Industrialization & Czech-German Nation Building

Habsburg rule, the Dual Monarchy and the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian world.

1 chapter

1740 - 1842

Enlightenment rationalism reshaped western Bohemia's spa towns into Europe's most fashionable healing destinations. The pitná kúra (drinking cure) at Karlovy Vary — walking between springs, filling a porcelain cup at each, drinking at prescribed intervals — became a secularized healing liturgy practiced by emperors, poets, and aristocrats. The colonnades would later give this ritual its architectural frame. Prince Klemens von Metternich made Kynžvart Castle his summer residence, filling it with Enlightenment-era collections of coins, weapons, and curiosities. The Church of St. Mary Magdalene (1733–36) presided over the spa town from above, its Baroque form a reminder that the spa calendar still echoed the liturgical one. Emperor Joseph II's reforms dissolved some monasteries and ended crypt burials (the Klatovy catacombs were sealed in 1783), but the spa ritual continued — a practice that transcended both church and state, rooted in the physical springs themselves rather than in any political authority.

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.

1618 - 1740

The Catholic victory in the Thirty Years' War transformed western Bohemia through a deliberate program of Counter-Reformation memory assertion. The Jesuits arrived in Klatovy (1656–76), building their church and catacombs as instruments of re-Catholicization — the mummified bodies in the crypt were visible proof that the Catholic dead were sanctified. At Kladruby, Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel rebuilt the conventual church (1712–26) in his signature Baroque-Gothic fusion: Gothic forms claimed continuity with the pre-Hussite medieval church, while Baroque dynamism asserted Counter-Reformation authority. The Plague Column on Plzeň's Republic Square (1681) proclaimed divine intercession. And on Veselá hora near Domažlice, a chapel built in 1685 anchored the svatovavřinecká pouť — the St. Lawrence pilgrimage that would become the region's most important annual ritual, surviving even communist attempts to suppress it. The Chodové lost their privileges; Jan Sladký Kozina was executed in Plzeň in 1695 after leading the Chod uprising against the Lamminger nobles. Read the architecture: Baroque vaults over Gothic foundations, pilgrimage chapels on signal hills — the landscape itself was rewritten to assert that the Catholic past had never been broken.

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.