Muriel Blaive

This project aims to complete a monograph on memory politics in the Czech Republic. Its approach is historical and epistemological and centred on the insufficiently thematized difference in the Czech public sphere between memory and commemoration, research and activism, history and politics. The introduction establishes a precise timeline of the main stages of memory politics in the Czech Republic, while the table of contents breaks down into five parts:

(i) The Totalitarian Paradigm Adapted to the Post-1989 Czech Terrain: “Totalita” or How to Transform a Communist Country into an Anticommunist Bastion. This part analyses the transformation of the totalitarian paradigm into a simplified “totalita” concept that exonerates most Czechs of any responsibility for the communist regime. It retraces the concept’s origins to the specificities of the Velvet Revolution and the weakness of the dissident movement.

(ii) How to Deal with Archival Documents?  The second part is a reflection on how to write history on the basis of regime documents. It retraces the declassification history of the secret police archives and the symbolic, political and methodological issues surrounding this process. An epistemology of the secret police file then offers the opportunity to deconstruct the (absence of) historical methodology linked to the political underpinning and power game presiding to the disclosures of celebrities’ secret police files.

(iii) Oral History: From Outwardly Detesting Communism to Privately Deploring the Post-1989 Development. This part analyses the complex relationship between the Czech public and its communist past, especially the long and ambivalent emergence of nostalgic feelings after 1989. It is based on oral historical studies.

(iv) Methodology in Dealing with Communist History. The fourth part analyzes the law creating an institute of national memory and questions the relationship between academic quality and legal prescriptions. It offers a prosopographical analysis of the post-1989, anti-communist generation that founded this institute, analyzes its bibliography in its first five years, and shows that the primary sources have come to contradict the prescribed anti-communist results. Finally, it reflects on the methodology most suitable to analyze the Czechoslovak communist experience (a bottom-up, social historical approach.)

(v) Memory. Finally, this volume concentrates on collective memory - and on its absence. Why is there no official museum of communism in the Czech Republic today? This part analyzes the fundamental contradiction between a state narrative of heroic anti-communism and a popular narrative recalling a lenient welfare state. A closer study of the Third Resistance prizes, meant to identify and compensate the heroes of anti-communist resistance, provides an additional case study in hero and collective memory manufacturing.