Gentle History (A Cultural Historian in the Archives)
Gentle History (A Cultural Historian in the Archives)

Summary/Abstract: Krapfl, James. Revolúcia s ľudskou tvárou: Politika, kultúra a spoločenstvov Československu po 17. novembri 1989. Bratislava: Kalligram, 2009, 302 pp. In the work under review, which has now been published in a revised and expanded English edition, Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989–1992 (Ithaca, NY, 2013), the American historian James Krapfl has successfully avoided the danger of letting his work be defined by contemporary disputes about whether to interpret the events as a so-called Velvet Revolution. Instead, he has combined thorough research in many archives with the approaches of the “new cultural history”. In this book, he searches for the now veiled content of the ideals of November 1989, which appeared in the political slogans and public statements of the time; he analyses the “revolutionary” rules of dialogue,and considers the topic of non-violence, in which he sees the special features of the democratic revolutions of Eastern Europe. Far more than in the efforts of other historians, Krapfl presents a balanced and nuanced picture of contemporaneous thinking and the relations between the élites and the public. This work is, according to the reviewer, an essential alternative to most of the existing works about the Changes of late 1989.

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