Conflict and cooperation
On the death of the Czech historian Jan Křen (1930-2020)
Dietrich Beyrau, Wolfgang Eichwede, Miroslav Kunštát
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Jan Křen was among the eastern-central European thinkers who overcame the division of Europe with the power of the powerless. His main interest was historical truth. He studied civilian resistance against National Socialism, which according to the ruling doctrine of the Communist Party did not even exist. One topics of his research was the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia, which he refused to justify as being a matter of necessity. And he refused to conform to deterministic portrayals of history that presented the destruction of the centuries-old community of Czechs and Germans in central Europe as being a matter of inevitability. Jan Křen died in April 2020 in Prague, aged 89.
(Osteuropa 6/2020, pp. 203–212)