History | Topic Archive

We have heard plenty in recent weeks from the two candidates in this year’s Czech presidential elections. But what about their predecessors? The Czech Republic and previously Czechoslovakia have had ten presidents since 1918 when Czechoslovakia was founded, and in this programme we let some of them speak for themselves through Czech Radio’s archives.

In sombre tones the second Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš announced his resignation on Czechoslovak Radio on October 5 1938. Since becoming president in 1935, he had been haunted by the spectre of Nazi Germany, as Hitler had fuelled separatist sentiment among the country’s 3.5 million German speakers. Here is an extract from one of President Beneš’ vain appeals for reconciliation, in April 1938.

Céčka, tuzex and trvalá – for those growing up in the communist Czechoslovakia these were a part of daily life. As of tomorrow, you can find out more about those trends in a new series called Retro, produced by the Czech Television. Why are Czechs suddenly so interested in looking back at their recent past? Ruth Fraňková went to ask Jan Rozkošný, the producer of the new show.

This week in Mailbox: we disclose the identity of our January mystery man and announce the names of the four lucky winners. There will also be a brand new quiz question. Listeners quoted: Louise Kelleher, Francois Jooste, J.R. Tinsley, David Eldridge, Constantin Liviu Viorel, Juan Carlos Gil, Colin Law, Charles Konecny.

After years of debate, the Czech Republic has finally got an official body dedicated to examining the country’s communist past. Entitled the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, it will give both the public and historians access to tens of kilometres – and millions of pages – of secret police and military intelligence files. I spoke to director Pavel Žáček at the new institute’s official opening on Friday morning.

In recent weeks, I’ve tried to capture something of the tense atmosphere of the time leading up to the Munich Agreement of September 30 1938, when the British and French Prime Ministers Chamberlain and Daladier allowed Hitler to carve up Czechoslovakia and march unopposed into the Sudetenland. The agreement left the country as a fragment of its former self; not only Germany, but also Hungary and Poland, claimed large chunks of Czechoslovakia’s borderlands. Here is how Radio Prague reported on the final border agreement, reached some weeks after

There’s a rather unusual film festival underway at Prague’s Ořechovka cinema at the moment. Called “The Magic Eights”, it examines the strange significance of the number "8" in modern Czech history. The festival features around a dozen films either made in or about the crucial moments in this country’s recent past, most of which occurred in a year ending in "8".

We quite often hear it said that in the run-up to World War Two, no-one quite realized the scale of the threat that Nazi Germany posed in Europe. When Hitler set his eyes on Czechoslovakia, there were plenty of politicians in Western Europe who really seemed to believe him, when he said that the Czech borderlands, the so-called Sudetenland, were his “last territorial claim”. But Czech Radio’s archives show clearly that here in Prague there were also plenty of people who were only too aware of the worldwide menace that Hitler posed. As Britain and

The 17th century Czech philosopher and writer, Jan Amos Komenský – known internationally as Comenius - is one of the best known Czechs of all time. He is most widely celebrated for his progressive and enlightened ideas about education that earned him the epithet “the Teacher of Nations”. But the many other aspects of his thinking - and he was indeed a prolific writer with some 250 books to his name – remain somewhat neglected. This is something that Benjamin Kuras has decided to try to put right, in a small but inspiring book that he has just written

One of the most dramatic - but least known - events in Czechoslovak Radio’s history dates back to September 21 1938. This was the day that the government announced that it was willing to succumb to German pressure, and would give up large areas of the country’s borderlands to Nazi Germany. By this time it was clear that Britain and France would not be willing to fight for Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity, and that to say no would mean invasion. The announcement sent a shockwave through Czech society, and immediately thousands took to the