Milan Hauner – jedinečný historik mezinárodních vztahů
Milan Hauner, a One of a Kind Historian of International Relations

(4. 3. 1940 – 26. 9. 2022)

Summary/Abstract: The obituary commemorates the distinguished Czech historian of international relations Milan Hauner. He was born on 4 March 1940 in Gota, Thuringia, into a Czech-German family, but grew up in Prague. His grandfather and uncle, resistance fighters in the Second World War, fell victim to the Nazis, generating Hauner’s professional interest. He studied history at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. After the Soviet invasion in 1968, however, he decided to emigrate. He was awarded a scholarship at St. John’s College in the University of Cambridge where he also earned his doctorate in international relations in 1972. In the following decades he worked at a number of academic institutions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany. His home institution was the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and, since the 1990s he also lectured at and published with Czech institutions. He died on 26 September 2022 in Madison. His work focused on a variety of understudied topics in twentieth-century international relations and on great power strategies at crucial moments in world history. Perhaps his most famous monograph deals with the role of Indian nationalism in the politics of the Axis countries during the Second World War. He also extensively published on the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Another of Hauner’s lifelong themes was the Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš (1884–1948), whose three-volume memoirs of the Munich agreement and the Second World War he prepared for publication in a critical edition. Taking a personal tone, the author of the obituary summarizes Hauner’s career and professional contribution, highlights his major works, discurses his long-term collaboration with this journal, and recalls the mutual friendship and inspiration that Milan Hauner meant to him.

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