Abstract
Spring man is legendary Czech phantom of the Second World War, a nocturnal hero who jumps across the rooftops with the help of steel springs attached to his feet and fights against the Nazis and their henchmen. However, spring man was not originally the first Czech superhero, as contemporary popular culture has tried to suggest.
The book deconstructs the nationalistic myth of spring man that was created after the Second World War in visual culture and literature and presents his original form as an ambiguous ghostly denizen of the oral culture. The author analyzes the archetypal character, social context, and cultural significance of this fascinating phenomenon with help of dozens of accounts provided by period eyewitnesses, oral narratives and other sources.
At the same time, he illustrates the international origin of the tales in the originally British migratory legend of Spring-heeled Jack that reaches back to the second third of the 19th century and draws parallels between the Czech myth of spring man and similar urban phantom narratives popular in the 1910s Russia, 1940s U.S. and Slovakia, 1950s Germany, as well as other parts of the world.