A Blissful Journey to Collective Victimhood: How the Czech Republic Forgot Its Communist Past

Britské listy.cz 20.10.2024 17:15 Many thanks to Éloïse Adde, Marián Lóži, and Jan Čulík for their feedback on this text. When I began my PhD on Czechoslovak history in 1992, I was met in Prague with skepticism, if not outright dismissal. “A foreigner writing about Czech history?”, they would ask. “What can you possibly know about us? Did you live under communism? No? Well, then…” This response overlooked the fact that most people have never visited the communist party or secret police archives, nor taken much interest in the lives of those outside their own social circles. For 25 years, skeptics could not even believe that a foreigner could speak Czech. Remember when Michal Klíma tried to lecture me in 2020 on Czech communist history because he was unaware of the methodology of oral, everyday life, and bottom-up history, so his inability to grasp what I was talking about could only be explained in his eyes by my “not fully understanding what he wrote” because Czech “was not my mother tongue”?