Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe article focuses on two sets of autonomist demands that the far-right Sudeten German Party (SdP) in Czechoslovakia put forward during 1937–38. Its central thesis being that both sets were marked by a profoundly close interplay between territorial and non-territorial approaches at accommodating national diversity, it sets to explore this relationship, highlighting the underlying dynamic. Although the 1937 Volksschutzgesetze posed as an ostensibly "pure" case of non-territorial autonomy, whereas the 1938 Skizze über Neuordnung der innerstaatlichen Verhältnisse entailed major territorial provisions, in both cases the practical end-goal implied territorial autonomy. A closer look into their inner logic and intellectual origins however, also reveals a shared, essentially non-territorial underpinning. While the SdP agenda was firmly centered on national territory, its specific völkisch and organicist understanding of nationality manifested a clear preponderance of non-territoriality. Both sets of autonomist demands may thus be treated as a potentially maximalist combination of territorial and non-territorial arrangements resting on a fundamentally non-territorial notion of Volkspersönlichkeit. Encompassing all the members of the national group, the latter was simultaneously conceived as the basic carrier of political will. Volksschutzgesetze and Skizze thus represented clear examples of illiberal (re-)conceptualization of national autonomy, informed by contemporary völkisch sociological, legal, and political thought.

Abstract
The paper presents the variability of aluminum concentrations in groundwater of the main porous-fissured aquifer and surface waters in the area of the Karkonosze National Park (KPN), covering mainly the upper parts of the Karkonosze Mts. The analysis was based on the results of samplings carried out in the area of the KPN in August 2015 and supplemented with the results of water quality monitoring carried out during the period of 2010–2016 in selected catchments of the Karkonosze Mts. Significant spatial variability of aluminium concentrations was observed, from several dozen to over 1,090 μg/L, increasing along with the height of the measurement points. The highest concentrations were recorded in the ridge zone of the Karkonosze Mts, where the pH is the lowest.

The ethnic problem had never before been such a pressing issue at the international level as it was in the initial post-war years, in particular, in the areas of Central and Southeast Europe. Based on post-war negotiations, the idea of international protection of national minorities was born, which was closely connected with the system of peace treaties concluded with defeated states. The submitted study uses unpublished sources of Czechoslovak (National Archives in Prague, Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague) and British (National Archives in Kew) provenance, published sources and specialist publications to look at the complaints of national minorities to the League of Nations during the 1930s; specifically — at the petition of the Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia in 1936, which concerned an instruction from the Ministry of National Defence to companies intending to apply for state contracts about the ethnic composition of their employees. It uses this example to demonstrate the instrumental nature of Sudeten German Party policy, showing that it did not represent a real attempt at improving the living conditions for the German minority in the First Czechoslovak Republic but rather was a deliberate effort to increase the visibility of the political entity and to internationalize the issue of the cohabitation of Czechs and Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia. The study also demonstrates that another objective of the Sudeten German Party was to attract attention from Great Britain, which had been avoiding significant engagement in Central Europe.