Reimagining Czech military history

Czechoslovak soldiers with ZB vz. 24 service rifles sometime during the late 1930s.

Today’s military history is a vast and varied discipline. Owing to the influence of social history methods beginning in the 1960s, and of cultural history in the 1990s, the questions asked by military historians have grown to be more holistic, more far-reaching, more intimately connected with the questions being asked by their colleagues in other historical disciplines. (I invite readers to peruse the program for this year’s American Society for Military History conference, where they are sure to find papers related to their thematic or methodological interests.)  Many military historians still focus on weapons, battles, army organization, or civil-military relations, but they are more likely to do so by enlisting concepts from sociology, memory studies, organizational theory, gender studies, art history, theories of nationalism, etc. While the oft-used sobriquet “new military history” actually blends several distinct evolutions, the term is still helpful for conveying that military history has become a “big tent” field – a medium across which scholars of diverse places and periods come together to investigate the all-too-human act of organized violence.

In the Czech Republic, some contend that the domestic practice of military history has been left behind by these methodological innovations abroad. Ivan Šedivý raised the alarm as early as 2002, and Jiří Hutečka has recently reiterated and expanded upon his critiques. Per Hutečka, Czech military historiography “has become entrenched in a historicist-positivist, unrepentantly descriptive approach” that focuses on notable generals and army institutions. This has left its practitioners doubly isolated, both from developments in military history abroad and from conversations with Czech scholars in other disciplines.

Rather explicitly, the contributors to the reviewed volume have declared it their goal to change Czech military historiography and show what it might be capable of. Many of the contributors are members of the Společnost pro výzkum dějin vojenství (SVDV, Society for Military Historical Research), founded in 2020 to help grow and sustain a more globally connected Czech military historiography. In addition to hosting lecture series and workshops, the SVDV has launched a book series and co-organized several international conferences. The inaugural SVDV conference of 2021 focused on “Military Service: Organization – Disciplining – Experience – Culture.” The volume under review is a collection of papers from that conference, edited by the SVDV’s chairman and published as the first title in its Militaria academica series.

While many of the contributors have published in English, German, and Polish, the volume’s essays are in Czech. As such, the book seems aimed at highlighting for a domestic scholarly audience what military history can and should be. Petr Wohlmuth’s brief introduction notes that the field has long been pegged as “essentially conservative”, “thematically unappealing”, and “theoretically-methodologically backward” (p. 7). Mirroring the SVDV’s mission statement, Wohlmuth argues that changing this perception requires an interdisciplinary engagement with “theories and concepts from […] new military history, cultural history, post-positivist oral history, historical sociology, and social geography.” (p. 7)

This litany previews the different approaches used in the volume’s six essays, which are united by a focus on “military service” in modern Central Europe. In particular, the essays analyze mandatory service in mass conscript armies. This form of service was common throughout the region from the mid-nineteenth until the early twenty-first century, when many states (including the Czech Republic) replaced their conscript armies with professional, volunteer forces. The volume’s focus on mandatory military service looks increasingly prescient with each passing month. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has reignited dormant debates about the civic value of soldiering in European society, and senior defense officials in both Germany and the Czech Republic have spoken publicly about a possible return to compulsory military service. Whether such proposals will generate real political momentum remains to be seen. But they are enough to suggest that, in the future, we might perhaps look back at the 2000s and 2010s as a temporary abeyance of European conscription rather than the definitive end of an era.

The volume’s six essays are arranged chronologically and focus on Prussia, the Bohemian lands, and communist Poland. Appropriately, it opens with an essay on Prussia’s nineteenth-century universal conscription regime, which quickly emerged as a model for other contemporary armies. Deploying a deft cultural analysis, co-authors Vojtěch Kessler and Josef Šrámek argue that the Prussian service model worked because it reflected crucial aspects of Prussian social organization, and because the army occupied a unique position in Prussian culture. While many states went on to copy the Prussian system’s legislative and administrative structures, they found it more difficult to replicate the “conceptual arsenal” (23) that made it tick.

The second essay, by Ondřej Král, shifts to the Habsburg army and incorporates the methods of social geography. It knocks down a long-held truism that the Habsburg empire sought to “divide and rule” its multiethnic army by posting conscripts to garrisons far away from their native districts. Král shows that the Habsburg army was not categorically opposed to garrisoning troops close to home, and that its garrison policy shifted back and forth several times during the nineteenth century. Král does Habsburg specialists a service by periodizing these policy shifts, which he supports through ample figures and tables.

The third essay comes from Tomáš Kykal and Marek Fišer of the Czech Military History Institute (VHÚ). Together, the two are building an ambitious digital repository of military ego-documents from the Bohemian lands. Here, they highlight “soldiers’ scrapbooks” as a particularly useful source for analyzing Czech experiences of military service across the twentieth century. Kykal and Fišer argue convincingly that this unique source-type offers historians a way to research aspects of military socialization that are hard to access through the traditional archival record.

Polish scholar Jarosław Kilias adds a comparative and sociological perspective by looking at class experiences of mandatory service in the Polish People’s Army. While altering some aspects of the interwar Polish conscription system, the communist system repackaged traditional privileges offered to educated soldiers. In this way, Kilias – like Kessler and Šrámek – reminds us that conscription regimes are shaped by legislative and cultural structures. In the Polish case, these cultural structures created deep continuities with the past that historians might miss by looking exclusively at official rhetoric and regulations.

Focusing as well on the communist period, editor Petr Wohlmuth uses critical oral history and historical anthropology to examine how conscripts sought “escape” during their time in the Czechoslovak People’s Army. Drawing from an extensive corpus of recent interviews, Wohlmuth identifies different forms of “escape” referenced by ex-servicemen – drugs, alcohol, apathy, the acquisition of technical skills, etc. Wohlmuth offers a typology of these “escape” narratives, which reveal a great deal about how ex-servicemen situate their mandatory service in their own life stories. Like Kykal and Fišer, Wohlmuth highlights an innovative method for reaching conclusions about the experience and memory of service.

The collection concludes with Petr Janoušek’s piece on the conscripts who volunteered for Czechoslovakia’s mission to Kuwait during the First Gulf War. While focusing on his subjects’ transformation from peacetime conscripts to frontline soldiers, Janoušek also weaves in a broader story – that of an army conducting its first ever foreign deployment while grappling with the recent transition from communism. While the volunteer conscripts of 1990-1 certainly considered the deployment a seminal moment in their lives, the “lessons learned” by the army during the Gulf War also figured into the Czech Republic’s eventual abandonment of mandatory service in the following decade.

Each of the above essays provides a creative perspective on the topic of mandatory military service, which remains relatively under-researched in the Czech context. While this collection cannot fill that gap in a single stroke, specialists will find a great deal of value in its individual essays. For the wider CEURB readership, I would like to conclude by emphasizing this volume’s significance as a product of, and testament to, scholarly proactivity. Its contributors represent a broader cohort of Central European military historians who have consciously committed to conversations with other scholars at home and abroad. They are publishing in international journals, participating in interdisciplinary conferences, staging conferences of their own, and hosting visiting scholars at their home institutions. Vojenská služba serves as a valuable window into those broader efforts.