“The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

Czech and French novelist

Milan Kundera was a Czech and French novelist. He is known for his fiction and for a career shaped by exile, first in France and later through French citizenship. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975 and became a French citizen in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, and he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.