The history of totalarianism is in part the conquering of the minds of the individuals and in greater part and with larger scope the erasing of memory and identitiy. This was no different in Czechloslovakia during the Russian occupation; which took hold after world war 2. In The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera elucidates upon the re education or re learning of their own selves and personal/cultural history as the metamorposis of the adult into the child. Kundera states, .
"The basic event of the book is the story of totalitarianism, which deprives people of memory and thus retools them into a nation of children.".
This being said; the only persons who retain their identity among the erasure campaign of totalarianism are those who retain their memories. .
The heroine of Kunderas book is the tortued Tamina; who in yearning to keep her recollections of her dead husband alive within her mind hearkens to the situation of Czechloslovakian culture and identity as a whole. Tamina tries in vain to re enter Prague to regain her journals which entail her everyday former life with her husband and their various holidays. The journals stay locked away in the chest of drawers under the prying eyes of her mother. These memories are the connection Tamina has to her identity. The longer they remain locked away from her the harder it is to remember her husbands face and the life she had. The Russians sought to do the same to the people of Czechloslovakia in order to make them forget who they were. Kundera comments on the campaign as follows:.
"200 Czech writers have been proscribed, including the dead Franz Kafka; 145 Czech historians have been dismissed from their posts, history has been rewritten, monuments demolished. A nation which loses awareness of its past gradually loses its self. And so the political situation has brutally illuminated the ordinary metaphysical problem of forgetting that we face all the time, every day, without paying any attention.
