SECTION IV: MEMORY, HISTORY, AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC PRESENT 


TELLING LIVES. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY AFTER SOCIALISM 


Haldis Haukanes, University ofBergen 

In 1991 I visited a photo exhibition in 
Strakonice, South Bohemia, at the museum 
belonging to a big factory, which had 
previously produced weapons and now 
produced motorbikes, among other things. I 
visited the museum together with a man from 
the village ofLipinaJ, who was foreman of 
one ofthe factory's departments. This man 
was one ofthe few proclaimed communists 
left in the village, a candidate for the 
Communist Party in the local elections in 
November 1990. We were shown around the 
photo exhibition by a female employee, 
obviously the person in charge ofthe museum. 
She told us about the founding ofthe factory 
in 1919, its time as a weapons producer, and 
the situation during the Second World War. 
The exhibition also had its "communist" 
section, i. e. pictures showing the founders of 
the factory's first cell ofthe Communist Party, 
leading Party members and, ofcourse, 
"Victorious February" in 1948. When we 
came to this section she addressed the 
foreman directly: "Well, this I believe we 
don't tell anymore, " she said. "No, we don't" 
he agreed, and a small moment of 
embarrassment passed. 

This article is concerned with recollections of 
the past in post-socialist Czech Republic, with 
the delicate balance between what can be told 
and what should rather be left out when 
recounting one's memories of the recent 
historical past. I'm building on material 
collected during fieldwork in the first half of 
the 1990s (1993 and 1995), a period when the 
public concern with rewriting the nation's 
history was great, resulting in concrete actions 
such as the removal of monuments and 

I Lipina is the pseudonym of a village in South Bohemia 
where I spent 8 months of fieldwork in 1990-91 and to 
which I have returned continuously - for longer and 
shorter periods. 

refashioning of museums' exhibitions, as well 
as the provision of funds for a wide range of 
research projects documenting and 
reinterpreting the recent past. This 
preoccupation with the past was to be found 
all over post-socialist Europe and is well 
reflected in the anthropology of post­
socialism. In the last 15 years we have seen a 
flourishing of works on history and memory 
from the region (see for example Watson 
1994; Wanner 1994; Skultans 1998; Pine, 
Kaneff, and Haukanes 2004). While some 
authors have mainly been preoccupied with 
documenting the voices silenced by 
communist censorship, many have analyzed 
the complex interplay between official 
versions of history and local/personal 
accounts under and after socialism (Borneman 
1992, Lass 1994), demonstrating both how the 
latter are being shaped by the former 
(Haukanes 2004) but also how personal and! 
or local accounts resist being absorbed into a 
dominant narrative framework (Watson 1994, 
Richardson 2004). 

In the following article I seek to analyze the 
relation between autobiography and the 
history of the "Great Czech Nation" (Holy 
1996). Particular focus will be addressed to 
the structure and periodizations of the 
autobiographical accounts and questions to be 
dealt with are: Which, if any, of the major 
national events serve as landmarks and!or 
keys to people's periodization, (the founding 
of the Republic in 1918, the Munich 
agreement in 1938 and the subsequent 
German occupation, the communist takeover 
of power in 1948, the Prague Spring and 
Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, and the fall of 
communism in 1989) and in which terms are 
they talked about? If such events are not 
mentioned, how do the persons interviewed 
periodize their life-histories? I would also like 
to examine the presence and eventual agency 

160 



of the communist "state" or the "authorities" 
in the accounts, by examining the way people 
represent their relations and dealings with the 
local and/or central powerholders. 

The accounts were collected during fieldwork 
in 1993 and 1995 in several different villages 
in Breclav okres, South Moravia and 
Strakonice okres, South Bohemia. Five of the 
persons interviewed were men, five women.2 

The youngest person interviewed was born in 
1944, the oldest in 1909; the majority were 
between 60 and 75 years old when 
interviewed, hence born between 1920 and 
1935. The majority ofthe interviewees were 
or had been manual laborers, either in 
agriculture or in some kind of craft, but there 
are also two teachers, a clerk and a postman 
among these informants. 

Periodization and landmarks in the life­
histories 

Considering the structure of the accounts, 
most of them have a lineal direction, i.e. they 
are sequentially and chronologically ordered 
in time. Nevertheless, they coincide with the 
periodizing of the nation's history only to a 
very limited extent. The period that stands out 
as most clearly delimited in the accounts, is 
the Second W orId War. 'Za va/ky , - during 
the war - served as a reference point in many 
of the accounts, and several of the South 
Moravians talked about the final days of the 
war, when battles were being fought in or near 
the villages where they were living. With 
regards to the other major turning points in 
the nation's history, only one inforn1ant (the 
oldest person, born in 1909) mentioned the 
founding of the Republic in 1918, which is, of 
course, natural as he is the only one who was 
old enough to remember the event himself. It 
is more peculiar that virtually none of the 
informants related their life-histories to the 
communist coup in 1948 and the Soviet 
invasion in 1968. Not only were these events 
rejected as keys to periodization of their own 
lives; they were hardly mentioned at all. The 

2 
One of the women did, in addition to presenting her 

life-history during interview, wlite down SOme major 
events in a book whieh she gave me on my departure. 

r 

161 

year 1 948 was mentioned by only one 
informant, a woman who talked about her 
family losing their pub after 1948. The year 
1968 was made a point ofby two infonnants. 
The first was a woman, Hana, who grew up in 
a small South Bohemian town. At the end of 
our conversation, when talking about 
particular events that she remembers well, she 
commented: "Well, there is of course 1968," 
and mentioned that people had been afraid 
that war would break out. In the same breath 
she added: "You know the really bad 
memories one has, are first and foremost if 
something happens to your family," thereby 
indicating that she did not want to exaggerate 
the importance of 1968 for her own life. "I 
was not interested in politics at that time" she 
concludes. The other person who mentioned 
1968, was Jan, a teacher at a South Moravian 
village school, who chose to leave the Party in 
1969, and who had a tough time afterwards. 
"My hair turned grey after that," he said, 
indicating the stress he must have felt. 
However, like Hana, Jan did not want fear and 
pain to be main themes in his life-history. 
When I tried to get him to elaborate on the 
difficulties of the 1970s, there was a long 
pause before he finally answered: "You know, 
I would like to forget the bad things, and 
prefer to remember the good ones. All in all, I 
believe that I have lived a happy life." 

1989, or the period after 1989 (represented 
through terms such as "today," "in today's 
time") was explicitly commented upon by 
most of the informants. However, only three 
(two of whom had also mentioned 1968) 
integrated 1989 or "today" into the stories of 
themselves, as a breaking point in their own 
life. The others commented on the post-1989 
changes in very general terms, either by 
expressing their happiness over the newly 
won freedom to travel and talk openly about 
politics or by complaining over more 
unfortunate developments such as increase in 
prices and criminality. 

Thus, the key years in Czech National History 
did not emerge as turning points in my 
informants' stories, nor were they referred to 
extensively as events in themselves. There 
were no differences between people in this 



respect; it did not matter whether the person 
telling the story had been a Party member or 
an opponent to the communist regime, a man 
or a woman, old or relatively young. How 
could tilis be? 

Let me concentrate on the events of 1948 and 
1968, and start by saying that I have no reason 
to believe that these events in themselves 
were not considered important in villages or 
small towns, nor that they did not make an 
impression on village people when they 
happened, both indirectly, through the mass 
media, and directly as "local" experiences. In 
my exanlination of local chronicles,3 both in 
South Bohenlia and South Moravia, I found 
that the events of both 1948 and 1968 were 
thoroughly described and presented as 
disturbing to the villagers. The chronicles also 
listed various kinds of local action triggered 
by the events, such as changes in the local 
politicalleadersmp and the establishment of 
local action comnlittees in 1948, and the 
hoarding offood for fear of war in 1968. 
These events must therefore belong to what 
Maurice Halbwacs (1981) would call the 
collective memory of the villagers. 

One explanation for the marked absence of 
these events may lie in my informants' 
conception of life-mstory as a genre. The 
crucial question is: What does one get to 
know when listening to people telling about 
their lives from A to Z? Life mstories are , of 
course, reconstructions of lived lives and 
therefore limited as sources of info~ation 
a~out :vhat. "really" happened (Rudie 1995). 
Llfe-mstones or autobiographies constitute a 
genre in their own right, at least in European 
soc~eties. Thus, most people probably have a 
nohon of what belongs to tms genre and what 
does not. The interview may therefore become 
a search for the genre itself, or even worse, as 
Paul Connerton has argued, for the 
interviewer's image of what a life-history 

,
: All C~ech municipalities are obliged ~ by a law 
Issued III 1920 ~ to appoint a chronicler who, by the 
end of each year, shall write down major events in the 
municipality. I have studied the chronicles of tour 
different villages in South Bohemia and South Moravia 
(see Haukanes 2004). 

should be like (Connerton 1989:19). I 
sometimes had the feeling that this was the 
case in my interviews, to the extent that I 
sensed a search going on for the proper things 
to tell me. On several occasions my 
informants made meta-comments on the 
endeavor they were about to embark upon. 
Frantisbi Svobodova, a woman from Lipina, 
started the account ofher life with a question 
and a little laugh: "Oh, so you want me to talk 
about how I got married and all that?" In 
another case it was not the person interviewed 
(a man in ms 80's) who had opinions on what 
belonged to the story, but ms wife, who was 
present during most of the interview. For 
example, when the husband described a 
?icycl.e accident at length, his wife interrupted 
nnpahentiy: "Why talk so much about that? 
Tell her about the life; what it was like." 
Later he told some rather dirty stories taken 
from his nlilitary service. "TIlis is not what 
the lady (pam) wants to hear" his wife 
objected, and continued: "Why don't you tell 
her about our life together - our marriage; 50 
years together. These are the tmngs that 
belong to such a story." 

The lack of "grand dramas" in the life­
histories nlight also be related to education 
and class. Anthony Giddens argues that the 
reconstruction ofpersonal biography is a 
central aspect of the reflexive self, and 
increasingly so in the age of late modernity. 
Working on one's own identity becomes an 
ever more crucial task to perform, as the self 
is now seen as a "reflexive project, for wmch 
the individual is responsible" (Giddens 
1991:74). Nevertheless, the degree to which 
persons have a narrative experience of telling 
their own lives and thereby a "verbalized" 
distance to what they have lived through 
varies greatly, both within and among social 
strata (Frykman 1992). Narrating lives within 
a certain structure requires experience in self­
presentation, wmch nlight not be so well 
developed in a village context where 
"everyone knows everyone" (Bringslid 1996). 
In the present case, it is noteworthy that the 
informants employing the most "external" 
contextualizations are those with the highest 
level of education, and the widest general 

162 



interest in politics and history. Another 
indication that class and education are 
significant is obtained by comparing "my" 
stories with life-story material from 
intellectuals in Prague, who, when asked to 
reflect upon their lives, made the macro­
political events of 1948 and 1968 central in 
structuring their self-presentation. They 
explicitly explained events in their own Jives 
by referring to these dates (Leviatin 1993, cf. 
also Pefinova 1994). 

Another and perhaps more important 
explanation for the absence of macro-events 
in these life-histories may be that, although 
the events were undoubtedly known and 
experienced, their consequences in terms of 
changing peoples' lives made themselves felt 
only gradually. This may have been 
particularly true following the communist 
seizure of power in 1948. Even though the 
year 1948 is only mentioned by a single 
informant, the 1950s as a period is identified 
by several as a particularly difficult time, or in 
one case, as a period when the post-war 
supply situation started to improve. 

So if it is not macro-political events that 
structure the accounts, what is it? As 
mentioned in the introduction, all the stories 
have an element of linearity or chronology. 
These features probably belong to my 
informants' conception of a life-history, and I 
may have contributed to this tendency by 
encouraging people to proceed 
chronologically. When an informant lost the 
thread in his or her account, I would ask 
questions like "what happened then ... ?" and 
"who was your next employer after the baker 
in Brno?" In addition to being lineally told, 
the life-histories were structured and 
periodized not by external events, but by the 
content of the accounts themselves, which 
concerned work and family life. All the 
informants reported something about their 
childhood and about parents and siblings 
before they moved on to schooling and 
working lives, marriage, and own children. 
Almost all focused on their youth and the 
early phase of their working lives, and many 
returned to their childhood when they felt they 
had nothing more to tell about their adult 

lives. The accounts vary with respect to what 
the person telling put the most stress on; some 
spent a lot of time on family life (mainly 
women), others on their working careers (both 
women and men). Pride in their identities as 
professionals and as decent, hard-working 
individuals, often lay at the core of the stories. 
In addition to telling about their own lives, 
some considered aspeCts of change in the 
village community, such as the decline in 
social activities and weakening of bonds 
between people. "People stuck together more 
before" (drieli vic spo[u), a teacher from 
South Bohemia commented when 
remembering her childhood herding goats 
together with other children of her age. 
"Nowadays everyone just sits in the front of 
their own television." 

A phenomenon that appears either as an event 
or more often as a period in most of the 
stories (7 of 10), is "the time when we were 
building" (kdyijsme stavili); i.e "when we 
built the house in which we live," which in 
most cases meant reconstructing an inherited 
building. For many this was a complicated 
endeavor that took several years to complete 
and coincided with the raising of small 
children, so it was referred to as a difficult 
and exhausting period. For example, a man of 
70 related how he and his wife lived in the 
house of his parents-in-law for seven years 
while saving money to build their own home. 
It took him three years to complete the 
endeavor, and since his wife was at home with 
small children they had very little money and 
had to be extremely careful with their 
budgeting. A woman of the same age related 
in detail the construction process of their 
home: how she first resisted her husband's 
suggestion to reconstruct and expand his 
parent's house, but had to give in; how she 
had to work day and night for several years 
while her husband worked on the house; how 
she took care ofthree small children in 
addition to holding a full time job. 

Three of my informants had particularly 
traumatic experiences, which shaped their 
accounts and constituted a major element. 
One man, born in 1913 and a baker by trade, 
became ill when he was only 30 years old and 

163 

L 



was left partly disabled and with a limp for 
the rest ofhis life. This event was identified 
as a key to understanding almost everything 
else in his life, including his working life, his 
quarrels with his wife, and his current small 
pension. A woman born in 1929 had lived all 
her adult life with a jealous, drunken, and 
violent husband and his very demanding 
mother, and this fact shed a light on most 
events in her account. A third person, 
Frantiska Svobodova, had two major 
traumatic events that constituted the content 
of most of her story; the first was the loss of 
her new-born daughter due to an irresponsible 
mid-wife in the late 1940s, and the second 
was the trauma of her family being classified 
as kulaks, i.e. wealthy farmers.4 She told me 
how her husband had been betrayed by his 
best friends; how the regional court had 
convicted him and sentenced him to prison; 
and how the next generation - her children ­
didn't receive any education because they 
were of kulak descent. She laid out one 
particular event (which I had heard her 
recount several times before this interview 
took place) in great detail. It concerned the 
loss of a huge amount of meat and lard from a 
newly slaughtered pig. The night after the 
slaughtering had taken place, some Party 
officials came to take it away from them; "It 
was Vaidis [a local communist] who came, 
together with one from the regional office 
[Party office]." "They say that we should 
forgive," she says, "and my son tells me that I 
always go on about these old things, and that 1 
sound like a gramophone record. But 1 cannot 
forget it, cannot forget lard and the nice 
meat. ... By the way, 1 saw Vaidis at the 
funeral ofMs Cerna the other day. He was 
walking right in front ofme and suddenly he 
turned around and smiled at me. But I didn't 
return his smile, and I really wanted to say to 

4 The word kulak stems form Russian, and its Iitcral 
meaning is 'fist.' Bcfore 1917 kulak was used to denote 
the larger, leading peasants in a community. After 1929 
(the year when the collectivization of agricultural land 
startcd in the Soviet Union), it became a term of abuse, 
used against those who resisted collectivization. During 
collectivization in thc "new" communist states of 
Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the word was adopted in 
this derogative scnse. 

him: "Where is my pig and all the lard? Give 
it back to me!" 

The absent state 

In Frantiska Svobodova's account "the 
authorities" are represented as violent 
intruders in her life. However, the authorities 
that enter and change her life are not so much 
an abstract "regime," but rather concrete 
persons, very often locals, whose actions 
destroyed the life ofher family. Referring to 
the 1950s, it is not only Frantiska who 
represents the state as an invader; most of the 
informants who talked about these years made 
a point of this state intrusion. The grandfather 
of one had his factory nationalized; another 
had to give his smithy to the agricultural 
cooperative; the father of a third was 
persecuted because he didn't want to give up 
his land. Only in Frantiska's account, 
however, is this loss and penetration really 
dwelt upon and made a major issue. Some of 
the informants did not make a point of their 
experiences dealing with the state at all; if 
they referred to "the authorities" or "the 
communists" at all, it was to provide some 
background information. For example, "I 
started to work in Brno in the year so and so; 
the communists were already here then." 
Even a person who was sent to a kind of work 
camp in Ostrava in 1949 reported this simply 
as a step in his working life, rather than as a 
violent act on the part of the authorities: 
"Well then I spent half a year in Ostrava, you 
know the communists didn't like those who 
said anything against them .... When 1 
returned, I went back to work in the factory in 
Brno." Only on my further interrogation into 
his stay in Ostrava, did he reveal that this was 
a kind of work camp, where he was displaced 
due to some kind of rebellious behavior. In 
one account, that of the woman with the 
difficult husband and mother-in-law, the 
"communist regime," "the state," or "the 
authorities" (local or central) were not 
mentioned on a single occasion. The only sign 
that there had been transformations in her life 
due to political changes was when she said 
that her father had become chairman of the 
first cooperative in the village in the early 
1950s. 

164 



All in all, the period when the state appeared 
to play the most active part in my informant's 
lives was in the 1950s. This is not very 
surprising, since the 1950s was the decade 
when agriculture was collectivized and very 
brutal and radical social transformations took 
place in the Czech countryside. In later stages 
of the life stories, the "authorities" emerge 
only very sporadically, for example, as the 
agency from which money was borrowed, 
from which a new job or pension originated 
or for the two teachers, by which they were 
fo~ced to take part in political meetings. Three 
of my informants had themselves been Party 
members, and a fourth was married to the 
Party leader in her village. All of these 
infomlants talked overtly about their relations 
to the Party, although none of them made this 
a major point in their story. Jan, the South 
Moravian teacher who left the Party 1968, 
said that he had entered the Party at the age of 
18 (in 1953). "I was so naive; I didn't realize 
what they were up to." Vaculik, an old 
postman, reported that he had been elected 
three times to the municipal council, "but 1 
was always in opposition. People in the 
village said so too; Vaculik is always in 
opposition." The wife of the communist 
leader in South Moravia told about how she 
had managed to remain faithful to her religion 
and God under communism. She defended her 
right to wear a cross around her neck, even 
when serving "big communists" from the 
regional Party organization who visited her 
husband. The female teacher from South 
Bohemia explained the political activities 
implicit in her role as a teacher: "It was 
expected that teachers take part in all kinds of 
activities" and "that they were active in the 
community." When she showed me her 
medals and diplomas she added, by way of 
excuse: "They all have the five-pointed star 
on them, but some of them 1 really appreciate. 
For example, this particular one was for my 
work in the Fire Brigade... or this one was 
for being the best teacher of the year. I really 
appreciate it, since it was for my work that 1 
received it." Others she claimed not to 
appreciate so much, "they are more like a 
reward from the Party." 

History, narration and avoidance 

With some exceptions, 1 found that my 
informants seemed to avoid relating important 
macro-historical events to their own lives, and 
to represent the communist state as an agent 
affecting the course of their lives. This was 
the case in spite of the fact that the recounting 
took place not so long after the 1989 - in a 
time when the public sphere of media and 
politics was still rather obsessed with . 
rewriting history and denigrating everything 
to be associated with the communist regime. 
Looking at the life-histories as a whole, I am 
surprised how little "the new order" manifests 
itself directly in the stories. I would have 
expected more details about the hardships 
under communism, more "tales of suffering." 
1 would also have expected more excuses 
from former Party members. Those who had a 
close relation to the Party explained their 
decisions to engage in Party activities as a 
matter of necessity or related to a desire to be 
oppositional from "inside." They thereby tried 
to separate "themselves as persons" from 
"Party activities," but it seems remarkable that 
they did not make more out of this. The 
telling of life-histories is, of course, the result 
of the infomlant's relation to the interviewer, 
genre, and society. One of the explanations 
offered for the lack of "politicization" of the 
narratives may lie in the first of these three, 
i.e. their relation to me as a foreign researcher 
whom they did not know particularly well. 
The rather forceful attempts of the communist 
regime to achieve standardization of language 
and discourse (Verdery 1991), in particular 
that of historical accounts (Haukanes 2004, 
see also below), made people careful about 
how they expressed themselves about their 
own experiences in life. In the early 1990s 
this carefulness was still very much a part of 
public behavior. The wife ofMr. Vaculik, the 
postman, expressed a direct fear about her 
husband's accounts: "Don't talk about that," 
she said to her husband when he mentioned 
his Party membership, "It's all over now." 
When he later started to criticize the current 
government, she became even more worried. 
"Stop," she pleaded, "I'm afraid." The genre 
of life-history, or rather, my informants' 

165 

I 



I 

I 

J 

J 

J 

expectations of the genre, also influenced the 
degree of "politicization" of the accounts: "I 
don't exactly know what lies in a life-history, 
but it is undoubtedly about when 1 got married 
and all that." 

As for the lack of interest in talking about 
1948 and 1968 in particular, 1 have already 
suggested a number of explanations: The fact 
that people are not familiar with narrating 
their lives in relation to macro-political 
events; that the events themselves, although 
important for political leaders in the village, 
were not immediately felt to have 
consequences for the daily life of people; and 
so forth. Nevertheless, 1 still feel that there 
might be an additional explanation to the 
omission of these particular grand dramas 
from the life-histories of these people. This 
feeling is supported by the fact that in my 
conversations with people more generally 1 
heard very few "local" versions of the events 
of 1948 and 1968; stories about "when the 
communists took over power here," or when 
"the Russian tanks passed by" (as they 
literally did in South Moravia in 1968). Lutz 
Niethammer (1992), conducting life-history 
interviews in 1987 among East Germans, 
observed that virtually none of his infonnants 
talked about 17 June 1953 on their own 
accord when telling about their lives. (June 17 
was the day of a large demonstration and 
spontaneous anti-Stalinist uprising of workers, 
which was brutally put down and immediately 
denounced by the sitting regime as an 
attempted coup by fascists and Western 
imperialists). Only on further interrogation, 
did it appear that all of them remembered the 
events very well, including where they had 
been and what they had been doing. The 
politicization of the events, Niethammer 
argues, made the majority of those who had 
lived through them put their experiences at a 
distance "relegating it to the niche of 
uninvolved knowledge" (Niethammer 
1992:68). A similar explanation might pertain 
to 1948 and 1968 in "my" stories. Although 
these events in themselves are very different, 
both in their courses and consequences, they 
have one thing in common: their status as 
(symbolic) events in official history writing 

-


changed dramatically with the overthrow of 
communism in 1989. 

History writing under communism was a 
carefully controlled and ideologically 
determined activity. The ideological 
legitimation of the regime itself was grounded 
on a specific historical development in the 
relations of production, leading to socialism. 
Or, as Rubie Watson has noted: "Under state 
socialism, Marxism-Leninism was not one 
ideology or political economy among many, 
but rather was the inevitable and glorious 
outcome of a discernible historical process" 
(Watson 1994:1). To maintain control over 
the accounts of key events such as those 
occurring in 1948 and 1968 was of great 
importance for the regime, and great effort 
was put into supervizing even local history 
writing (see Haukanes 2004a and Haukanes 
2004b:66ff). 

In every "Western" publication dealing with 
post-war history, the two years of 1948 and 
1968 of course stand out as key moments, the 
first being read as the year when socialist rule 
in Czechoslovakia went from being legitimate 
and democratic to being enforced and 
totalitarian and the latter seen as the year 
when the hope - not only of the Czech people 
but of the whole of leftist Europe - to have a 
humane socialist society was brutally crushed. 

In official history writing under communism 
the status of these events was very different. 
The year 1948, celebrated annually all over 
the country, was dealt with in detail. It was of 
course not termed a coup, but appeared under 
the label "Victorious February," "the victory 
of the workers (vitezstvi pracujiciho lidu) and 
working class" (delnicka tfida), or "the 
moment when the working people under the 
rule of the Communist Party of 
Czechoslovakia won over the reactionaries, 
and definitively decided on the socialist 
development of our motherland." The year 
1968 was passed over rather roughly, and if 
mentioned at all, it is described as "an attempt 
by right-wing and anti-socialist forces to get 
rid of communist rule." The Warsaw Pact 
invasion was described as "help from friends 
in a time when socialism was threatened," and 

166 



the years 1968-69 as "years of crises" (krizova 
leta) (llfibek et. al 1982, Pubal and Robek 
1963, Janda et. aI1963). 

With the fall of the old regime, these 
"communist" versions of the events 
completely lost their validity. This process 
had started long before 1989 (see Haukanes 
1999), but after the change in regime they 
disappeared from the surface altogether and 
were substituted with readings similar to the 
ones that we know from "Western" history 
writing. The events of 1948 and 1968 are still 
vested with national symbolic meaning, 
however, although the opposite to the one that 
the fonner regime tried to give them. This 
combination ofpersistent symbolic 
importance and radical change of meaning is, 
I will argue, part of what make the events 
problematic for people torelate to. Stories 
from the Second World War are much easier 
to deal with since they have not changed so 
much with the change in regime, and are 
therefore told much more often. 

Final remarks 

The early 1990s was a period when the 
Czech( oslovak) nation, as it appeared both in 
public discourse and through state-initiated 
actions such as rearTangements of public 
space, was working intensively on its relation 
to the past. New lines of break and continuity 
were established. In the overall picture, it is 
clear that much "discursive work" was done 
to set apart the communist period as an 
"artificial" and undesired episode in the 
nation's history (Haukanes 1999:25ff). At the 
level of politics, an attempt was also being 
made to collapse the genealogy of the nation 
and that of the state's politicians into one, so 
that the new leaders appeared to be the heirs 
to the "good" traditions of the First Republic, 
and to be totally dissociated from their 
communist forerunners (ibid:58ff). The life 
histories of my infonnants hardly reflect this 
tendency to reinterpret and rewrite history at 
all. With one or two exceptions, they all read 
as stories about "nonnallives," having a focus 
on family life and not the least on work. What 
I find in the life histories is thus a lack of 
engagement in the grand dramas of the nation. 

By avoiding mention of the big turning points 
in the nation's history, people detach 
themselves from what has happened to the 
nation. I have chosen to interpret this 
detaclnnent as a deliberate and actively 
chosen strategy on the part of my infonnants. 
It represents an attempt to protect oneself ­
one's dignity and integrity- from official 
versions of history: not only those of the 
fonner regime, but also those of the present 
power holders. This habit of distancing 
oneself from everything that "comes from 
above" may not only be seen a result of 
people's experience with communist 
censorship and "enforced" history writing. It 
may also be understood against the 
background of historical experiences 
accumulated over a longer period oftime, a 
defensive strategy developed by a people who 
have always been in the middle of the 
political turbulence of Europe and whose 
destiny always has been in the hands of 
someone else (Simecka 1985, Holy 1996, see 
also Sayer 2000). 

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