Central Europe is a strategically important space, destined by its geography and political history to become crossroads of nations and their cultural and educational traditions. The Habsburg monarchy, the German Empire unified in the second half of the 19th century as well as the region of today’s Poland has been seats of numerous universities and technical universities with venerable traditions. In all these institutions, the influence of local teachers intermingled with the impact of experts coming from culturally diverse parts of Europe. The creation of national states in the aftermath of 1918, their subjugation by totalitarian regimes in 1933, 1938–39, and 1945–48, as well as the dissolution of the Soviet block after 1989, represent turning points in the more recent history of this region.
doc. RNDr. Soňa Štrbáňová, CSc.
President of the European Society for the History of Science
doc. PhDr. Petr Svobodný, Ph.D.
Director of the Institute of the History of Charles University and Archive of Charles
University, Prague
Updated: 2011-09-27