The Identity of modern urban worlds (the example of Prague in the period from the 1860s until the so-called Velvet Revolution)
Abstract
The identity of every modern national city arose not only from its history and traditions, but primarily from delimiting itself in relation to other, different, foreign identities. This delimitation naturally had not only politico-social and cultural repercussions, but also its symbolic level (including the language one).
Prague, the capital of the Czech lands, from the 1860s unequivocally a Czech city, had, in its modern history, to delimit itself in relation to states on whose territory it was located. (Until October 28, 1918, it was a third class provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; afterwards, until March 15, 1939, capital of the sovereign First and truncated Second Czechoslovak Republic; from March, the capital of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under the direct influence of Nazi Germany, and after liberation in May 1945, the capital of the renewed Czechoslovak Republic, which, however, became a satellite state of the Soviet Union). At the same time, however, Prague represent, until 1941, the space where fates of the Czech majority and the German and Jewish structured majorities (mainly they were people who assimilated; from the 1890s the Zionist ideology began to have influence in Prague) met and merged.
Jewish Orthodoxy was the minority orientation.