Two decades after the end of communism, Czech historians and society are only now beginning to “come to terms with the past.”

By Aviezer Tucker

Until recently, Czech historians tended to avoid politically thorny issues about the recent past. There were scattered efforts to examine suppressed memories, but overall the reformed communists of the generation of 1968 would not confront embarrassing questions about the past, in effect about their youth. As in West Germany during the ’60s, once a new generation of historians came of age, though, they began to ask the questions that their parents’ generation avoided. The current debate over the Czech past is largely conducted among historians in their 30s who could not have participated in the totalitarian project and for whom communism is a childhood memory. Continue reading …