The Bloody End of War. Collective Violence as Politics, Culture and Social Practice in the Czech Lands during 1945
Abstract
The pivotal figure of the Czechoslovakian government in exile, President Edvard Beneš, anticipated the post-war state of emergency already in the 1943, when he performatively pronounced, ""[that] the end of this war is going to be written by blood in our land"". This paper works on the assumption that without any exaggeration we can regard the period immediately following the Second World War, in which the interpersonal and mainly the collective violence became one of the major features of the legitimate social and political action (i.e. the norm of social action), as one of the bloodiest in the modern Czech history.
According to the phenomena of collective violence (Charles Tilly), the analysis attempts to capture and explain both main macro and micro social levels of understanding these processes during the spring and summer 1945. Both the configuration of the social system (Philip Zimbardo) and the interaction of social actors in a particular violent situation (Randall Collins) are taken into consideration as important causes of the violent confrontations that may escalate to mass atrocities simultaneously.
By the interconnection of macro and micro social level, the paper strives to capture the interdependent nature of collective violence illustrated by the example of Czech lands. The dynamics of violence in this area is finally situated in the frame of general development of the East Central Europe.