Ethnic cleansing, communism, and environmental devastation in czechoslovakia's borderlands, 1945-1989

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 78, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 65-92

  Glassheim, Eagle ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33645222792     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/499795     Document Type: Review

References (147)

1. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (New York, 1966), 33.
2. Tomáš Kostelecký, Regionální diferenciace sociálních problémů v České Republice (Prague, 1994).
3. By north Bohemia I am referring to the territory included in the North Bohemian Region as of the 1960 redistricting: the districts of Česká Lípa, Děčín, Chomutov, Jablonec, Liberec, Litoměřice, Louny, Most, Teplice, and Ústí nad Labem. North Bohemia made up 19 percent of the land area of the former Sudetenland, the region occupied by Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945. Its population density and industrial output were a much larger portion, however. For 1939 population statistics, see Sudetendeutsches Archiv, Odsun: Die Vertreibung der Sudetendeutschen (Munich, 1995), 361. The region had 1.13 million inhabitants, primarily Czech, in 1960.
4. Otakar Tyl and Jaroslav Zahálka, Severočeský kraj dnes a zítra (Ústí nad Labem, 1961), 12, 15.
5. Letter from Susan Muehlhans Karides in Heimatbrief 8, no. 4 (December 1997).
6. Sudeten German Heimat organizations in Germany use a similar rhetoric of decline. See, e.g., the website of the Komotau organization, http://www.komotau.de/. Václav Havel, the dissident and first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia, has shared this view. Reflecting in 1991 on the Czech western border with Germany, he noted, "On one side of the border there are neat, well-kept fields, pathways, and orchards . . . evidence of human care, based on respect for the soil. On the other [Czech] side there are extensive fields with crops lying un-harvested on the ground, stockpiles of chemicals, unused land, land crisscrossed with tire tracks, neglected pathways, no rows of trees or woodlots. Villages are merely the remains of villages, interspersed with something that resembles factory yards."
7. Václav Havel, "Beyond the Shock of Freedom" (1991), in his Summer Meditations (New York, 1993), 112.
8. František Jedermann (Petr Příhoda), Verlorene Geschichte: Bilder und Texte aus dem heutigen Sudetenland, trans. Joachim Bruss (Cologne, 1985).
9. The Czech version of this book appeared in 1991 as František Jedermann, Ztracené dějiny (Cologne, 1991).
10. For a summary of this debate, see Bradley Abrams, "Morality, Wisdom, and Revision: The Czech Opposition of the 1970s and the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans," East European Politics and Societies 9 (1995): 234-55.
11. Publications from the debate, including some cogent contributions by Příhoda himself, are reproduced in Jan Křen, Bohumil Černý, Václav Kural, Milan Otáhal, eds., Češi, Němci, Odsun (Prague, 1990).
12. On problems with the concept of identity, see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, "Beyond 'Identity,'" Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1-47.
13. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA, [1990] 1997), 9.
14. Harvey drew this quote from the editors of PRECIS 6 (1987): 7-24.
15. See Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 8-9;
16. and Philipp Ther, "A Century of Forced Migration: The Origins and Consequences of 'Ethnic Cleansing,'" in Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (Lanham, MD, 2001), 44-47.
17. The state's role in ethnic cleansing is not always clear-cut and varies case by case. In the Czech case, both state and nonstate actors pursued the cleansing of Sudeten Germans. Both levels, however, drew on the ideology of the ethnically pure nationstate.
18. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT, 1998).
19. On Communist utopianism, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).
20. On expulsion violence and the number of deaths, see Czech-German Joint Commission of Historians, A Conflictual Community, Catastrophe, Detente (Prague, 1996).
21. For a comprehensive overview of problems and literature relating to Czech resettlement, see Adrian von Arburg, "Osídlování: Die Besiedlung der Grenzgebiete der Boehmischen Laender, 1945-1950" (Diplomarbeit, University of Vienna, 2001).
22. See, e.g., "Osidlovací akce v našem pohraničí v proudu," Lidová demokracie, May 27, 1945, 1,
23. or "Odsun Němců z pohraničí," Rudé právo, June 12, 1945, 2.
24. The Provincial National Committee for Bohemia issued a widely reported formal appeal for settlers in June 1945. See text of appeal in "Jde o rychlé osídlení našeho pohraničí, " Lidová demokracie, June 24, 1945, 2.
25. Along with five hundred thousand Czechs still living in the borderlands at the end of the war, another 1.2 million moved in by February 1946. Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (ÚV KSČ) pamphlet, "Osnovy referátů, Dobudujeme naše pohraničí" (1948), 13.
26. See Eagle Glassheim, "National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945," Central European History 33, no. 4 (2000): 463-86.
27. On housing shortages, see Zdeněk Radvanovský, "The Social and Economic Consequences of Resettling Czechs into Northwestern Bohemia, 1945-1947," in Redrawing Nations, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (Lanham, MD, 2001), 241-60.
28. See, e.g., Okresní správní komise (OSK; District Administrative Commission), Ústí to Místní národní výbor (MNV; Local National Committee) Ustí, September 1, 1945. Okresní národní výbor (ONV) Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k. 407 ic 5. See also Emilia Hrabovec, "Neue Aspekte zur ersten Phase der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Maehren 1945," in Nationale Frage und Vertreibung in der Tschechoslowakei und Ungarn, 1938-1948, ed. Richard Plaschka, Horst Haselsteiner, Arnold Suppan, and Anna Drabek (Vienna, 1997), 130-32.
29. See, e.g., letter from the administrator of the Filip Michel & Sons Stocking Factory in Rumburk to OSK Rumburk, April 9, 1946. The OSK issued a notice of expulsion to the Germans in question the next day. ONV Rumburk, Státní okresní archiv Děčín, k 371.
30. Radvanovský, "The Social and Economic Consequences," 243.
31. Numbers come from Kulturní a propagační oddělení sekretariátu ÚV KSČ, Dobudujeme naše pohraničí: Osnova a materiál pro veřejné schůze a besedy v pohraničí (Prague, 1948), 13.
32. By the end of 1947, there were 2.5 million Czechs in the borderlands. Of those, around five hundred thousand were Czechs who had lived out the war there and an estimated three hundred thousand were returnees, i.e., Czechs who had fled the Sudetenland after the Nazi occupation in 1938 but returned after the war ended. Estimates are derived from Dobudujeme, 13;
33. and Quido Kastner, Osídlování českého pohraničí od května 1945 (Prague, 1996), 14.
34. Radvanovský, "The Social and Economic Consequences," 248.
35. Benjamin Frommer, "Expulsion or Integration: Unmixing Interethnic Marriage in Postwar Czechoslovakia," East European Politics and Societies 14, no. 2 (2000): 382.
36. If one adds an estimated 150,000 children of such marriages, the total of 330,000 was a sizable proportion of the population of Czechoslovakia, not to mention that of the borderlands.
37. There were some areas where Czechs and Germans had a history of coexistence and got along reasonably well during 1945-46. See J. Kadeřábková and J. Pargač, "Problematika současných pohraničních vesnic v severovýchodních čechách," in Etnické procesy v pohraničí českých zemí po r. 1945, ed. Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (Sobotín, 1985), 209-25.
38. Germans remained for various reasons, with some needed as specialists in industry, others exempted from expulsion for being antifascists, and many united with Czechs in mixed marriages.
39. Tomáš Grulich, "Etnografický výzkum novoosídlenecké problematiky v horské části Krušných hor," Český lid 68, no. 4 (1981): 204-13.
40. See Kastner, Osídlování, 15;
41. and Arburg, "Osídlování," 138-46.
42. See, e.g., K. Innemann, "Pro jednotu všech Čechů v pohraničí," Sever, February 5, 1946, 1;
43. and the frequent references to unity in Osidlování, the official journal of the Settlement Office.
44. Christiane Brenner analyzes the old/new divisions in "Viděl jsem pohraničí . . . Das Grenzland in der tschechischen Publizistik und Literatur nach 1945," in Regionen und Regionalismus in den boehmischen Laendern in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Robert Luft (Munich, forthcoming).
45. Zemský národní výbor (ZNV; Provincial National Committee) Praha to Karel Fridrich, rejecting application to form Spolek Sdružení hraničářů starousedlíků v Podmoklech a okolí, September 25, 1946. ONV Děčín, Státní okresní archiv Děčín, k 173.
46. See various articles in Náš hraničář, Ústřední orgán národní jednoty severočeské, 1946-47.
47. See Arburg, "Osídlování," 80-83, 91-96.
48. On celebrations, see "Posvícení v pohranič í," Osidlování 3, no. 12 (October 25, 1948): 328.
49. On skills and work habits, see Radvanovský, "The Social and Economic Consequences," 248.
50. On the construction of a Czech historical narrative in postwar Czechoslovakia, see Nancy Wingfield, "The Politics of Memory: Constructing National Identity in the Czech Lands, 1945 to 1948," East European Politics and Societies 14, no. 2 (2000): 246-67.
51. See Glassheim, "National Mythologies."
52. Speech reproduced in "Republiku musíme odgermanisovat," Lidová demokracie, June 17, 1946, 1-2.
53. See, e.g., Osidlování 2, nos. 4-5 (July 10, 1947): 104.
54. Osidlování 2, nos. 10-11 (October 10, 1947): 210.
55. Pražák text reproduced in Svatopluk Technik, Výstava Budujeme osvobozené kraje v Liberci roku 1946 (Liberec, 2001), 50.
56. "Ze zahájení výstavy 'České pohraničí,'" Osidlování 2, no. 12 (October 25, 1947): 253.
57. Karel Tuček, "Přírodní bohatství severočeského pohraničí a jeho využití ," in Masarykova akademie práce, Odborných spisů # 54 (Prague, 1947), 22.
58. See Hans Krebs and Emil Lehmann, Sudeten-deutsche Landeskunde (Kiel, [1937] 1992), 122-33. Quotes come from 126 and 133. Krebs was a leading Nazi and was executed in 1947 for his collaboration in the Sudetenland from 1938 to 1945.
59. For a sample of writings on the "contested nation," see Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Becoming National: A Reader (New York, 1996).
60. Examples of this literature include Cynthia Paces, "'The Czech Nation Must Be Catholic!' An Alternative Version of Czech Nationalism during the First Republic," Nationalities Papers 27, no. 3 (1999): 407-28;
61. Nancy Meriwether Wingfield, "Conflicting Constructions of Memory: Attacks on Statues of Joseph II in the Bohemian Lands after the Great War," Austrian History Yearbook 28 (1997): 147-71;
62. and Eagle Glassheim, Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian Aristocracy (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
63. Bradley Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Czech Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (New York, 2004).
64. František Zejdl, "Význam výstavy BOK," in Katalog výstavy, BOK (Liberec, August 1946), 38.
65. Emil Weiland and Stanislav Šolta in Katalog výstavy, BOK, 45-47.
66. In a recent interview, one of the organizers estimated the attendance at half a million. Svatopluk Technik interview, Liberec, April 8, 2003.
67. Miloslav Bureš in Katalog výstavy, BOK, 53.
68. Technik, Výstava, 35.
69. Budujeme osvobozené kraje, Náměly pro výstavu Budujeme osvobozené kraje, odbor průmysl a živnosti, May 28, 1946. Obchodní a živnostenská komora v Liberci (OŽK), Státní okresní archiv Liberec, k 1290.
70. Technik, Výstava, 18-19.
71. See also Brenner, "Das Grenzland."
72. M. Kreysa, "Celé české pohraničí je nejlepší výstavou našeho budovatelského úsilí," Osidlování 1, nos. 5-6 (August 10, 1946): 99.
73. M. Kreysa, "Osidlovací politika lidově demokratického státu," Osidlování 1, no. 1 (May 17, 1946): 1.
74. Bedřich Steiner, "Pohraničí ve dvouletém plánu Gottwaldovy vlády," Osidlování, 1, nos. 5-6 (August 10, 1946): 98.
75. Kreysa, "Osidlovací politika lidově demokratického státu," 2.
76. See also numerous articles on the Teplice spa in the north Bohemian newspaper Sever in 1945.
77. Radvanovský, "The Social and Economic Consequences," 248.
78. Katalog výstavy '10 let budování Ústeckého kraje' (Ústí, 1955), unpaginated.
79. On the labor shortage in mines, see Radvanovský, "The Social and Economic Consequences," 247.
80. See, e.g., OSK Ústí to Mjr. Šimůnek (Posádkové velitelství): "Ustanovení vládního zmocněnce za účelem zvýšení těžby uhlí, August 23, 1945. ONV Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k. 407 ic 5.
81. Vlastimil Školaudy, "Hovoří Mostecko," Rudé právo, September 30, 1945, 3.
82. Vlastimil Školaudy, "Odvěký sen českých horníků se splnil," Rudé právo, July 3, 1945, 5.
83. František Zejdl, "Liberecká výstava nástupem do dvouletého plánu," Stráž severu, insert:
84. "Budujeme osvobozené kraje," August 4, 1946, 1.
85. On struggles to control north Bohemia, see Volker Zimmermann, "Die Wahlen muessen schon vorher entschieden werden!" Bohemia 43 (2002): 1-32.
86. In the two north Bohemian electoral districts, Ústí nad Labem and Liberec, the Communists received 56.5 percent and 48.3 percent, respectively. "Přes 40% hlasovalo pro komunisty," Rudé právo, May 28, 1946, 1.
87. See also Jiří Sláma and Karel Kaplan, eds., Die Parlamentswahlen in der Tschechoslowakei, 1935-1946-1948 (Munich, 1986), 116-18.
88. In general, the social structure of settlers was favorable to Communist organizing efforts. Settlers tended to come from humble backgrounds ("socially weak," as some Czech historians perhaps unfairly label them) and were thus open to a party that seemed to champion their interests.
89. As one curious English-language publication pointed out, these workers' getaways started as early as 1945: "The Revolutionary Trade Union Movement . . . [in 1945] turned private hotels and sanatoriums (expropriated from quislings, big capitalists and fascist occupiers) into health centres and arranged holidays for the first four thousand working people. In the following year 46,000 workers spent holidays at these centres . . . [by] 1974 some 361,000."
90. O. Vidláková, ed., Landscape and Man in Socialist Czechoslovakia (Prague, 1977), 38.
91. Tyl and Zahálka, Severočeský kraj dnes a zítra, 20.
92. Ibid., 78.
93. See in particular Budujeme pohraničí (Prague, 1950) and Katalog výstavy.
94. Internal Communist documents labeled the situation an "extraordinarily unfavorable dispersion and emission situation." See Zápis z jednání komise pro tvorbu a ochranu životního prostředí, Ústí nad Labem, January 28, 1982. OSN Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k 138 ic 514. Meteorologists often refer to these particular conditions as an inversion, a situation where air temperatures at higher altitudes exceed those at lower altitudes, thereby trapping air pollution close to the earth. Inversions happened often in the north Bohemian brown-coal basin from Ústí to Chomutov.
95. During the inversion, mortality among those over sixty increased to four times the normal rate for heart attacks and bronchial pneumonia. Ibid.
96. Ibid. On a similar inversion in September 1980, when leaves fell prematurely from area trees, see Miroslav Vaněk, Nedalo se tady dýchat: Ekologie v českých zemích v letech 1968 až 1989 (Prague, 1996), 57.
97. 2 from Vladimir Kaiser, director of the City Archive of Ústí nad Labem, personal communication, February 2003. On the long-standing myth of the salutary antiseptic value of coal smoke, see Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 39 and 152.
98. See František Kotěšovec et al., "Long-Term Trends in Mortality," in Radim Šrám, ed., Teplice Program, Impact of Air Pollution on Human Health (Prague, 2001), 252.
99. The authors note that it is difficult to separate environmental causes of mortality from lifestyle causes (such as smoking, etc.). I would suggest that environmental causes also influence lifestyle choices (general ugliness can contribute to depression, alcoholism, smoking, etc.). Life expectancy was two to three years lower in north Bohemia than the countrywide average. See also Vaněk, Nedalo, 61.
100. Vaněk, Nedalo, 54.
101. Olga Hniková, "Po nás potopa?" Mladá fronta, June 23, 1968, 4.
102. Útvar hlavního architekta, Cikáni ve starém Mostě (ONV Most, 1975), 27a. Copy located in Státní okresní archiv (SOkA), Most.
103. Ibid., 95, 97.
104. Ibid., 184.
105. Among others, see Jedermann, Verlorene Geschichte, 95-104. Seeking a suitably devastated landscape, filmmakers shot the movie version of All Quiet on the Western Front (1979) in areas around Most.
106. On political passivity, see the essays in Václav Havel, Living in Truth (Boston, 1990). Havel makes passing references to the environmental legacy of the Communists in speeches reproduced in The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice, trans. Paul Wilson (New York, 1997).
107. For a comparison of the environmental policies of Communist East Germany and capitalist West Germany, see Raymond Dominick, "Capitalism, Communism, and Environmental Protection: Lessons from the German Experience," Environmental History 3, no. 3 (July 1998): 311-32.
108. Dominick concludes that politics, rather than economic system, determined environmental policy. While pollution in West Germany rivaled that of the East into the 1960s, the West improved dramatically thereafter. Western public outcry about the environment in the 1960s and 1970s led to pollution controls, while the East squelched most environmental criticism.
109. Freese, Coal, 111-23, 180.
110. Radvanovský, "The Social and Economic Consequences"; and Jedermann, Verlorene Geschichte.
111. Jedermann, Verlorene Geschichte, 90.
112. Československá sociologická společnost při ČSAV Praha, Výzkumný tým v Ústí nad Labem, "Vliv některých faktorů životního prostředí na identifikaci občanů s městem Neštěmice," 1971. ONV Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k 262 ic 1025. In another, more recent study of the highly polluted city of Teplice, Alena Nedomová found that close to 80 percent of residents felt at home there, at least in 1991. Nedomová concludes, "The generation of current inhabitants of the originally resettled towns feels completely at home there now, and view any doubt as to their position as permanent residents as an attack on their identity."
113. Alena Nedomová, "V blízkosti hranic: Identifikace obyvatel dosídlených po 2. světové válce do českého pohraničí a jejich potomků s místem současného bydliště na příkladu Českého Krumlova a Teplic," Sociologický časopis 31, no. 4 (1995): 507, 515.
114. The population of greater Most increased from 58,800 in 1970 to 70,700 in 1990. Petr Pavlínek and John Pickles, Environmental Transitions: Transformation and Ecological Defence in Central and Eastern Europe (New York, 2000), 310.
115. Ibid., 113.
116. The quote comes from Jan Gabriel, Ústí nad Labem's chief architect, in an interview in "Už gesto obrany," Dialog 3 (1966): 4.
117. Vaněk, Nedalo, 57-61. Frustrated by its inability to stop the departures, in 1982 the central government instituted a two-thousand-crown yearly bonus for those who remained in the brown-coal basin from Ústí to Chomutov. Locals half-jokingly referred to this as the burial subsidy (pohřebné).
118. See letter from ONV Ústí to members of environmental review committee, n.d. (1960), as well as Plánovací komise ONV v Ústí nad Labem politicko-organizační opatření . . . ke zlepšení pří rodního a pracovního prostředí v ústeckém okrese, December 9, 1960. ONV Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k 138 ic 515.
119. "Za socialistické životní prostř edí v Severočeském kraji" (speech of Communist Party secretary Oldřich Voleník and environmental program of Krajský výbor Severočeské KSČ, November 1960). ONV Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k 138 ic 515.
120. Of the many such reports, see "Souhrnná zpráva koordinační komise o stavu životního prostředí v okrese Ústí n. L," February 18, 1966, 17-18. ONV Ústí nad Labem, Archiv města Ústí nad Labem, k 138 ic 515.
121. Ibid., 17.
122. See Pavlínek and Pickles, Environmental Transitions, 44-48.
123. The Czech journal Demografie reported, e.g., 15 million crowns a year of damage to agriculture alone in the Teplice district in the early 1960s. Excerpt in Rudolf Urban, "Erhoehte Sterblichkeit im Bezirk Teplitz durch Industrieabgase," Wissenschaftlicher Dienst für Ost-Mitteleuropa 15 (1965): 415.
124. Local estimates of damage to forests included 7.2 million crowns in the Most region in 1960. See Literární noviny excerpt in Rudolf Urban, "Das Schicksal der Stadt Brüx," Wissenschaftlicher Dienst für OstMitteleuropa 16 (1966): 332.
125. Vaněk, Nedalo, 50.
126. Pavlínek and Pickles, Environmental Transitions, 105.
127. Vaněk, Nedalo, 52.
128. 100 "Periphery" comes from Škornička, a member of the north Bohemian regional committee of the KSČ. Quoted in ibid., 49.
129. Otevřený dopis městských a místních národních výborů Šluknovského výběžku centrálním orgánům Československé socialistické republiky, May 18, 1968. Městský národní výbor (MěNV) Rumburk, Státní okresní archiv Děčín, k 36 ic 115.
130. Novotný, Sekretariát Podpredsedu vlády JUDr. Gustáva Husáka to MěNV Rumburk, June 25, 1968. MěNV Rumburk, Státní okresní archiv Děčín, k 36 ic 115.
131. Quoted in Rudolf Urban, "Das Schicksal der Stadt Brüx," Wissenschaftlicher Dienst für Ost-Mitteleuropa 16 (1966): 331.
132. Vaněk, Nedalo, 65.
133. On the darker aspects of late modernity, see Scott, Seeing Like a State. For a productive application of Scott's work to a Communist case, see Amir Weiner, "Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism," American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (October 1999): 1114-55;
134. and Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, CA, 2003).
135. State control and planning of north Bohemia's larger industries began during the war, with Nazi organs managing industry for war production. Even so, planning and control reached a crescendo with the postwar resettlement and subsequent Stalinization of the region.
136. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain.
137. On Nowa Huta, see Katherine Lebow, "Nowa Huta, 1949-1957: Stalinism and the Transformation of Everyday Life in Poland's 'First Socialist City'" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2002); on Eisenhüttenstadt as a model town, see Timothy Dowling, "Stalinstadt/Eisenhüttenstadt: A Model for (Socialist) Life in the German Democratic Republic, 1950-1968" (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1999).
138. On the settlement of Poland's western borderlands, see Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950 (Ithaca, NY, 1997).
139. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 97.
140. Ther, "Century," 44.
141. Jedermann, Verlorene Geschichte, 90.
142. Chernobyl was another such disaster meriting the title of worst-case scenario.
143. I should note that Havel was referring to consumerism in this quote, but this also applies more broadly to mentalities privileging economic growth over nonmaterial values. Václav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless," in his Living in Truth (Boston, 1990), 54.
144. The Teplice demonstrations began on November 11, 1989. The crowd of mostly young people numbered between six hundred and eight hundred on November 11 and one thousand on the next day. Miroslav Vaněk, "Př edehra k 17. Listopadu 1989: Ekologické demonstrace v Teplicích," Historické Studie k sedmdesátinám Milana Otáhala (Prague, 1998): 226.
145. See, e.g., Hana Slavíčková, Děč ínská zastavení, historický průvodce městem (Děčín, 1997).
146. Slavíčková is one of several historians, archivists, museum curators, and others in north Bohemia trying to establish a post-Communist identity for localities in the region.
147. Here I am partly paraphrasing the title of William Rollins's book, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904-1918 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997).