The Prague Spring as a Laboratory

Retrospectively, the Prague Spring appears to have been a coherent but unsuccessful experiment in finding a synthesis of Western democracy and socialism. However, this perspective ignores that different groups and individuals participated in these developments and shaped the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia with their completely varying professional, generational, national, and gender-specific experiences. What appears retrospectively as a goal-oriented reform movement or as an 'interrupted revolution' looked in the eyes of the protagonists rather like the situation in a laboratory, where they worked on new syntheses with uncertain results. The volume focuses on the protagonists' ideas of politics, society, and their reform plans. Of particular interest is the question which new thoughts about the interrelation of politics, science, economics, and arts were developed in Czechoslovakia.

Thomas M. Bohn ist Professor für Geschichte Osteuropas an der Universität Gießen.

Anna Bischof ist Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Collegium Carolinum und Doktorandin an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Hélène Leclerc ist Dozentin am Germanistischen Institut der Universität Toulouse-Jean Jaurès (Frankreich). Sie lehrt Geschichte und Kulturgeschichte der deutschsprachigen Länder. Sie studierte Germanistik an der Ecole Normale Supérieure Fontenay-Saint-Cloud und an der Sorbonne und Bohemistik am Institut des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO, Paris) und promovierte 2006 an der Universität Toulouse. 2019 habilitierte sie im Fach Germanistik.

Pavel Kolár ist Professor of Comparative and Transnational History of 19th-20th Century Europe (Central, Eastern, South Eastern Europe) am European University Institute in Florenz.