Buchbesprechungen: Atlas Republiky Československé

Summary

This review examines the Atlas of the Czechoslovak Republic, published in 1935 by the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts. The atlas, a product of ten years of labor, comprises 55 large plates with numerous insets and demonstrates high technical and visual quality. However, its ethnographic maps exhibit a clear political bias, employing specific color scales and typologies to emphasize the unity of the Czechoslovak nation while downplaying the presence of German and other minorities. This stands in contrast to the more objective cartography of Rauchberg. The atlas's demographic, economic, and cultural maps offer rich data, revealing a significant west-east gradient in national biology and socio-economic conditions, as well as the offensive tendencies of Czech cultural policy in German-speaking areas. The author concludes that the atlas is of considerable value to German scholarship, urging German and Sudeten German researchers to engage in a critical analysis and to produce complementary maps from their own perspective.