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Lecture Summary

According to comparative data, suicide rates in Bohemia remained at a statistically high level in comparison to global figures from the nineteenth century until late in the twentieth, a matter of grave concern for successive political regimes. In the interwar-republic of Czechoslovakia, patriots were troubled that the high rates of suicide in Bohemia had failed to decline following the transition from the-Habsburg empire into the new-Czechoslovak state. The article uses sociological works to show how the problem of suicide was negotiated and rationalized in the context of the patriotic culture of the First Republic. This often involved eschewing the most compelling explanations of the problem in favour of those better adjusted to the political mood of the times, passing-over immediate and apparent problems in the national and the welfare of war veterans in favour of historical-explanations loosely related to the war years or the previous imperial experience. The Habsburg past and the difficult post-war transition were usually offered as causes of suicide. These ultimately achieved few concrete solutions, but rather provided an interpretation of the ongoing problem that was compatible with the state-forming patriotism of the day. The problem of suicide seems to have consistently remained at a high rate between the interwar and beyond.

Dr John Paul Newman is Associate Professor in Twentieth-century European History. He is interested in the modern history of the Balkans and East-Central Europe, with a particular focus on Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Czechoslovakia.