Remembering the German Past in the Czech Lands: A Key Moment between Communicative and Cultural Memory
Abstract
The objective of this text is to document the ongoing shift from the communicative to the cultural memory of war and post-war events in the Czech Republic by using an example of a local struggle about a memorial for German inhabitants of a Czech town killed in June 1945. This case study of a local conflict enables one to analyse the different modes, circumstances and objectives of the production of knowledge about the German past in the Czech Republic before and after 1989.
Thanks to an anthropological and social geographical approach based on interviews, family memory research, observations, an analysis of archive materials it is possible to reconstruct the local as well as the international sources of the post-1989 collective memory of the German past in Central Europe. This history is still in constant conflict with the pre-1989 version of Czech national history which had contemptuously marginalised its German component.
The communicative memory of the German past has entered the public space and tries to become a permanent part of the Czech cultural memory, but it is not a straightforward process, mainly due to the continuously strengthening nationalistic framing of memory within Central Europe.