The Kundera Conundrum: Kundera, Respekt and Contempt (Page 2)

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The Kundera Conundrum: Kundera, Respekt

May 20, 2009

Skirmishes over the Czech Republic's Communist past have been part of its political life for almost two decades, and the media have proven adept at profiting from them. An unfortunate precedent was set shortly after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, when widespread doubts about the new government's legitimacy led to the enactment of a controversial "lustration" law. A closed parliamentary commission was established to vet a wide range of public officials: former senior members of the Communist Party and agents of the Státní bezpecnost (secret police, or StB) were banned from public office and other administrative positions for five years. So, too, was anyone who had signed a document agreeing to collaborate with the StB. But people had signed the agreements for different reasons and then collaborated to very different degrees, and the new law disregarded all that. Former dissidents, who had been special targets of the StB, could now find themselves blacklisted because their name appeared on the wrong list. The irony was that in shrouding the deliberations in secrecy and diverting them from open judicial review, lustration may "have helped to inhibit discussion of the past in general," a 1999 assessment of the law in Central Europe Review concludes. "The last two decades of Communist rule remain almost entirely unexplored in [Czech] academic or popular history."

Yet the newly freed Czech press did not leave the past unexplored, after its manner. Since the early '90s, lists of people whose names appeared in still-classified StB archives were published by Petr Cibulka, a former member of Charter 77, leading to many painful reckonings. In 1999, when Cibulka published a second edition of the list in book form, it sold five times as many copies as the average work of fiction. (These days ...

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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/prikryl/2

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/prikryl/2