The Soviet liberation of most of Czechoslovakia was the subject children studied at school and that was, right from the start, celebrated by poets, writers, artists and intelligentsia including those whose political views had very little in common with Soviet-style socialism. 

The Second World War had deepened even further the anti-German sentiments bred by the First over virtually all of Europe. In Bohemia, these sentiments were mythicised in a specifically Czech fashion. 

In some circles, the end of the War was seen as a decisive blow in a thousand-year-old struggle between Czechs and Germans for cultural and political dominance in the Bohemian lands. 

For example, the professor of Czech literature who was the president of the Revolutionary National Council during the Prague Uprising, Albert Pražák, saw in the end of the war and the so-called Košice Programme the fulfilment of the desires of the early fourteenth-century nationalist chronicler, 'Dalimil'. 

The conference will look at how the end of the war was reflected in Bohemian culture. Amongst the subjects of papers to be presented by academics from four British and two Czech academic institutions are immediate literary reactions to the war, Czech and German literary reactions to the Prague Uprising, the diary reactions of a Bohemian German Social Democrat, women writers on the end of the war, a 1945 dictionary for Czech journalists and Czech poetry concerned with 1945.