The Parallel Lives reader includes five stories from each country participating in the project. They are stories that the creators came across while doing research in the archives of communist secret police organisations and that they have composed in an original way.
Diverse stories of people whose lives were fatally influenced by the secret police are to serve as a memento of the oppressive totalitarian regimes. They are a mosaic of human stories whose tragic quality indicates the nature of the communist regime’s power mechanism, and that raise questions as to how we deal with our recent past. They are not precisely historiographical material, but given their documentary character, they, pars pro toto, reflect our recent history whose dark side must never be forgotten.
This publication is available at ERSTE Foundation Library.