Komplexní rozbor poválečných restitucí a nezodpovězené otázky
A Complex Analysis of Acts of Post-war Retribution and Unanswered Questions

Summary/Abstract: Frommer, Benjamin. Narodni očista: Retribuce v povalečnem Československu. Transl. from the English by Jakub Rakosnik. Prague: Academia, 2010, 502 pp., ISBN 978-80-200-1838-0. Now in Czech translation, this monograph by the American historian Benjamin Frommer, according to the reviewer, remains, even after almost ten years since it was fi rst published (National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) the only work that charts out retribution in Czechoslovakia at the State-wide level and provides a complex picture of its preparation, course, and, partly, its results. A definite strength of Frommer’s work, according to the reviewer, is its thorough understanding of retribution as a dynamically changing political battleground, the detailed analysis of political pressures on those involved in retribution, and the thorough analysis of the retribution measures and most important cases. By paying so much attention to the political level of retribution, other levels of analysis, for example, social, cultural, and legal, get shifted to the background. The book in essence thus offers an exhaustive answer to the question of how war criminals and collaborators were prosecuted in post-war Czechoslovakia, but in many cases does not seek to explain why.

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