Reckoning with dictatorship: the Czech Republic after 1989

When communism fell in Czechoslovakia, contemporary observers relished the feeling that the newly liberated country was returning to Europe. Capitalism and democracy had triumphed, and the wind of history seemed to be blowing towards progress and collective happiness. On the surface, the Czech case is an intriguing success: from the country in the socialist camp with the highest rate of communist party members per capita, it became a model transitional state and a member of the EU within fifteen years. In reality, this facade hides a divided society as far as its endeavor to deal with its communist past is concerned. As such, the Czech case is an interesting example of what to do and not to do in matters of punishment and recognition, history and memory, justice and injustice. This project proposes to write the history of this accounting with the past from 1989 to the present. It proceeds from the assumption that a deep knowledge of the communist past is necessary to fully understand the countrys memory politics after 1989. It operates from several vantage points: what to do with various social actors (vetting policy, judicial measures, laws concerning the past); how to deal with the documents (archival policy, epistemology); how to write the history of communism (historiography); how to remember this period (memory studies.) Mainly, it will discuss all these aspects in their mutual interaction in an interdisciplinary perspective. Two research questions guide the project: how representative is the apparently dominant anticommunist narrative of societys attitude concerning the communist past? And if justice was the goal of the post-communist project, why not resort to the category of crime against humanity to bypass the legal problems arousing from judging a past dictatorial regime? The corpus of sources to be examined combines primary sources (policy, legal, and archival documents, oral history interviews, policy papers from non-state actors such as NGOs) and secondary sources (academic literature; newspaper articles; feature and documentary films; novels and testimonies.) The amount of literature to be covered needs preliminary theoretical knowledge of history, sociology, political science, anthropology, gender studies, and transitional justice studies. The aim of this project is precisely to make the knowledge accumulated by these disciplines come together in interaction to create a wider picture.