Karel Kaplan – 90 let
Karel Kaplan – 90 years

Summary/Abstract: In his contribution, Oldřich Tůma describes the life story of historian Karel Kaplan, who celebrated his 90th birthday in 2018. His career is a typical example of fates of a whole generation of Czech historians – it also holds true in the sense that he was not only a historian, but in many respects also a participant in and co-creator of the latest Czechoslovak history. He was born on August 28, 1928, in Horní Jelení in the region of Pardubice in eastern Bohemia. Since 1948, he worked for sixteen years in different positions in the apparatus of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He became a full-fledged historian in 1964, when he started working at the Institute of History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In the 1960s,he was a member of several commissions of historians investigating acts of illegal persecution taking place in 1950s, which substantially changed his views. In 1970, he was dismissed from the Communist party, worked as a stoker, and spent a few months in detention. In 1976, he went to exile in the Federal Republic of Germany and he began to intensively publish there. In his numerous monographs and studies many of which were translated into major languages of the world, he described and mercilessly analyzed the operation of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Upon his return home, he was one of the leading personalities of the newly established Institute for Contemporary History in Prague. Since the 1990s, he has published further dozens of essential works without which the Czechoslovakia’s historiography of the 1945–1969 period would be unimaginable.

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