The “Totalitarian Era”?
Democracy and Dictatorship in the Czech Republic’s Politics of Memory
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The politics of the past is the politics of the future. In the Czech Republic, as in other East-Central European countries, the sense of this connection is particularly pronounced. The events of 1989 therefore sparked a genuine boom in history. In the Czech Republic, for example, there was a struggle over the “rediscovery” of the First Republic’s democratic tradition. Much more controversial than this search for positive landmarks in Czech history was the debate over reassessing the expulsion and resettlement of Czechoslovakia’s Germans. For several years now, there has been a struggle over the creation of a view of history that brings together Czech society’s dual experience with dictatorship since 1938.
(Osteuropa 6/2008, pp. 103–116)