Kompendium míst paměti na komunistický režim v dnešním česku
A Compendium of Places of Memory of the Communist Regime in the Czech Republic Today

Summary/Abstract: Five scholars from the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Markéta Devátá, Oldřich Tůma, Barbora Čermáková, Michaela Tučková and David Weber) have compiled an extraordinarily comprehensive encyclopaedia, "Pamětní místa na komunismus v České republice" [Places of Memory of Communism in the Czech Republic]. In the form of individual entries with informative texts and photographs, it records 807 different memorials in the Czech Republic dedicated to people and events connected with the period of communist rule in Czechoslovakia (1948–1989), which were created during the following thirty years of democratic rule (1989–2019). The reviewer introduces the structure of the publication and emphasizes the usefulness of the project. In his view, the documentation collected and categorized in this way provides a thorough overview of the phenomenon of Czech public commemoration of communism, including events and figures both well-known and forgotten, while, in addition to the victims of the regime, also notes the border guards on the western border. While appreciating the effort of the introductory chapter’s authors to place the Czech culture of remembrance in an international context, the reviewer believes it would be desirable even in such an empirical publication to place the cases more in their historical context and to pay more attention to the instigators of the memorials. The book is also availableonline at www.pametnimista.usd.cas.cz, and is searchable by region, topic, timeline or full text.

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