Reception of the Prussian-Austrian war of 1866 in the memories of contemporary actors

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to analyze the war experience of the Austro-Prussian War by researching memoirs of the contemporary participants. The research is focused on the experience originating from the northern battlefront, particularly on that from the Czech lands and the western part of present-day Slovakia. Based on the selected sources views this bachelor thesis the events through the eyes of the participants themselves. The war itself and its components as well as the perception of danger, injury, death, other people around the author and the perception of oneself as a soldier or a civilian and one's role among other phenomenons are adressed. Historical Anthropology and New Military History constitute the methodological basis of this work. The primary sources of this bachelor thesis constitute of memoirs from both Prussian and mainly Austrian or Czech military as well as civilian participants. Authors of these ego-documents, which had been largely published in print, rank among the lower or middle class. The sources were processed by the use of textual analysis with occasional application of comparative method. Due to a large number of available sources the topic is processed as a case study. It was concluded that the contemporary participants' experiences were very diverse, which..