Documenting Czechoslovak Exiles, 1948–1989

The series ‘Documenting Czechoslovak Exiles, 1948–1989’ will include all kinds of historical literature (including volumes of documents, monographs, memoirs, bibliographies, dictionaries) on the history of Czechoslovak exiles involved in politics and the arts from the time of the Communist take-over to the collapse of the Communist regime. The term ‘exile’ includes all groups that were formed in the democratic countries of Europe, North and South America, and Australia in the conditions of the Cold War and against the background of its conflicts, as well as in conjunction with developments in Czechoslovakia. Research into exile institutions, groups, and communities which came together, fell apart, or changed with the changes in international context, the Czechoslovak politics and the changes in the lives of individual people, aims to contribute to our knowledge of the lives and works of hundreds of Czechs and Slovaks who in this period left their native land for the free world, and so that their history, both the larger aspects and the lesser, becomes part of the historical memory of the Czech and Slovak societies of today and tomorrow.

In the forefront of the research at the Centre are those exiles, who, in view of their role in the historical conflict between East and West and in the struggle for a free, democratic, and independent Czechoslovakia, are understood as political exiles. One branch of these exiles was involved in the arts – in particular, literature, the social sciences, painting, sculpture, and film –, and lived in symbiosis with the exile politicians, but often remained distinctly independent of political groupings and organizations. The importance of exiles in the arts increased as time went by, particularly after the creation of a relatively large structure of exile cultural institutions with considerable influence both in the ever-growing ranks of exiles, and, particularly, in Czechoslovakia. That was helped by, among other things, the exodus to the West of a large number of writers, journalists, scholars, and artists in the second large wave of emigration during the twenty-one years after the Soviet-led intervention in August 1968.

Besides the dissidents at home and the opposition, the exiles constituted the second sphere of the Czechoslovak anti-totalitarian resistance. They were a tribune of freedom of speech and systematic criticism of the Communist system; they disseminated propaganda-free information, communicated with the intellectual and political currents of the Western world, and maintained the values of democratic humanist traditions. As communicators of ideas, information, and political programmes, for decades they considerably influenced intellectual and political developments at home, and as allies of the dissidents in Czechoslovakia they played an important role in the creation of conditions for the democratic revolution of November and December 1989.

Throughout the years, the exiles represented in the free world also the real opinions and desire for freedom of large parts of Czech and Slovak society, and, importantly, communicated to the rest of the world information on the situation in their homeland, the voices of the opponents to the régime, who had remained in Czechoslovakia, and what was new in independent areas of culture there. Apart from that, possibly what is most important, the members of the Czechoslovak political and cultural exile communities helped to form authentic values in all areas of their professional activity. Anchored in the structures of their host countries, they took part extensively in political, literary, artistic, and academic life; they worked as journalists and as experts in a wide range of governmental and international institutions, and contributed to the development of the countries in which they lived and worked.

The structure of the exiles as a whole was complicated. It included, for example, people of different political leanings, different generations, different nationalities, different religions, and people with different links to various institutions of their host countries and the spectrum of dissent and opposition in Czechoslovakia. It was diversified mainly horizontally and poly-centrically, and had many focal points from which it radiated outwards and attracted others to it, and also had sufficient space for individual initiatives. As soon as we move away from generalizations and typological analyses, however, and move to the description of the everyday life of exiles, we run into – as one always does in history – real life, which lacked nothing of what is inherently human, both positive and negative, including spite, slander, personal attacks (signed and anonymous), and accusations. During the Communist era, compared to earlier periods, exiles worked in the conditions of the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear war looming in the background; the strategy of the West did not include support for anything like governments-in-exile. Merely the length of time it lasted, without hope of the imminent return of freedom to the homeland, was a source of much frustration, even despair, for many exiles. If one considers in addition the subversive activity of the Communist intelligence service among them, one gets a general picture of all the components that in their aggregate make up the environment in which the exiles worked, and thus also of the subjects that belong in volumes of the series ‘Documenting Czechoslovak Exile, 1948–1989’.

The Czechoslovak Documentation Centre does not intend to limit itself to publishing the results of its own research. The Centre looks forward to assuming the publishing of manuscripts written in parallel with his efforts, without in any way influencing the individual views of the authors or assuming responsibility for their interpretations of the past. Apart from this series, the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre publishes a yearbook on the history of both spheres of the anti-totalitarian resistance, the one at home and the one abroad. The yearbook contains articles, documents, correspondence, information about scholarship, book reviews, debates, and discussions, without which it is often impossible to gain even roughly accurate ideas about the past, which are frequently contained only in the testimonies of those who have witnessed events, but in a way strikingly different from one another. It is also hoped that the yearbook will become a platform for discussion of publications of the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre and others.