“Together in the Fight, Together in Work”. Re-emigrants from Yugoslavia as Heroes of Socialism and Victims of Post-Socialism

0533459 - EÚ 2021 CZ eng A - Abstrakt
Pavlásek, Michal
“Together in the Fight, Together in Work”. Re-emigrants from Yugoslavia as Heroes of Socialism and Victims of Post-Socialism.
Memory of the Communist Past. Virtual conference : Book of Abstracts. 14. 10. 2020 (2020), s. 71-73. ISBN 978-80-973372-2-3.
[Memory of the Communist past. 14.10.2020-16.10.2020, Bratislava]
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378076
Klíčová slova: Re-emigrants from Yugoslavia * memory community * politics of memory * Socialism * Post-Socialism
Obor OECD: Antropology, ethnology
https://www.sav.sk/?lang=sk&doc=activity-monography-response-page&institute_no=40&monography_id=82

In this paper I will follow a group of re-emigrants who took an active part in the partisan (antifascist, or Communist) resistance movement during the Second World War in Yugoslavia and who established their own partisan unit, the Czechoslovak Brigade of Jan Žižka. After the war, partisans with Czechoslovak citizenship decided to answer the call from Czechoslovakia, and they and their families settled the areas from which the old German residents had been expelled. The state firstly welcomed them as antifascist heroes (freedom fighters), but after Cominform issued its first resolution in 1948, the regime of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia stigmatized them as being “unreliable for the state”. In the 1960s, they were “rehabilitated”. After the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, they found themselves in a position of memory bearers, a position that did not correspond to the contemporary hegemonic anti-Communist narrative (the thing is that, in contrast to the current anti-Communist discourse, they do not criticize the former political regime but they accentuate its positive aspects, such as social security or respect of the then regime for their ancestors). Due to this fact, the second generation of re-emigrants in particular feels that their ancestors have been unjustifiably erased from history, their legacy and imagined family honour unrecognized. At their own commemorative meetings, they clearly demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the contemporary exclusion of their partisan ancestors from the post-Communist national narrative. I will argue that the contemporary post-Communist politics of memory led the re-emigrants to the formation of their own memory community. This creates a contra-memory in relation to the current dominating narrative of liberal democracy, with which it comes into conflict not only in the private environment, but also in public.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0312821