“I never called the Czechs ´bad´”

                                                                                                                                                                    11 January 2010

Sir,

I feel that to present a review of my recent book Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed under the title ‘A Bad State and a Bad Nation’ is highly misleading. Although highly critical of state policies undertaken under a series of Czechoslovak regimes, the book never calls either the Czech nation or the Czech people ‘bad’.
As for the assumption that I must dislike the Czechs: I would hardly have spent ten years learning Czech, studying Czech history (or, for that matter, married my Czech husband) if that were true. The book strongly criticizes extreme nationalism, not the Czech or Slovak or German or Hungarian or Polish or Ruthenian/Ukrainian or Jewish or Gypsy/Roma peoples.

Mary Heimann

The review of Mary Heimann´s book by David Vaughan can be found here.