Unrecognized Heroes and Conflicting Historical Heritage

0543348 - EÚ 2022 eng A - Abstract
Pavlásek, Michal
Unrecognized Heroes and Conflicting Historical Heritage.
[Mezinárodní workshop Displaced Memories & Memories of Displacement. Vanquished Others, Silenced Past, and the Burden of Implication in the 21st Century. 09.06.2021-11.06.2021, Praha]
Institutional support: RVO:68378076
Keywords : Yugoslavia * re-emigrants * migration * anti-Communist narrative * politics of memory
OECD category: Antropology, ethnology
https://calenda.org/885253

In my paper I will follow the trajectory of a group of re-emigrants, which made them to form their own memory community. Czech members of a partisan unit, which was part of the antifascist Communist resistant movement in Yugoslavia during the Second World War, answered the call from Czechoslovakia, and they and their families replaced German residents who had been expelled. Those arriving were welcomed by the state as antifascist heroes, but they perceive the period of the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 and the subsequent production of a hegemonic anti-Communist narrative of the new liberal-democratic regime as a path to the unrecognition of their historical legacy, and, as a consequence, of their family honour. They see the occasion to return both of them in the definition of their position in entanglement of politics of memory, conflicting historical heritage, and interpretations of contemporary migrations.

In my paper I will follow the trajectory of a group of re-emigrants, which made them to form their own memory community. Czech members of a partisan unit, which was part of the antifascist Communist resistant movement in Yugoslavia during the Second World War, answered the call from Czechoslovakia, and they and their families replaced German residents who had been expelled. Those arriving were welcomed by the state as antifascist heroes, but they perceive the period of the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 and the subsequent production of a hegemonic anti-Communist narrative of the new liberal-democratic regime as a path to the unrecognition of their historical legacy, and, as a consequence, of their family honour. They see the occasion to return both of them in the definition of their position in entanglement of politics of memory, conflicting historical heritage, and interpretations of contemporary migrations.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0320697