Prague in the early twentieth century was the city of cubists, surrealists, and the Good Soldier Svejk. This book takes a new approach to interwar Prague by identifying religion as an integral part of the city's cultural history. As Prague emerged as a modern city and the Czech nation gained independence, Catholics, Protestants, and those who imagined a non-sectarian religion debated questions of faith and morality. Contrary to the conventional view of modern Czech elites as "atheistic," Berglund shows how they were deeply concerned with the place of religion in modern life. Based upon a wide array of sources, the monograph explores the linkages between politics, theology, and architecture in the building of new symbols and a civil religion for the first Czechoslovak republic (1918-1938). Berglund views the contest of the sacred and secular in Prague within the broader context of religious change in twentieth-century Europe. His book lays a foundation for understanding both Czech culture of the interwar period as well as the nation's - and Europe's - religious history in the modern age. The author takes an approach that is both interdisciplinary and biographical by focusing on important figures in the politics and culture of interwar Prague, including Tomas Masaryk, the philosopher who became Czechoslovakia's first president; his daughter Alice, founding director of the Czechoslovak Red Cross; and Joze Plecnik, the Slovenian architect who directed the renovations of Prague Castle and designed one of the city's most renowned churches. This study of the beliefs and doubts held by these and other figures shows the transition from a (mostly) Catholic tradition to a new religious conception that was modern, humanistic, and detached from any institution - much like the religious beliefs held by many Europeans today.

"A scholar of religion in Eastern Europe, Berglund digs deeply into the personal stories of individuals, famous and less famous, involved with state building and cultural production in the 1920s. We meet a group of politicians, intellectuals, architects, writers, and activists whose public associations with nationalism and secularism hid profound religious inclinations that influenced their actions and thinking. This book is a pleasure to read and a rare opportunity to grasp an intellectual moment in history so intimately. Berglund uses his wealth of sources to nuance his interpretations in ways that make the book and its arguments of interest to all scholars of interwar central European culture and politics." - Austrian History Yearbook

"An engagingly written and carefully argued study in cultural history, it offers a finely woven discussion of spirituality with the castle and its cathedral as one of its key pivots, the other being the book’s primary protagonists, a visionary president, his daughter the activist social worker, and the religiously informed modernist architect. This is a revisionist history in the very best sense of the term. The Castle and the Cathedral, a title that references two very concrete sites portends to address their other senses, the secular site of a new political order and the sacred site in need of a new religious fulfillment in a society deeply suspicious of religious dogmatism." - Canadian Journal of History

"The subject of Berglund’s book is difficult to pin down. The author defines it as “thinking about God”, but one might also call it a group portrait of how leading Czech public figures struggled with the role of faith and religion in modern Czech society from around 1900 to 1938. Some of these people, like the Prague-based Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik and the writer Jaroslav Durych, were devoted Catholics, but most of Berglund’s protagonists searched for, and tried to express “something higher” in their political, social, or artistic practice outside the established churches." - Slavic Review