The Discussion about Expulsion of Sudeten Germans in Czech Society

This thesis focuses on the controversy in Czech society over the displacement of Germans. The dispute is one of the most significant public debates related to the Czech past held since the fall of the communist regime. The work briefly summarizes the historical development of the controversy over the displacement and introduces the political context of the discussion held already in the democratic regime. The main part of the text consists of analysis of opinions on the issues of displacement in Czech newspapers in the period of one year directly before the Czech Republic entered the European Union Concerning methodology, the work is inspired by discourse analysis. However, the author is not that much focusing on the use of language, which is common within this methodological tradition, but rather on what is being expressed through the language, i. e. the contents of the discourse itself. In doing so, he refers to the work of the Czech-British anthropologist Ladislav Holý. The author concludes that two main approaches may be found within the debate over the displacement, and calls the first of them the "official" discourse and the other the "critical" discourse. Based on the analysis, it is not possible to speak of the two discourses as competing with each other in the form of notional oppositions,..