Jan Křen. Sedm desetiletí na cestách soudobých dějin

Mapping the development of the research of contemporary history in the Czech Republic is not possible without analyses of the opinion and research development of key personalities. Jan Křen (1930–2020), a prolific historian who established a new field, an active political intellectual and influential academic teacher, was one of the most important Czech historians from the 1960s to the second decade of the 21st century. Křen’s development of his ideas, transformations of the thematization of the levels and aspects of the modern history of the Czech lands and every more distinctly also Central or all of Europe demonstrates the gradual general expansion of his research optics. The history of the Communist Party stood at the beginning, and from the 1960s they were replaced by Křen’s books on the Czechoslovak western exile representation of 1938–1940 and his fundamental role in large syntheses about the resistance against the Nazis. In the 1970s and 1980s, when Křen was forced to work as a field worker for his political involvement in the Prague Spring, he wrote a fundamental work on the problems of Czech-German coexistence. After the 1989 revolution, in addition to a number of cultural and political activities, Křen founded and led the interdisciplinary Institute of International Studies. At the same time, he devoted his research and literary capacity to the synthesis of Central European history from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 21st centuries.