For historians whose academic careers began in the early twenty-first century, Jan Tesař (1933–2025) was an elusive, mysterious figure. A dissident and exile who refused to return to Czech academic life after November 1989, he was known for his book Mnichovský komplex (‘The Munich complex’), written in 1989 and published in 2000.
In contrast to today’s world of professional academia, in which academics are under increasing pressure to embrace self-promotion, Tesař’s lifelong voluntary status as an outsider offered an appealing alternative. His writing style and his scepticism vis-à-vis institutional historiography served as a reminder that ultimately it is the struggle for creative freedom, for a critical examination of the past seen as a nexus of problems shaping the world we live in, that is the main reason for the pursuit of historiography as an academic subject.
Tesař appeared to take part in historiographical discourse from afar. We had read his texts, but only a few of us had met him in person or indeed had an idea of where he was based and what he was working on. Nevertheless, thanks to the Triáda publishing house, which undertook to bring out his work, Tesař had never been absent from the Czech milieu, even though he had never sought to play a visible role in national academic life, let alone to frequent the intellectual salons of post-November Czechia. This changed somewhat following the publication of the three-part Czech Gypsy Rhapsody in 2016. While Tesař’s position had not undergone any significant change, he received much more attention and public appreciation than in the previous two decades. His final work brought him new readers, demonstrating that, even in their eighties, a historian can produce revelatory and socially relevant work.
So what was the trajectory of Tesař’s thinking about the past which his Rhapsody brought to a conclusion?
Against prevailing interpretations
Jan Tesař began his career as a historian in 1956 at the Institute of Military History (VHÚ), his first employer after graduating from Prague’s Charles University. Fired two years later, he worked in his native eastern Bohemia, most notably at the Pardubice Museum. In 1961 he returned to VHÚ, only to lose his job in 1969. A brief stint at the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences was followed by years of imprisonment, oppositional activities and, in 1980, exile.
Despite being one of the most interesting figures in Czech historiography of the 1960s, Tesař never held any significant institutional position. Nevertheless, academic institutions played a key role in his work as a historian. The VHÚ, together with Czechoslovak Committee on the History of Antifascist Resistance, which Tesař co-founded in 1960 as an umbrella organisation to oversee work on a comprehensive synthesis of the history of the wartime Protectorate and resistance (which remains unpublished), provided platforms for a critical, ideologically and methodologically non-standard study of modern history. In those days it was quite common for academic institutions, under the auspices of the Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership, to back research highly critical of the ideological interpretation of history that had been officially promoted until then. Tesař was able to make maximum use of this institutional support. His work challenged not only the official Stalinist and post-Stalinist interpretation of history but also mainstream reformist historiography.
Historians such as Jan Křen, Václav Kural and Oldřich Janeček regarded anti-fascist resistance as a key phase of what was referred to as the Czechoslovak revolution, the culmination of the struggle for national and social emancipation that began in the nineteenth century. In their view, the anti-fascist resistance laid the groundwork for the national revolution of May 1945, which liberated the Czechs and Slovaks from German occupation and established a people’s democracy. That, in turn, paved the way for the “Czechoslovak path to socialism”, crowned by the socialist revolution of February 1948. Rather than by force, the Communists took power democratically, with the support of the majority of the population. Socialism achieved social hegemony. In their view, the reform communism of the 1960s built on this original and essentially democratic Czechoslovak socialism, forged not just in class conflict but also in the fight against the German occupiers.
A critic among reform communists
As a socialist, Tesař supported the reform movement within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) that came to a head in 1968. At the same time, he was a radical critic of reformist historiography and reformist policies. His approach was driven not just by his specific understanding of radical socialism, but also by methodological considerations that had evolved over many years. Most historians at that time regarded the history of resistance as a history of the programmes and activities of resistance groups, particularly the elite. The social relevance of the resistance movement and its anchoring in a broader historical context were ignored. Tesař based his research on sources that allowed a new look at the history of the resistance and the Protectorate.
For one thing, he studied regional source materials that brought to light agents of historical events who were not a part of the elites, allowing history to be viewed from the perspective of the periphery. He was also familiar with material in the archives of the Protectorate and the occupation administration. He regarded the Nazis and their collaborators as fully fledged agents of history, stressing that “Nazism has to be understood as a historical agent in its own right.” Furthermore, he considered the cultural output of the period, which enabled him to delve more deeply into the thought processes of Czech nationalism under the Protectorate, while also taking into account the broader context of the themes he studied.
Tesař’s research was based on meticulously constructed empirical foundations. One of his first pieces of academic writing mapped the damage partisans caused to railways in eastern Bohemia and western Moravia, and included a detailed analysis of sabotage activities based on period reports by the Protectorate authorities. Tesař insisted that it was material originating from the time of the Protectorate that must serve as the basic source of knowledge, since later recollections of those who took part in the events could paint a highly idealised picture of resistance and cater to present-day political requirements.
But his work was also conceptually ambitious, in that it strove to capture major social events not just from the perspective of resistance strategies, but also in terms of the evolution of Czech nationalism and Czech society’s attitudes to authoritarian politics. All this resulted in a body of work – some of it published during the 1960s, and some in the new millennium – which remains fundamental to the historical study of the Protectorate and Czechoslovakia’s subsequent path towards Stalinism.
Tesař argued that it was neither the road to socialism nor the struggle against possible annihilation by the Nazis that was the key issue of the day. His analysis of the Nazi occupation strategy demonstrated that the Nazis were planning to Germanise the territory of the Protectorate, offering to a racially acceptable section of Czech society the opportunity for integration into a National Socialist “new Europe”. The Czechs thus faced the dilemma of whether to insist on the democratic, progressive and egalitarian character of the Czech national project, and to risk open conflict with the occupier – or to accept the Germans’ offer, get rid of the politically inflexible and racially unsuitable, and implement a new concept of the Czech nation that would be culturally conservative, anti-democratic, racist and National Socialist. This view of the occupation was and has remained controversial, since it places under critical scrutiny not only the collaborators within the Czech elite, but also the anti-fascist resistance and the overall impact of the war and the occupation on Czech society.
Is the nation worth saving?
In Tesař’s view, the Czech national dilemma under occupation provided the basis for the Nazi occupation policies, which reflected both the interests of the Third Reich as well as those of the elites of the Protectorate and Czech society. Instead of dividing Czech society into the resistance, a grey zone, and collaborationists, Tesař established that there had existed a nationwide political current that included a considerable part of the resistance, political representatives of the Protectorate and the majority of Czech society that identified with the nationalist campaign, drawing on the political atmosphere of the Second Czechoslovak Republic [1 October 1938 to 15 March 1939 – trans.] – i.e., a celebration of national traditions, Czech culture and conservative values, built on the idea of “saving the nation” in hard times. A minimalist programme of national survival was to be developed, its precondition being a compromise with the Nazis.
Tesař argued that this policy of saving the nation, agreement on which united members of the Protectorate government with a part of the resistance, served the interest of the Germans. The occupiers sought to suppress all the radical forces in the Protectorate and pacify the population on the territory that formed a key part of the economic hinterland for Nazi expansion. The pragmatic policy of the lesser evil, of nationalism aligned with the Protectorate and a modus vivendi with the occupiers, was the best way of integrating the Protectorate into the great-power politics of the Nazis.
Tesař criticized the historiography of the Second Republic and early Protectorate that is still influential today and that seeks to rehabilitate, if not outright celebrate, the political elites that had aided and abetted the Nazis, or at least depict as unproblematic the activities of those Protectorate politicians who cooperated with the resistance and themselves later became victims of Nazi repression.
However, Tesař went even further with his thesis of a “regressive national consciousness”. He claimed that this primitive nationalism, which rejected democratic and progressive ideas associated with the Czech national emancipation, involved a “peculiar mix of sentimental headiness and the servility of decrepit weaklings”. The decline of “national consciousness” had not only brought about a lack of societal support for domestic resistance but also facilitated a smooth transition from Nazism to Stalinism, when servility towards the occupiers was replaced by servility towards the liberators.
Tesař gave a lot of thought to the political content of the Czech national project and the fact that the Czech national existence could not be taken for granted. In 1967, taking part in a discussion on the Czech question in the twentieth century, Tesař said: “Is the endeavour to preserve the nation always necessarily a ‘progressive’ requirement? I don’t think so. But if we claim it is, then, paradoxically, we deify nationhood … The Czech resistance is characterised precisely by the fact that even in the desperate circumstances of occupation it was preoccupied with the question: Is our nation even worth being fought for and liberated?”
Tesař’s reflections on the politics of “saving” the nation acquired a new dimension after Czechoslovakia was invaded by the armies of the Warsaw Pact. He viewed the events that followed 21 August 1968 through the situation of the early Protectorate. His writing from this period, especially his unfinished series of essays “Patriots and Fighters” set out to show that, once again, Czechs and Slovaks found themselves having to choose between standing up for certain values on the one hand, and the “realism” of the lesser evil on the other. As it transpired, it was Husák’s “lesser evil”, the pragmatic and “responsible” calming of the situation after the “excesses” of 1968, that formed the foundation of the long-term stability of the normalisation regime.
Where did Stalinism come from?
In the late 1960s, Tesař focused on another subject that was regarded as controversial even by many reform Communists. In his critical assessment of his colleagues’ research into the history of the occupation, he pointed out that their interpretations relied too heavily on the dichotomy between domestic traditions of democratic socialism and Stalinist authoritarianism, with the latter supposedly an extraneous element imported from the Soviet Union. Tesař challenged this view, which around 1968 had become a widely shared basis of the reform communist interpretation of the history of Czechoslovak Stalinism.
Tesař instead pointed out the continuity between the wartime period and developments after 1948, as well as the important role played by the resistance in establishing the Stalinist dictatorship. In 1965 Tesař stated that: “The resistance represented the unleashing of class forces that were prepared to accept Soviet-style methods, Soviet-style dictatorship … If we try to explain the 1950s, we will not explain or understand anything if we see it solely as a result of outside pressure. Such pressure undoubtedly existed and undoubtedly played a huge role in our country; however, I am convinced that it also chimed with certain internal tendencies bolstered by the resistance.”
Four years later, in his expert opinion on Miroslav Pich-Tůma, a partisan commander and later member of the StB [Czechoslovak secret service – trans.], on trial for crimes committed after February 1948, Tesař noted: “By a decision of the party (as some kind of seemingly mystical collective principle), a certain person of ‘special kind is given the right, in the interest of the party, to twist deep-rooted moral standards … Generally speaking, it is a tragedy of mankind and of those nations that have participated in the resistance in particular, that the anti-Nazi war, being a uprising against dehumanisation, itself reaffirmed some of the inhumane principles in the practice of the opponents of Nazism.”
In 1969, Tesař also wrote: “There is a direct continuity, one that can even be traced in individual lives, from the resistance against Nazism to the installation and maintenance of Czechoslovakia’s Stalinist regime. However, this is also echoed by the attitudes of a society that was first raped by Nazism, was later won over to join the struggle against it and, eventually, adapted for the purposes of installing the Stalinist regime and its passive support.” Tesař’s proposition that the legacy of World War II, particularly the acceptance of political violence as a legitimate instrument of societal change, contributed to the advent of Communist dictatorship, revised the reform Communist approach to domestic Stalinism. Tesař argued that the crimes of the 1950s were not the failure of individuals or a Soviet import, but rather a systemic phenomenon with deeper historical roots.
The Serinek inspirations
The advent of “normalisation” brought an end to Tesař’s career as a professional historian. As early as in 1969 he joined opposition activities aimed at forming a political front against the occupation and the policy of “consolidation”. Tesař was among the first activists targeted by the Husák regime’s repressive policies. However, his decision to move from academic study of the occupation and resistance to political action, with all the consequences that this entailed, did not mean that he stopped working on historical issues. As his writing from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the nature of his opposition work at home and in exile, demonstrates, Tesař the activist drew on the experience of the past that he had studied in his capacity as a historian. The organisation of resistance against repressive dictatorship, the creation of structures of an autonomous political society, Czechoslovak statehood and the role of political elites were particularly prominent themes in his polemical writings in the context of Czechoslovak dissent and exile, as well as after 1989.
Although Tesař’s return to historiography in the 1990s and the noughties took place through his older writings, Rhapsody, his final work, showed that he continued exploring the subject which he had studied in the early years of his career as a historian, rounding off his lifelong interest in the history of anti-fascist resistance and partisan warfare. The three-part publication is remarkable not just in terms of its subject matter but also its methodology. At its core are the recollections of the Romani partisan fighter Josef Serinek, recorded by Tesař in 1963 and 1964, complemented by his extensive editorial notes, which represent a work of history in their own right. In the notes, Tesař corrected and contextualised Serinek’s recollections by drawing on additional sources and setting the experience of one particular agent in history in the context of the broader history of the region and Czechoslovakia’s anti-fascist resistance.
Part three of The Rhapsody, entitled The Serinek Inspirations, is a historical essay on the character of guerrilla warfare and the question of why it was not better deployed by the Czechoslovak resistance. Rather than entertaining the prevailing assumption that the Czech Lands were geographically unsuited to guerrilla warfare, Tesař examined the character of Czech nationalism statehood and political culture. He critiqued the limited understanding of Czechoslovakism among the Czech political elites, who failed to make use of Slovakia as the base for more extensive guerrilla activities – even though it provided not only suitable terrain but also local anti-fascist forces.
Tesař believed that Czech wartime politicians were using Czechoslovakism in an opportunistic way, simply writing Slovakia off – just as did Czech reform communists in 1968, the dissident opposition under “normalisation”, and the Czech political elites during the re-emergence of democracy after 1989. The Czech elites’ lack of interest in the potential of the Slovak guerrilla movement enabled the Soviets and the communists to call the shots in the partisan movement in the waning months of the war, and thus to become a key force on the road to Stalinism.
For an emancipatory historiography
In his late work Tesař advocated a cooperation between the strategically thinking political elites and autonomous activists in organising resistance against foreign aggression and authoritarian power. He did not juxtapose an idealised people’s political activism based on spontaneous activities and innovative political creativity with corrupt or incompetent elites. He merely claimed that for a politics of resistance to be meaningful, political elites must understand the importance of grassroots political action and not hinder its blossoming.
Tesař’s final work is yet another demonstration of his lifelong understanding of the historian’s role and its social importance. He was empirically thorough, methodologically unconventional and analytically subversive. Rather than writing stories bolstering and glorifying the powers-that-be, he critiqued and questioned the reading of history on which power is based. He argued that you have to study what you believe is important and what you enjoy studying, regardless of short-term intellectual trends; to think about the past in the context of the present-day world and its contradictions; and to practise historical research as a scholarly discipline with an emancipatory charge, not merely as cold analysis but also as a social intervention on behalf of the oppressed and those who are weaker. Don’t be provincially narrow-minded; take into consideration long-term and – in today’s parlance – global impacts of historical developments, while at the same time anchoring historical research in the community that you live in, and to which you have a responsibility as a scholar and a citizen.
This is how we might summarise Tesař’s advice to historians. However, there is another lesson that follows from Tesař’s intellectual evolution: don’t be afraid of unconventionally rethinking and critically reassessing established and acclaimed conclusions. Even at the price of being wrong at times.
This translation has been supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic