Forgotten pasts and fearful futures in Czechs' remembrances of communism

Trnka, Susanna

doi:10.3167/fcl.2013.660104

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…Ongoing critiques were kept alive in jokes which circulated widely, in rumours and stories recounted in kitchens over tea or vodka, and in films, plays and exhibitions that contained veiled references which everyone recognized. Since the fall of socialism there have been concerns about a kind of collective amnesia sweeping across the region, reflecting an apparent lack of engagement with the traumatic aspects of actually lived socialism (Ringel 2013, Trnka 2013. Politicians, local leaders and members of the general public call for a revival of historical memory.…”

Section: Secrets and Silences Under And After Socialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Silences and Secrets of Family, Community and the State

Haukanes¹,

Pine²

2021

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In this article, we suggest that silence is often more about remembering than forgetting. We consider ways in which silences can occupy and dominate state discourse, community knowledge, family stories and individual narratives. Drawing on research material from Poland and the Czech Republic in the late socialist and post-socialist periods, we look at ways similar patterns of narrative fusion take place in various contexts in which both the public and the private domains are often shadowed by things veiled in secrecy and hidden from the general gaze. We argue that personal family and kin accounts of private things which for some reason cannot be spoken become entangled with, and to some extent communicated through, broader and more public historical narratives, and vice versa, and show how partial accounts are thus transmitted from generation to generation even while remaining largely unspoken. In developing our argument, we focus on the idea of walls of silence and on the process of drawingboundaries between people and the state, between generations (grandparents, parents and children) and between insiders and outsiders of communities. Suggesting that silence may be loud or quiet, we look at registers of silence and the ways in which they operate at the different levels of state, community and household. We ask what it means to hold certain kinds of knowledge, or to be excluded from these. At times, and for some people, knowledge may be a source of power or social or economic capital; for others, or in other contexts, being excluded from or rejecting knowledge, and thus not being privy to the subtexts of silence, may be a source or freedom and potential or possibility.

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Section: Secrets and Silences Under And After Socialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Silences and Secrets of Family, Community and the State

Haukanes¹,

Pine²

2021

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C zechs

Trnka

2015

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism

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The Czech nation was born out of a nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century “national revival” movement ( národní obrození ) whose proponents portrayed themselves as “awakening” long dormant, primordial Czech identities that had been suppressed through centuries of foreign rule. Two hundred years later, the revivalists' efforts continue to inspire national sentiment but the political–economic, social, and cultural contexts out of which national identities are produced, both in Europe and more globally, have radically changed. Contemporary Czech nationhood is formulated in response to historically new phenomena, such as the legacies of state socialism and the Czech Republic's membership in the European Union, in addition to addressing more enduring concerns over the importance of the Czech language and territorial sovereignty.

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Playing cowboys and Indians: the therapeutics of nostalgia

Trnka

2015

Canadian Slavonic Papers

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Forgotten pasts and fearful futures in Czechs' remembrances of communism

Cited by 4 publications

References 3 publications

Silences and Secrets of Family, Community and the State

Silences and Secrets of Family, Community and the State

C zechs

Playing cowboys and Indians: the therapeutics of nostalgia

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