Abstrakt
The chapter reports on research into the little-known process of how documents of memory, in this case biographical narratives of life under the communist regime, are received by members of the community of memory. The research is based on an experiment in which three generations of family members (two generations of eye-witnesses of communism and one post-communist generation) were asked to infer the political identity of narrators from very short fragments of biographical texts concerning the communist era.
Using a semiotic approach, the author performs a detailed analysis of reader cooperation with these excerpts of biographical texts in their formulation of an acceptable interpretation of the narratives. The results show that narrative texts do not circulate in a society as a kind of 'ready-made', canned human experience, but they are actively interpreted by readers.
Members of all generations displayed a competence to interact with the fragments of narratives and to skilfully integrate them into their image of the past.