SOU OBÉ DùJINY - Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV - Akademie věd ČR

246 Soudobé dějiny XIV / 1of culture in the years when the Communist system of controlling the arts inCzechoslovakia was established. Knapík provides a suitable periodization of thisperiod, contributing a considerable amount of new or more precise informationand also some remarkable interpretations of specific events. He describes withoutbias the conflicts among the centres competing to make policy on the arts forsome party or other, and attributes more weight to motives of power rather thanideology. His interpretation of policy on the arts is balanced, credible, and drawson a thorough knowledge of the sources.In the second part of the article, the reviewer discusses the relationshipbetween society and culture (in the broad sense of the word) in the 1950s. Inhis view “socialist” culture as a system of values professed by the regime thatwas established in Czechoslovakia after the takeover of February 1948 did not atthe time have an integrative character, but, while being taken over, collided withsuppressed but relatively deeply rooted elements of “First Republic” (democratic)culture still existing in society. The reviewer argues that it is the task of historians,sociologists, philosophers, and other social scientists to continue the discussion ofthis reception and resistance.Diary Entries of a Czechoslovak Diplomat from the Capital of the Third ReichJiří KostaHoffmann, Camill. Politický deník 1932–1939. Preface by Dieter Sudhoff. Trans. fromthe German by Alena Bláhová and David Kraft. Prague: Pražská edice, 2006, 239 pp.Poet, editor, and diplomat, Camill (Kamil) Hoffmann (1878–1944) is an exampleof Czech-German-Jewish symbiosis. After the First World War he founded thePrager Presse, a pro-government German language newspaper, and later, from1920 to 1939, was press attaché of the Czechoslovak embassy in Berlin, till he wasrecalled to Prague. The diary, first published as Politisches Tagebuch, 1932–1939(Klagenfurt, 1995), describes the rise and growing power of the Nazi régime, andconstitutes a remarkable primary source for historians.Stories about the Identity of Jews of the Bohemia Lands, 1918–38Květa JechováSoukupová, Blanka. Velké a malé českožidovské příběhy z doby intenzivní naděje.Bratislava: Zing Print, 2005, 284 pp. (Etnické studie, vol. 2.)The book under review is not the usual treatment of the history of one minority.Rather, it is an integrated collection of historical-ethnological essays about the