This article examines debates on the “two cultures” in socialist Czechoslovakia during the sixties, focusing on the relationship between the natural and technical sciences, the humanities, and the arts. While influenced by C. P. Snow’s concept of the “two cultures” and Soviet discussions on “physicists and lyricists,” these debates unfolded within the specific institutional and ideological framework of socialist science policy. The study argues that the controversy reflected not simply intellectual divisions but also asymmetries in funding, political influence, and disciplinary prestige within the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. It analyzes discussions surrounding engineering traditions, collectivism, and the social role of science, including comparisons with Poland’s stronger humanistic tradition. Particular attention is devoted to the Prague Spring, when questions of responsibility and solidarity intensified tensions between the natural sciences and the humanities.

This article examines the role of children’s homes in socialist Czechoslovakia as temporary humanitarian spaces for child refugees fleeing the Greek Civil War (1946–1949) or the Korean War (1950–1953). It challenges the conventional ideological framing of socialist residential care as a tool of social engineering. Instead, it examines the everyday agency of refugee children, as manifest through their experience of space and time. The analysis draws on archival materials, oral interviews, and refugee literature to illuminate the personal choices and coping strategies of these children in the context of socialist education. The refugee children’s homes are conceptualized as socially constructed spaces that required a healthy political and physical environment for the children’s presumed successful development. By situating these facilities geographically and spatially and contextualizing them historically within a broader continuum of care, the analysis elucidates the underlying issues associated with the postwar reconstruction process.

What defines an émigré scholar? Drawing on personal correspondence between members of the Unity of Science movement, this article emphasizes the contingency of the category by reconstructing the social and material conditions that shaped academic life under fascism. When scholars became refugees, they had to find ways to move their knowledge with them. Antisemitic discrimination restricted their access to libraries, conferences, and publishing contracts: the very things they needed to continue their work and secure jobs abroad. Would-be émigrés attempted to compensate by relying on their interpersonal networks for information and support. This response exacerbated existing hierarchies. Junior scholars, in particular, struggled to secure the connections they needed. Some academics managed to flee but lost their careers in the process. Others were murdered in the Holocaust. Putting them in the same narrative avoids the teleological pull of successful escape stories, providing a fuller, more accurate picture of how fascism and the Second World War reshaped academia.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, German universities faced the rise of National Socialism among students and external stakeholders. University leaders were typically embedded in a traditional bourgeois milieu and ardent defenders of academic freedom, which led to aggressive confrontations with groups advocating the new ideology.

This study examines the dynamics of the conflict at the Technical University of Brunswick (Braunschweig) between 1930 and 1933. Specifically, I explore how National Socialists strategically escalated conflicts and disrupted existing social structures to attain power within the organization. The conflict culminated in the (failed) attempt to appoint Adolf Hitler as a professor in February 1932 and the dismissal of key actors after January 1933. This study provides insights into the deliberate escalation of conflicts by populist movements, the vulnerability of apolitical spaces, and the importance of formal governance structures for handling ideological conflicts.

As East-Central Europe shifted from empires to nation-states, financial insecurity became an everyday reality. Ordinary people found themselves suddenly cut off from their savings and vulnerable to the rapid devaluation of new national currencies. Focusing on the Polish-Czechoslovak border, this article discusses the Teschen Savings Bank in the divided city of Teschen (Cieszyn/Český Těšín). It traces the protracted yet futile efforts of Český Těšín’s leaders to recover Czechoslovak residents’ deposits stranded in Poland. Drawing on negotiation records from the local, regional, and national levels, the article demonstrates how financial entanglements inherited from the imperial era persisted into the postwar order. It further shows how the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Czechoslovak state seemed to have obstructed meaningful resolution. Ultimately, it argues that the government’s failure to address these deeply felt grievances eroded public trust and contributed to the unraveling of the interwar political order.