Abstract
Paper analyses the role of memory practices and their commodification in creating a specific contact zone. It concentrates on the case of recently opened Hotel Sudety in Chomutov in the Czech-German borderland.
Sudety is a historical appellation for parts of today's Czechia, from where the German population was expelled as a result of WWII and the post-war reordering of nation states in Central Europe. The hotel of the same name targets visitors from both sides of the border.
The hotel employs memory practices such as referencing displaced German inhabitants on visual material inside the hotel, naming particular rooms after abandoned and destroyed German villages. By means of these, memory practices aiming at the process of reconciliation are being commodified.
At the same time they create a specific contact zone characterised as a social space (Pratt 1991, Clifford 1997, Sternfeld 2011) where memory practices of German visitors and Czech owners of the hotel coexist, the latter being in a position of having power of interpretation of the past and at the same time attracting the visitors by these interpretations. Drawing on an etnography of the hotel and both its German visitors and Czech owners and employees as well as and textual analysis produced about the hotel, the paper dissects the workings of those memory practices.
The paper considers 3 questions - how are the (commodified) memory practices and its negotiation towards visitors perfomed by the hotel staff; how are those memory practices perceived by visitors; and which processes and dynamics become visible and which actors during the process of negotiation those interpretion. By answering these the paper offers the methodological challenge in re-thinking what type of social spaces can be considered contact zones with the example of hotel Sudety being created "from bellow" outside the institutional framework.