Milan Kundera opens his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a scene from the winter of 1948. Klement Gottwald, leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, is giving a speech to the masses from a palace balcony, surrounded by fellow party members. Comrade Vladimir Clementis thoughtfully places his fur hat on Gottwald’s bare head; the hat then features in an iconic photograph.
Four years later, Clementis is found guilty of being a bourgeois nationalist and hanged. His ashes are strewn on a Prague street. The propaganda section of the party removes him from written history and erases him from the photograph.
