Book Discussion: "One Hundred Student (r)Evolutions. The Student Generation of 1989 in Longitudinal Perspective," by Miroslav Vaněk et al.

Abstract

The book One Hundred Student (r)Evolutions. The Student Generation of 1989 in Longitudinal Perspective: Biographical Interviews After Twenty Years, published to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution", presents the results of a unique oral history project of unprecedented scale conducted at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences over the past three years.

Based on interviews with 100 former student leaders of the revolution in Czechoslovakia, who had already participated in a similar oral history project 20 years ago, the book is a sequel to Miroslav Vaněk and Milan Otáhal's successful 1999 monograph One Hundred Student Revolutions. The project's longitudinal dimension allowed the authors to examine changes in individual and collective memory over the past decades and to implement a number of methodological innovations.

The resulting book presents not only an investigation of former students' understanding of their historical role in the events of 1989, it also constitutes a significant contribution to the history of the democratic transformations in the former Eastern Bloc by examining the memories and life stories of a generation that came of age and entered adulthood just as the socialist regime collapsed. The roundtable format is particularly suitable for introducing the book's results: it will allow all four authors (M.

Vaněk, P. Schindler-Wisten, J.

Markupová and V. Pehe) to present their conclusions and enter into discussion with an external chair and commentator.