"Each of us carries the drip of the past war even in peacetime". Memory of the Anti-Fascist Struggle as a Horizon of Hope in Post-War Czechoslovakia
Abstract
Due to war trauma and specific legacy of communist movements, the memory of anti-fascist struggle from the very beginning became one of the foundations of identity of political regimes in post-war Central Europe. Antifascism was remembered through various festivities, interventions in the public space and wide range of references in official discours.
Beside its function as a kind of fundamental myth of new regime(s), the reference to the anti-fascist struggle also served as a carrier of some collectively shared emotion: the hope for better future. The paper will focus on cultural representations of hope linked to official remembrance of anti-fascist struggle and WWII in post-war Czechoslovakia.
Based on the analysis of selected cases of festivities (as Czechoslovak Spartakiads or anniversaries of the Prague Uprising and the Slovak National Uprising), public performances and media coverage of specific topics we will follow the way in which the hope was expressed and main ideas and images with which it was asociated. We will also reflect the relation between hope and collective trauma and role of the motive of hoping in general imaginarium both of the socialist ideology and the anti-fascism itself.