The City of Truth

My research up until now on the development of Václav Havel from playwright to politician to historical figure has brought me to many sources written by and about the man himself. In the authorized biography, by a personal friend Eda Kriseová, the author addressed the criticism which alleged that she had written a moralistic fairy tale. […]

Document 9 of Briefing Book 293 of the GW National Security Archive presents a translated conversation from a visit by Egon Krenz to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev. Krenz had recently replaced Erich Honecker as party leader in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and this conversation features relatively frank discussion of the social and political developments regarding […]

The obituary highlighted last week was not a personal account as much as a personal history. Below is a link connecting to a personal account taken as part of a project by Europeana.eu from Petr Janyska, a witness to the Velvet Revolution. The audio recording of his take on events accompanies photographs of a document […]

In his account of the events of 1989, Timothy Garton Ash explains his role as a historian who was observing historic happenings, had some appreciation for the magnitude of the situation, and realized that his privileged access to chief players and organizations put him in a unique position to take advantage of a perfect storm […]

The account from Tina Rosenberg, in The Haunted Land, of those living in the shadow of recently collapsed communist regimes provides a more intimate look at the effects of a half-century of totalitarian rule on culture and relationships than the previous readings. I appreciated the narrative depictions of, among others, dissidents decried as collaborators, the general […]