4 ideas
In February 1948 the communist leader Klement Gottwald addressed a crowd in Prague from a balcony, and his comrade Vladimír Clementis put his own fur hat on Gottwald's bare head against the cold. The photograph of that moment was reproduced by the hundreds of thousands. After Clementis was charged with treason and hanged four years later, the propaganda office airbrushed him out of the picture, and all that remained of him was the hat on Gottwald's head.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Regimes rewrite the past because people who lose their history lose any standard by which to judge the present. The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory, meaning its books, its culture and its history, and to have new ones written, until the nation forgets what it is and what it was.
There are two opposed kinds of laughter. Devilish laughter comes from seeing that things are absurd, meaningless or unfounded, and it lets the laugher break free of imposed order. Angelic laughter celebrates that everything is well ordered and meaningful, and it is the laughter of collective joy, of circle dances and regimes, where it enforces conformity by excluding anyone who does not share the euphoria.
Individuals erase their pasts by the same method as governments. Mirek tries to recover his old love letters to Zdena because they record a version of himself he is now ashamed of, which puts him in the same position as the Party airbrushing its photographs. Read this way, the drive to rewrite one's own biography looks less like a personal quirk and more like a small-scale form of political censorship.