Contemporary Living Culture & Heritage Economy

The post-war European integration project binding contemporary member regions across borders.

1 chapter

1989 - 2004

The Velvet Revolution unlocked suppressed memories and restored severed connections. On May 6, 1990 — just months after the revolution — the Thank You America monument (Památník Díky, Ameriko!) was dedicated in Plzeň, publicly commemorating the US liberation for the first time in 41 years. The Liberation Festival (Slavnosti svobody) became an annual commemoration with the Konvoj svobody, one of Europe's largest WWII military vehicle convoys. The KVIFF was privatized in 1994, transforming from a state propaganda instrument into an independent cultural institution. The spa towns were privatized and repositioned for Western tourism, with Karlovy Vary's colonnades restored to their 19th-century appearance — creating an amnesia about the four decades of socialist management that had also shaped them. The Chodské slavnosti recovered its religious dimension alongside the folk program, and the August 10 pilgrimage date was restored. The Great Synagogue was restored (1995–98) and reopened for concerts and exhibitions — though the community that built it was largely gone, and any event in its main hall commemorates absence rather than continuity.

1948 - 1989

The communist regime nationalized the spa industry (1948), seized the monasteries, and reshaped western Bohemia's cultural institutions for ideological purposes. The Škoda Works, now a state enterprise, became the industrial heart of the region — and its workers launched the 1953 Plzeň uprising (May 31 – June 2), storming the town hall in protest against the currency reform that wiped out savings. The uprising was both an economic protest and a political act; it was violently suppressed and then erased from official history for 36 years. The Chodské slavnosti was relaunched in 1955 as a secular folk showcase, stripped of its church-pilgrimage character; from 1963 to 1967 it was merged with Border Guard Day (Den pohraniční stráže) and moved to July. The KVIFF, founded in 1946 in the newly Czech-settled Karlovy Vary, operated as an A-category propaganda festival, alternating biennially with Moscow from 1972 to 1992. The Great Synagogue was closed in 1973 and left to decay. And the memory of the US liberation on May 6, 1945 was actively suppressed — anyone who tried to commemorate it faced persecution. Yet the spa ritual continued under new management: the drinking cure persisted, now serving citizens of the Soviet bloc rather than European aristocrats.

1918 - 1948

The new Czechoslovak Republic brought democracy to Plzeň but demographic rupture to the borderlands. The Sudeten German minority, concentrated in the Karlovy Vary and Cheb districts, felt excluded from the new state. The Munich Agreement of 1938 made the Sudetenland part of Nazi Germany overnight; Karlovy Vary became Karlsbad again. During the occupation, the Great Synagogue was spared physical destruction only because the Nazis designated it as storage for their planned 'Museum of the Extinct Jewish Race' — the building survived, its community did not. On May 6, 1945, Patton's Third Army liberated Plzeň and western Bohemia — a fact that would be suppressed for 41 years under communism. The post-war Beneš decrees authorized the forced transfer of over three million German speakers from Czechoslovakia. In western Bohemia, the demographic transformation was nearly total: entire towns like Karlovy Vary and Cheb lost virtually their entire populations. The spa traditions, folk customs, and church festivals of German-speaking communities were erased, replaced by the traditions of Czech and Slovak settlers who arrived to fill the empty towns. This was not a simple liberation but a cultural rupture of extraordinary completeness.

1842 - 1918

On October 5, 1842, Bavarian brewer Josef Groll produced the first batch of pale lager at Plzeň's new Burghers' Brewery — the beer that would conquer the world as Pilsner Urquell. The same era saw Emil Škoda transform a small workshop into one of Europe's largest armaments works, Ludwig Moser found his glass workshop in Karlovy Vary (1857), and Plzeň's Jewish community build the Great Synagogue (1888–93) — the second largest in Europe, with its Moorish-Romantic towers rising 45 meters. These institutions embodied a bilingual, multi-ethnic society: the brewery employed Czech and German workers, the synagogue served a German-speaking Jewish community of roughly 2,000, Moser glass bore the aesthetic of Karlsbad. But the tide of nationalism was rising. Czech and German communities that had coexisted for centuries began to see each other as rivals, and the industrial wealth that built Plzeň's grand synagogue would, within decades, be insufficient to protect its community from destruction.