Soudobé dějiny

The following articles have their origin in a project initiated and sponsored by the Visegrád Fund in 2011. The purpose of the project was to examine and evaluate how the Visegrád Four member nations reflect their own history and the histories of their neighbours. One of the principal deliverables of the project was a conference titled My Hero, Your Enemy: Listening to Understand, held in the beginning of December 2011 in Prague, which attempted to illustrate and interpret different perceptions of own history and histories of neighbours in Central Europe on an example of a comparison of reflections of the historical role of outstanding historical personalities from a dual perspective of two Central European nations. A number of important historical personalities were selected, from medieval rulers to Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa. The historical personalities viewed in the dual perspective also included three statesmen who had been co-determining the Czech and Slovak (or Czechoslovak) history of the 20th century: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Jozef Tiso, and Alexander Dubček. Through three pairs of articles by Czech and Slovak historians, the Soudobé dějiny journal returns to how the Czechs and Slovaks have been perceiving the history of the common state since the establishment of which a hundred years elapsed in 2018.