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

Manythanks to Éloïse Adde, Marián Lóži, and Jan Čulík for theirfeedback on this text. (Česky zde tento článek vyjde během týdne)When
I began my PhD on Czechoslovak history in 1992, I was met in Praguewith skepticism, if not outright dismissal. “A foreigner writingabout Czech history?”, they would ask. “What can you possiblyknow about us? Did you live under communism? No? Well, then…”

Thisresponse overlooked the fact that most people have never visited thecommunist party or secret police archives, nor taken much interest inthe 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 triedto lecture me (in broken English) in 2020 on Czech communist historybecause he was unaware of the methodology of oral, everyday life, andbottom-up history, so his inability to grasp what I was talking aboutcould only be explained in his eyes by my “not fully understandingwhat he wrote” because Czech “was not my mother tongue”?