Whose Nation?: <em>Czech Dissidents and History Writing from a Post-1989 Perspective</em>

Abstract

If there was a time to be hopeful in Czechoslovakia, it was New Year's Day, 1990. Only a few weeks earlier Communism had collapsed more swiftly, peacefully and decidedly than anywhere else in East-Central Europe. Intellectuals of various political leanings, most of them former "enemies of the people," were speedily organizing a democratic form of government and planning a transition from state socialism to a free-market economy. Perhaps most remarkably the country's overwhelming choice for president was Václav Havel, a well-known philosopher/playwright/dissident who had been jailed several times by the Communist regime. Everything seemed turned on its head, and for the better. In addressing the country that day, however, Havel's tone was less than jubilant. The country's new leader spoke of Communism's sad legacy, and most strikingly of the country's "moral contamination." As both victims and perpetrators of the previous system, Czechs, he said, had become selfish, parochial and unable to think in terms of the common good: "Our main enemy today is our own bad traits.... The main struggle will have to be fought on this field." 1