Sborník Prameny víry — pokus o protektorátní literaturu
Sources of Faith anthology — an attempt to create Protectorate literature

Summary/Abstract: This study deals with the Sources of Faith anthology dating from 1943, which contains fifteen short stories that came out top in a competition titled New Tomorrow. The aim was to publish texts that were meant to depict life in the Protectorate in the spirit of Nazi propaganda. It was initiated by activist journalist Rudolf Novák, who had been assigned to the Leopold Mazáč publishers by the Nazi authorities in the summer of 1942. The competition was entered primarily by younger authors who had not previously published, or who had only published unsophisticated prose works of popular fiction. The only fairly well-known contributor was Vojtěch Rozner. Although these stories had literary ambitions, none of them achieved a very high literary standard. This study focuses in particular on describing and interpreting the motifs and subjects of Nazi propaganda which occur more or less implicitly in these texts. Almost omnipresent is the subject of the „New Europe“ and its construction. These stories often present the motif of children as the builders of the new world. Two texts also include an anti-Semitic element characterizing a racially pure Nazi Europe. This construction also involves the subject of workers’ labour and social justice: workers are better off in the New Europe, they work happily in a comradely collective and their work is valued appropriately. Several stories also attempt to interpret recent events in an activist spirit: the social contradictions of the First Republic, its collapse and the creation of the Protectorate. The issue of what was known as the new Czech patriotism remained vague. While activist journalists and propagandists conceived it to be identification with a united Nazi Europe, the authors of the stories under analysis stressed the motif of pragmatic defence of the nation and the longing to live to see a better future. No competition of this kind was ever repeated in subsequent years, so Sources of Faith remains a unique attempt to create a Czech activist literature.

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