Mnichov? A „pokus“ o jakou revizi? Stiny v recenzi Piotra M. Majewskeho
Munich, an ‘Attempt’ at Revision? Of What? Shadows in Piotr M. Majewski’s Review

Summary/Abstract: In this article the author takes issue with Piotr M. Majewski’s review of his book, In the Shadow of Munich: British Policy towards Czechoslovakia from the Endorsement to the Renunciation of the Munich Agreement, 1938–1942 (Prague, Karolinum Press, 2008), which appeared in the last issue of our journal (‘Mnichov, Britanie a pokus o revizi českeho pohledu’ [The Munich Agreement, Great Britain, and an Attempt to Revise the Czech View], Soudobe dějiny, vol. 16 [2009] no. 1, pp. 174–76). The author attributes the reviewer’s reproaches solely to lax reading or ignorance or both. He rejects the reviewer’s claim that the subject discussed in his book had already been sufficiently researched by others, and believes that the subject cannot be considered exhausted, even after the publication of his own monograph. He argues that his book is hardly at all concerned with the events around the Munich Conference of autumn 1938, which the reviewer, by contrast, has fixed his attention on. He rejects the reviewer’s opinion that what was of utmost importance in forming the attitudes of the British Foreign Office towards the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile was the anti-Czech bias of the civil servants employed there. And he particularly defends himself against the reviewer’s ‘labelling’ and ‘pigeonholing’, which he perceives in the assessment of his work as ‘revisionist’ and as an attempt to overcome the ‘Czech view’. There is, the author argues, no such thing as ‘revisionism’ or ‘the Czech view’ in contemporary Czech historiography.

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