Although, in many respects, Karel Kaplan’s path into the community of Czech histo- rians is symbolic of the situation in which a whole generation of historical scholars, born around 1930, arrived on the academic scene, his personal story is exceptional even in this generational context. Most representatives of Czechoslovak historiog- raphy of the 1950s and 1960s were trained at various university institutions after February 1948. In contrast, Kaplan, as one of the most prominent of those historians of recent events who established their professional profi le in the 1960s (especially the second half of the decade), started his complicated journey to the profession of a historian as a regional functionary of the KSČ [the Czechoslovak Communist Party] and came to history by an atypical detour through other posts at different levels of the communist apparatus. He could thus be said to have embodied a whole complex process of engagement with the recent past in Czechoslovak conditions in his career: from the historical propaganda of the fi rst half of the 1950s to the historiography of de-Stalinization of the 1960s, which then continued in diffi cult conditions outside offi cial institutions under “normalisation” and in exile, up to the free pluralist research after 1990. It is therefore no exaggeration to see Karel Kaplan as a symbol of this complicated continuity.
At the beginning of the 1950s, Czechoslovak historiography was in a phase of major changes, most obviously expressed in changes of personnel and institutions of historical scholarship (the establishment of new institutions, the silencing of politically unacceptable historians and their exclusion from employment, the rise of party functionaries entrusted with running historical research). Another sign of the times and the following years was the ideological demand for research into the recent history as a means of historical legitimatisation of the new political order. For the whole fi rst half of the 1950s, this tendency was expressed in the produc- tion of propagandist works focused on the history of the previous half century. It was not until the second half of the decade that the fi rst original historical works appeared, with a gradual abandonment of the genre of ideological literature. The trend in the 1960s was then towards ever more extensive critical revision of the ongoing historiographical research of the recent history, and this culminated in the year 1968.3 Karel Kaplan’s historical works fully exemplifi ed this trend.
his method of writing. Otherwise I focus on titles in Kaplan’s extensive bibliography that I consider in one way or another exceptional or particularly important.
3 I look in more detail at the theme of research on recent history in the 1950s and 1960s in the book: SOMMER, Vítězslav: Angažované dějepisectví: Stranická historiografi e mezi stalinismem
Shortly after he left the Zlín Baťa Factory for the KSČ apparatus in 1947 (he fi rst worked in Vysoké Mýto, and then in Pardubice),4 Kaplan also started to publish in
the fi eld of recent Czechoslovak history. His early work combined regional themes with a gradually diminishing but still perceptible present ideological colouring. Another distinguishing mark of Kaplan’s fi rst texts was an increasing emphasis on the exploitation of archival materials and statistical data. These brief works served the needs of regional political agitation, but still showed features that would later become an inseparable part of Kaplan’s historical method.
Karel Kaplan’s fi rst venture into history was the brochure Ke vzniku komunis-
tické strany v Pardubickém kraji [On the Origins of the Communist Party in the
Pardubice Region], dealing with the formation of the KSČ in the Pardubice region in the years 1918–1921.5 His approach to the topic in no way diverged from the
conventional interpretation of the time stressing the importance of the December Strike of 1920 as the key moment in the emergence of the revolutionary party and the beginning of its road to the successes of 1945–1948. Kaplan used an- other schema typical of communist accounts of the politics of the First Republic in a pamphlet on the Skuteč Strike published in 1957.6 In it, he stressed one of the
favourite tropes of historical narrative used by party historiography of the time to explain the interwar political, economic and social confl icts, i.e. “the treachery of the reformists.” He described the story of the Skuteč Strike as a successful fi ght of the ordinary workers led by the Communist Party, at a critical moment betrayed by the leaders of the reformist unions who went over to the side of the capitalists. Kaplan went on to apply a similar model to postwar development in the region in a work eloquently titled Kdo byl tedy vinen? [So Who Was to Blame?].7 This was
a reformním komunismem, 1950–1970 [Engaged Historiography between Stalinism and Re-
form Communism, 1950–1970]. Praha, Nakladatelství Lidové noviny – FF UK 2011.
4 Biographical data is taken mainly from two long published interviews with Karel Kaplan: PALEČEK, Pavel: Exil a politika: Historici o nejnovějších dějinách a o sobě [Exile and Poli- tics: Historians on Recent History and on Themselves]. Tišnov, Sursum 2004, pp. 29–73; CUHRA, Jaroslav – KOPEČEK, Michal: Jde o to, jestli se k pravdě přibližujete: Rozhovor s Karlem Kaplanem [It is About Whether You Are Getting Closer to the Truth: Interview with Karel Kaplan]. In: PERNES, J. (ed.): Po stopách nedávné historie, pp. 10–29. There is a more detailed biographical sketch in the collection for Kaplan’s 65th birthday: JANIŠOVÁ,
Milena – JECH, Karel: O životním příběhu českého historika [About the Life Story of a Czech Historian]. In: JECH, K. (ed.): Stránkami soudobých dějin, pp. 7–16.
5 KAPLAN, Karel: Ke vzniku komunistické strany v Pardubickém kraji [The Origins of the Com-
munist Party in the Pardubice Region]. Pardubice, Krajská poradna a studovna marxismu- -leninismu b.r. (the National Library Catalogue dates this work to the end of the 1940s). 6 IDEM: Skutečská stávka 1932 [The Skuteč Strike 1932]. Pardubice, Krajské muzeum
v Pardubicích – Krajský dům osvěty 1957. In the very same year, Kaplan also published a documentary brochure on this theme containing photocopies of documents and period photographs (see IDEM: Dokumenty o skutečské stávce v roce 1932 [Documents on the Skuteč Strike in 1932]. Pardubice, KV KSČ Pardubice 1957).
7 IDEM: Kdo byl tedy vinen? K historii komunistické strany v období 1945–48 v Pardubickém kraji [So Who Was to Blame? On the History of the Communist Party in the Pardubice Re-
intended as an answer to a similarly titled exile publication by Bohumil Laušman, a former leading Social Democrat.8 In this text, too, Kaplan presented the story
of certain historical events (the road to the February takeover in Pardubice) as a confl ict between the interests of the people (the whole nation) represented by the Communist Party and the politics of the non-communist forces, especially the right-wing Social Democrats.
Kaplan’s interpretations were entirely in line with the orthodoxy of the period, but these early works are linked to his later texts by their growing emphasis on the use of authentic materials, whether from various archives, the press or offi cial statistics. This tendency was evident above all in Kaplan’s penultimate “regional” work Příspěvky k ekonomickému a sociálnímu charakteru vesnice Pardubické župy
v letech 1918–1938 [Contributions to the Economic and Social Character of the Vil-
lage of the Pardubice Region in the Years 1918–1938] which was also his fi rst more extensive historiographical text.9 Kaplan tried to put together a social and economic
history of the village of the Pardubice region. In the book, he dealt with the social structure of the village, the organisation of agriculture, and the consequences of economic changes for the social position of the agricultural population (housing, healthcare, schooling and so on). The work was accompanied by a series of tables containing a great deal of statistical data. Kaplan’s aim was to identify the historical roots of diffi culties with the socialisation of villages in the region after 1948 and, at the same time, to indicate the many basic economic and social problems with which the rural population had to cope in the interwar period.10 Despite the open
propagandist slant, this is the fi rst work in which we can clearly recognise typical features of Kaplan’s later historiographical style.