The Image of Bratislava in Czech Travelogues of the Interwar Period

Abstract

The paper focuses on the literary representations of Bratislava in Czech travelogues and formulates various narratives of those depictions of the city that are related to the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. The paper compares Karel Kálal’s and Ivan Hálek’s travelogues of the so-called pre-coup period – the period before 1918 – with texts of the same genre written during the First Czechoslovak Republic (Jakub Deml, Josef Váchal, Karel Čapek, Marie Majerová, S. K. Neumann). The travelogues drew attention to the traditional culture of Slovaks (represented by Karel Plicka’s photographs) and sought new forms of Czech-Slovak relations in the political atmosphere of the so-called Czechoslovakism. Bratislava, which entered new cultural relations with the establishment of the new republic, occupied a specific place in these. The reconstruction of the image of Bratislava in the analysed texts shows that it did not become the main symbol of the changes that took place after 1918. The travelogues represent it only marginally and Bratislava corresponds to the perspective of the so-called null morpheme. The article employs the theory of imagology and, marginally, also theories of postcolonialism.

Keywords

• travelogue
• imagology
• czech-slovak relations
• czechoslovak republic