Cold War Heritage Transformed…?! Or The Image of West In Memory of Czech (Czechoslovak) Society from 1970s till late 1990s

0387881 - ÚSD 2013 AR eng C - Conference Paper (international conference)
Mücke, Pavel
Cold War Heritage Transformed…?! Or The Image of West In Memory of Czech (Czechoslovak) Society from 1970s till late 1990s.
17a Conferencia internacional de historia oral. Los retos de la historia oral en el siglo XXI: diversidades, desigualdades y la construcción de identidades. Buenos Aires: Dirección General Patrimonio e Instituto Histórico, 2012 - (Barela, L.). ISBN 978-987-1642-17-5.
[Conferencia internacional de historia oral. Los retos de la historia oral en el siglo XXI: diversidadese, desigualdades y la construcción de identidades /17./. Buenos Aires (AR), 03.09.2012-07.09.2012]
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GAP410/11/1352
Institutional support: RVO:68378114
Keywords : cold war * west * oral history
Subject RIV: AB - History

Author of this paper, analyising the interviews with members of different social groups ofCzech society (workers, inteligensia class, white collar workers, people employed inagriculture, economic management members, armed forces – army, police and fire corps members) living in communist Czechoslovakia and than in democratic Czech Republic tries to conclude in wide context the contours of memory concerning Western countries. The analysis is based on the interviews realised with graduated „ordinary“ people born generally between 1935 and 1955, who were employed in mentioned professions depending on their graduation (not dissidents, suspended from Communist party after 1968, not in primar plan members of „grey zone“ etc.) The life stories were interviewed within the grant projects elaborated since 2006 in Oral History Center, Institute of Contemporary History CAS in Prague. Analysed image of „other“ and „others“ as a very popular and often elaborated theme in humanities and social sciences, in connection with reasearched specific sample, take the value because the notions and memory of narators – as members of different social groups – were influenced by temporary terms and circumstances of living in one country taking a part of Eastern Bloc before 1989, which form the unique „frame of memory“ (e.g. limited and by regime regulated possibility of traveling, censored informational streams, absence of free public disscutions etc.) Under the influnce of regime propaganda, who interpreted „capitalistic West“ as the main „ideological enemy“, due to „self-collected“ sources of informations (e.g. recepting foreign medias, by hearsay etc.) and with their own self-experience, the popular image was born and it was, after the fall of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, also confronted and revisited in new restituted democratic reality after 1989.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0220342