Poválečné proměny českého pohraničí z pohledu amerického historika
Post-war changes of Czech border regions in the eyes of an American historian

Summary/Abstract: Glassheim, Eagle: Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016, 288 pp., ISBN 978-80-8229-6426-1. The author focuses on three areas of issues. The first of them is the post-war cleansing of the Czechoslovak borderlands, related to the unfulfilled efforts of Czechoslovak authorities for an ethnic homogenization of the regions. The second one comprises changes of the borderlands and their use as a “laboratory of state socialism” in the process of modernization transformations. The third area concerns memories of home and the formation of a new identity of expelled Germans and new settlers arriving to the border regions. In the reviewer’s opinion, the uniqueness of the book stems from conceptual and methodological approaches by means of which Glassheim describes the development of the Czechoslovak borderlands and living conditions of local people from a viewpoint of an environmental historian rather than in the topic of the publication. He emphasizes the role of economic and social factors related to the economic policy of the state, since the end of the war oriented mainly on the exploitation of mineral resources and heavy industry as tools used to promote the technocratic, production-driven vision of modernity. However, its implementation not only resulted in the devastation of the borderlands and their environment, but also had an adverse effect on the local population, particularly on their social relations and health.

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