Rodina kolonizovaná státem?
The Family Colonized by the State?

A Book about Family Policy in Twentieth-century Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia

Summary/Abstract: Jakub Rákosník and Radka Šustrová. Rodina v zájmu státu: Populační růst a instituce manželství v českých zemích 1918–1989. (Knižnice Dějin a současnosti, vol. 60.) Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2016, 283 pp., ISBN 978-80-7422-378-5. According to the reviewer, the two authors of the book under review (whose title translates as The Family in the Interest of the State: Population Growth and the Institute of Marriage in Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia, 1918–89) convincingly demonstrate the massive growth in state intervention in the private sphere in Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia in the seventy years from the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic to the collapse of the Communist regime in late 1989. She does, however, have some doubts about their periodization, which ignores great political dividing lines in favour of continuities, and she is also disappointed in the authors’ intentionally refusing to pass judgement on the topics they discuss. The reviewer would have liked to have read an assessment of interwar Czechoslovakia, which had sought to be a democratic and socially just state, and she would have welcomed discussion of the Nazis’ intentions to eradicate the Czechs during the German occupation from mid-March 1939 to early May 1945. The reviewer remarks on some aspects of family policy in socialist Czechoslovakia, and concludes that the book under review is useful for the general public as a call for discussion about the social values and traditions and the purpose and operation of the State.

• Details
• Contents