Mocní? a bezmocní? [The Powerful? and the Helpless?]
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Miroslav VANĚK (ed.): The Powerful? and the Helpless? 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)
