Praha: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2007, 224 s.
The main questions raised in this publication deal with the topic of oral history which is a qualitative research method and a particular branch of study of history which developed rapidly after the WWII especially in the USA and western Europe. The book follows its genesis from the moments it became clear that the political and economic history of states and populations, the so-called „macro" history, wasn't sufficient in providing the reasons for people's decisions, in explaining their motivation and presenting the uniquness of their experience in general, up to present. The neccessity to record human experience, to preserve it to future generations and to try to interpret contemporary history „from below" are the main issues of this book.
Praha, Prostor 2006. 412 s.
The book consists of ten essays which derive from the publication „Victors? Vanquished? Political Elites and Dissidents during the Period of So-Called Normalization - Historical Interviews". Their authors, researchers and associates of the Institute for Contemporary History, analyze, from various points of views, a vast material in form of dozens life histories of ex-dissidents and communist officials gathered with the oral history method.
The interpretations aren't mere summaries of narators' testimonies. They have no intention of correcting the narrators or convicting them of consciously or uncousiously told untruth, nor are they trying to extract some sort of generalisations out of their testimonies. The interpretations' main goal is to reach an in-depth understanding of the stories or happenings followed, i.e. to comprehend the complexity of events in our contemporary history.
The ten interpretations bring the historians and wider public interested in contemporary history an opportunity to get acquainted with individual viewpoints about the character and development of the so-called normalization period in ex-Czechoslovakia. The readers can see for themselves that one interview can lead to different results according to the various points of view of an interpretation (and an interpreter).
Praha, Lidové noviny, 1999. 860 p.
This is without a doubt one of the key studies of Czech historiography. Using the method of oral history, the authors sought to explain life during "real existing socialism" at the moment of its collapse, from a point of view hitherto unknown to the historian, thus painting a portrait of the lives of one hundred participants in the November revolution in 1989. The first part of the book includes a historical introduction into the topic of youth during late communism and theoretical and methodological essays on oral history, focusing particularly on interview interpretation. The second part consists of additional material and the full transcripts of 65 of the interviews. For many years, the theoretical portion of this book represented a unique source of widely-accessible information about oral history for Czech readers.
Praha, Votobia – Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2002. 350 p.
This book presents the results of the project "Youth Culture and the Road to Civil Society", which was financed by the Czech Science Foundation (GA ČR). This research showed that the corrosion of the communist regime had advanced to such an extent in the last ten years of its existence that it was not able to suppress – or in the final stages to even control - all of the activities which appeared spontaneously and often without any explicitly political intentions in the communities of Czech youth, a generation which experienced neither the 1968 invasion nor its traumatic aftermath. The book consists of six studies from one female and four male authors that present different perspectives on the interests, everyday life and mentalities of university students, trainees/apprentices and working youth: from pacifism and the peace movement to young people's views on religion, ecology, nature and scouting and new trends in rock music. One essay also deals with the specific theme of the efforts of the Secret Police (StB) to control youth movements. The studies are based on research results obtained via the oral history method. All quotations are drawn from interview recordings archived at the Oral History Center in the "Interviews" collection.
Praha, Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2004. 175 p.
The author summarizes and contextualizes the theory and practice of oral history, working from the experience gained by researchers at COH through their oral history projects. The first part of the book presents a short summary of the development of the oral history method globally and then in the Czech context, and tries to deal at least partially with the proliferation of terms used to describe the method. The author then presents his own view on the subject of interviewing and related issues. This book can also serve as a guide to doing oral history for those researchers in the social sciences and humanities who acquire their research material from recording interviews.
Praha, Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2004. 170 p.
This book presents a historical analysis of 36 life stories of Charter 77 members, based on interviews conducted during 1992 – 1996 by Květa Jechová and Ilona Christl, a former graduate student of sociology at the University of Erlagen. At that time, the authors were among the first to conduct interviews according to the oral history standards of the period. The book contains the transcripts of four of the most interesting interviews (Anna Marvanová, Jiří Hájek, Václav Benda and Josef Vohryzek), as well as a section devoted to interview interpretation according to the standards of historical research. Almost all of the transcriptions from the Charter 77 project are kept at the Oral History Center in the "Interviews" collection.
Praha, Prostor 2005, 1970 p.
The two-volume study Victors? Vanquished? presents a selection of 50 exemplary interviews chosen from a total of 120 recorded biographical narrations of ex-dissidents and communist officials. The first volume consists of 30 interviews with Czechoslovak ex-dissidents who participated in the opposition to various extents and at various levels; and the second volume is comprised of 20 narrations from pre-November Czechoslovak Communist Party functionaries from the level of the district council all the way to the Presidium of the Central Committee of CCP.
The interviews were conducted by researchers at the Institute of Contemporary History using oral history methodology. They not only enrich our knowledge of the normalization period; they also enable us to peer into the life stories and experiences of people who, in some way, influenced that era or took part in forming it. The reader can create for himself a three-dimensional - and at the same time non-textbook – view of our recent history, because he can confront the experiences of individuals as they are captured in the narratives of dozens of actors.
On one side, we find the narrations of ex-dissidents such as Petr Oslzlý, Václav Malý, Mikuláš Huba, František Stárek, Petr Uhl, Vladimír Hučín, Václav Havel and many others; and on the other side lie the stories of former communist officials, including Jindřich Poledník, Rudolf Hegenbart, Miloš Jakeš, Miroslav Štěpán, Zdeněk Hoření and Jaroslav Čejka.
Both historians and the wider public have the opportunity to contemplate the authentic narratives of a wide range of people of various ages, who came from both the center and the regions, including those who were famous and those for whom this project presented their first possibility to tell their life story. The biographical interviews do not focus only on historical events or on Party, political or dissident activities. They also present us with authentic life stories, sometimes very intense and touching, sometimes ordinary and at times, in spite of attempts at positive self-representation or "autostylizace", repulsive. The interviews also record the narrators' social and family environment and their leisure activities and hobbies, in an effort to give „living content" to otherwise empty words such as „communist official" and „dissident".
This book, which was intentionally given the ambiguous title Victors? Vanquished?, fills in a gap in history which is not possible to reconstruct on the basis of written sources. It is intended not only for those who lived through the period, but also for young readers who are given a chance to reflect upon the public and personal images of those who provided us with their narrations, and to put the finishing touches on their own picture of the historical period in question.
Olomouc: 2003, 78 p.
This book deals with the rules and principles of oral history as a method of historical research. It presents a brief but compact and practical summary of such topics as: contacting the narrators; research preparation; sample questions; methods of conducting interviews; narration possibilities and narration limits; archiving techniques; transcription; and final text analysis. In addition to the technical and instructional sections, it also includes an example of a contact letter; statement of consent to process and archive the material obtained through the interview; as well as a legal analysis of the ramifications of contemporary Czech legislation for doing oral history. The study was published as a textbook and is directed primarily at university students studying history, political science, sociology and journalism.
