Crucial Events - Critical Experience - Radical Action. Was the Society of the Czech Lands radicalized by experiences of crisis and war during 1930's and 1940's?
Abstrakt
Events in their relative unexpectedness constitute conditions of possibility of the new experience but simultaneously are inseparable from the actual space of experience. The formation of events is first possible in their retrospective processing when they are becoming a part of an individual or social consciousness, memory and historical culture.
After a successful processing are events further interpreted as a part of shared experience and social discourse and they can possibly open a new horizon of expectation. In the first part of this paper I would like to focus on the correlations of formal categories (Koselleck 2000, 15), i.e. event, experience, expectation and others.
Those categories are inseparable from the social context hence they are also constitutive for explanation of a social action. Therefore I would like to apply in the subsequent part aforesaid formal categories to the particular example of the historical development of the Czech society during the 1930's and 1940's.
After a failure of the liberal project of the first Czechoslovakian republic in the second half of the 1930's and after the catastrophe of the Second World War witnessed inhabitants of the restored state an increasing wave of support to radical forms of dealing with tensions within the society and a rising legitimacy of the acts of explicit violence (e.g. expulsion of the so called Sudeten-Germans, show-trials of 1950's, forced collectivization etc.). The main question in this part would be under which conditions we could immediately relate pre-war and war experiences to the aftermaths of WWII? And could we talk about the continuous process of radicalisation which spans all the crucial events? Or could a massive concentration of crucial events possibly have changed long-standing structures of mentalities?