Retrospectively, the Prague Spring appears to have been a coherent but unsuccessful experiment in finding a synthesis of Western democracy and socialism. However, this perspective ignores that different groups and individuals participated in these developments and shaped the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia with their completely varying professional, generational, national, and gender-specific experiences. What appears retrospectively as a goal-oriented reform movement or as an “interrupted revolution” looked in the eyes of the protagonists rather like the situation in a laboratory, where they worked on new syntheses with uncertain results. The volume focuses on the protagonists’ ideas of politics, society, and their reform plans. Of particular interest is the question which new thoughts about the interrelation of politics, science, economics, and arts were developed in Czechoslovakia.

Hersteller:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ute.schnueckel@brill.com
Theaterstraße 13
DE 37073 Göttingen

Martin Schulze Wessel, Jahrgang 1962, hat seit 2003 den Lehrstuhl für die Geschichte Ost- und Südosteuropas an der LMU München inne und ist Leiter des Collegium Carolinum, Forschungsinstitut für die Geschichte Tschechiens und der Slowakei, in München.Er studierte Neuere und Osteuropäische Geschichte und Slavistik in München, Moskau und Berlin. Er wurde an der Freien Universität Berlin mit einer Doktorarbeit über "Russlands Blick auf Preußen (1697-1947)" promoviert und habilitierte sich an der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg mit einer vergleichenden religionshistorischen Studie zur Gemeindegeistlichkeit in Russland und den böhmischen Länder bzw. der Tschechoslowakei (1848-1922). Er ist Mitglied der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und Leiter des Historischen Kollegs München.

Retrospectively, the reform movement appears to have been a coherent but unsuccessful experiment in finding a synthesis of Western democracy and socialism. However, this perspective ignores that different groups and individuals participated in these developments and shaped the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia with their completely varying professional, generational, national, and gender-specific experiences. The central question of the volume is how various actors perceived, promoted and resisted change, not only in the dramatic spring and summer months of 1968 but also since the early sixties.

The volume focuses on the ideas of politics, society, and economics which were developed in the ČSSR during the Prague Spring. For its protagonists it was like a lab situation, where they worked on new syntheses with uncertain results.