1950–
The historian who interpreted the Prague Spring between the tanks and the memory wars
The experience of the occupation, the incredible solidarity in August 1968: that belongs to those very rare historical moments that not everyone gets to live through, and one can count oneself lucky to have experienced it.
Jan Pauer is a Czech-born historian who witnessed the Prague Spring of 1968 and emigrated to West Germany the following year. In 1995 he published Prag 1968, the definitive account of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and spent his career at the University of Bremen's Research Centre for Eastern Europe studying modern Czechoslovak history. In his 2011 ENRS article, he argued that the invasion marked 'the start of a civil society opposition and the historical end of reform communism,' contending that the Prague Spring was buried twice: first by Soviet tanks and then by the memory politics of post-1989 Czechia.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1969Left Czechoslovakia and emigrated to West Germany
- 1990–1993Member of the Czech government's Historical Commission on the events of 1967–1971
- 1993–Research associate, Research Centre for Eastern Europe, University of Bremen
- 1995Published Prag 1968: Der Einmarsch des Warschauer Paktes
- 2017Co-editor of Ringen um Autonomie: Dissidentendiskurse in Mittel- und Osteuropa
Related historical events
The government historians' commission and rewriting 1968 from new sources
From 1990 to 1993 Jan Pauer took part in the historians' commission appointed by the Czechoslovak government to investigate the events in Czechoslovakia of 1967-1971. Building on that commission work, he published Prag 1968: Der Einmarsch des Warschauer Paktes in Bremen in 1995, a study reconstructing the course of events leading to the August 1968 invasion and the first period of the political restoration that followed. What set the study apart from earlier accounts was its evidentiary basis. Pauer consulted not only materials from Czechoslovak state archives but also, for the first time, documents from the central committee archives of the Soviet Union, East Germany, Hungary and Poland; on that basis he offered a new assessment of the political and military background and the conduct of the 1968 intervention. Reviewers accordingly treated the book as the definitive account of the 1968 conflict between Prague and Moscow. Pauer himself set out how he periodised the episode in a 2011 article for the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, where he treated the protests against the intervention by small and then powerless dissident groups in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and East Germany as a break in the development of the Eastern bloc, calling it 'the start of a civil society opposition and the historical end of reform communism.'
In the same article, however, Pauer declined to reduce the meaning of 1968 to an ending. He conceded that reform communism left no theoretical or institutional legacy on which the democracies established after 1989 could or needed to build, yet argued that the Prague Spring's civil society heritage laid the foundations for the East European civil rights movements of the 1970s and 1980s and demonstrated that recovering democratic freedoms was the shortest route to overcoming communist dictatorship peacefully. Recalling the charge of Czech intellectuals of the time that the Prague Spring had been 'buried twice,' he criticised the political exploitation of its memory by the neo-liberal parties that emerged victorious after 1989. This position rejected both the reform communists' formula that 1968 was a direct precursor of the Velvet Revolution and the neo-liberal account that counterposed a people wanting democracy to reform communists who merely sought to modernise their own rule.