jan Švec, who took his own life on a train in revolutionary Russia, and worried over despair among enlisted men and veterans in the new democratic army – until, at least, it became clear from statistics that soldiers did not actually suffer from higher rates of suicide and could be lauded instead as uniquely impervious to the social disease. As Newman perceptively and cogently concludes, contemporary Czechs sought “less to resolve the admitted problem of suicide but rather to alchemize it into a form that was palatable and well-adjusted to the new patriotic narratives of the interwar republic.
Honorable Mention
Chad Bryant, Kateřina Čapková, and Diana Dumitru, “Undone from Within: The Downfall of Rudolf Slánský and Czechoslovak-Soviet Dynamics under Stalin,” Journal of Modern History 95, no. 4 (December 2023): 847-886.
Undone from Within” offers a comprehensively innovative analysis of the events that led to the 1952 trial of Rudolf Slánský trial and his thirteen co-defendants. Mining an impressive range of previously uncited documents from former Soviet and Czechoslovak archives, Bryant, Čapková, and Dumitru together bring fresh insight to this formative moment in the early years of Communist Eastern Europe. Through its deft dissection of the mechanisms of political trials, the article reveals a far more complex picture of how Soviet power buttressed and was but-tressed by maneuvering within the Czechoslovak communist leadership. The authors’ emphasis on bottom-up dimensions over top-down dynamics brings to light the pervasive “cultures of denunciation” that mixed personal rivalries, political ambitions, and, for some, antisemitism, with efforts at self-preservation and the fear of being denounced. The committee particularly marveled at how the authors richly detailed the lead-up to the trial and how they interwove discoveries from far-flung archives into a coherent and persuasive, revisionary narrative. The committee was even more im-pressed by the truly collaborative nature of the project, which is a model of all that scholars with different expertise can achieve when working together.
Prize Committee: Benjamin Frommer (chair), Phillip Howe, and Clare Morelon
Emerging Scholar Prize, 2024
(Qualifying scholarly texts published between 2022-2023)
Julia Mead, University of Chicago
Dissertation chapter, “The Not-So-Velvet Divorce: Late Socialist Mining Masculinity and Its Management”
Julia Mead’s dissertation chapter “The Not-So-Velvet Divorce: Late Socialist Mining Masculinity and Its Management,” explores state efforts to mitigate marital discord, domestic violence, and alcoholism in the mining region of Ostrava. Drawing on records from the city’s Marital and Pre-Marital Counseling Center, one of dozens of such centers established in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mead shows how state authorities invested in institutions and therapeutic practices that would alleviate the negative fallout of socialist mining masculinity.
The effort to decrease marital discord, domestic violence, and alcoholism, Mead argues, encapsulates a much broader project to manage “the contradictions of socialist mining masculinity: it was at once heroic and vulgar, strong and sickly, powerful and violent, and because its heroism, strength, and power were so essential to the material and ideological project of building socialism, the state tolerated its vulgarity and built a social infrastructure to manage sickness and violence.” Thus, rather than framing marriage counseling centers as a reflection of a “conservative” impulse, Mead shows that the “managers” were clear eyed about what they saw as “problematic masculinity,” this darker side of the tough, socialist mining masculinity. Instead of punishing violent, drunken, and even illicit behavior, psychiatrists and social workers sought to manage men’s behavior, through marriage counseling and, what would today be called, anger management.
Using memoirs and client files, the chapter offers fascinating insights into everyday life in late Socialist society, laying bare tensions engendered by idealized and privileged forms of masculinity; the persistent scarcity of consumer goods; new divorce legislation; and the limits of state-sponsored efforts to manage the “problematic” outcomes of the socialist program.
Honorable Mentions
Sophie Elise Charron, “The Empress and the Humanist: Profit and Politics in the Correspondence of Anne of Świdnica and Petrarch,” Journal of Medieval History 49, no. 1 (2023): 72-92.
Sophie Elise Charron’s article “The Empress and the Humanist,” published in 2023 by The Journal of Medieval History, provides an exceptionally deep reading of the correspondence between Holy Roman Empress Anne of Świdnica and the humanist scholar Petrarch. In just twenty pages, Charron brings together a remarkable number of dis-tinct strands – book and manuscript history, the history of education, histories of queenship, literary analysis – and situates them within the richly complex landscape of medieval Imperial politics. In doing so, Charron reveals how Anne and Petrarch both sought to leverage their quasi-public correspondence in pursuit of specific political objectives.
Aleksander Momčilović, “Literature from Below: Literary Competitions in Serbia (1941-1945) and in the Protectorate of Bo-hemia and Moravia (1939-1945),” in European Literatures of Military Occupation: Shared Experience, Shifting Boundaries, and Aesthetic Affections, eds. Matthias Buschmeier and Jeanne E. Glesener (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2024), 239-259.
Aleksander Momčilović’s book chapter, “Literature from Below,” which appeared in an edited collection entitled European Liter-atures of Military Occupation (2024), compares literary competitions sponsored by Third Reich occupation regimes in Serbia and the Protectorate. Balancing an institutional history of occupation cultural policies with literary analysis of prize-winning literature, Momčilović exposes similarities and differences in both the intended aims and literary artifacts from the two cases. The result is a commendable example of comparative transnational research that contributes to historiographies of Nazi occupation, collaborationist regimes, and literary culture in both of the examined regions.
Prize Committee: Tatjana Lichtenstein (chair), Kevin Hoeper, and Petra James
CSA Book Prize, 2023
(Books published between 2021-2022)
Felix Jeschke, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Iron Landscapes: National Space and the Railways in Interwar Czechoslovakia (Berghahn, 2021)
This fascinating new account of interwar Czechoslovakia tells a new story of the country’s earliest years by examining the building of its national rail network. Drawing together an impressive variety of primary and secondary sources, from visual sources to travelogues to contemporary literature, Jeschke’s book draws on the newest literature in the field to open new areas for study of the connections, ideas, and infrastructure that underpinned the Czechoslovak state at home and abroad. He expands the traditional ‘geography’ – literally and figuratively – of the First Czechoslovak Republic, integrating the study of the Czech lands with discussions of Slovakia, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, and other regions. In the process he discusses the multiple, contested meanings of ‘Czechoslovak’ over time, space, and national language. His account is a fresh, deeply researched approach to the history of the First Czechoslovak Republic, its challenges, contested politics, discourses, and everyday life.
Prize Committee: Christopher Campo Bowen, John Paul Newman, Molly Pucci