Abstract
According to Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist and author of the concept of collective memory, human memory is always the product of social reference frameworks: "There is no memory outside those reference frameworks used by people living in society to fix and recover their memories." In this context, Halbwachs also emphasizes concreteness and empiricality as basic features of remembering, on the basis of which comprehensive visual and narrative figures are formed and applied. In her reflections on collective memory, Aleida Assmann points to its institutional and non-spontaneous nature: collective memory is, in her view, a product of the activities of social institutions which deliberately use symbols, artifacts, rituals and memory practices to shape it.
She considers the tendency to create permanent and generalized structures of symbols and characters to be a characteristic feature of collective memory. The year 1989 is undoubtedly not only one of the objects of collective remembrance in Central Europe, but also a kind of emblem of a wider complex of historical events and phenomena associated with democratic changes in local political regimes, economic transformation and the birth and development of civil society in the former socialist bloc.
As an influential symbol, it also forms an important point of reference in thinking about the values that are (or were) marked as the moral and ideological pillars of later political establishments in these countries. At the same time, as a formative event of a whole generation of citizens and a kind of "founding myth" of contemporary democratic states, it is linked with a segmented structure of signs, with the help of which it is presented in memory practice and historical education.
Various layers of the reflection of 1989 in the collective memory interact with each other and together form its specific image in the public view. The pictorial potential of the memory of this historical event, related to establishing of a comprehensive reservoir of associated symbols and narratives is evidenced by the efforts to present it in museum exhibitions.
The means of narration are exhibits which are subject of controlled selection. The representation thus takes place in a constant tension between the reflection of the wider material, visual and ideological heritage and the superior narrative intention that shapes the exhibition.
The paper focuses on the analysis of selected topics of year 1989 in museum exhibitions in Czech Republic and Poland. Our goal is to analyze and compare basic symbols, signs and narrative figures that appear in the exhibition of this topic, in relation to its connection with the material heritage of the events of 1989 and phenomena which are generally understood as the ideological heritage of this period.
The purpose is to analyze, on the example of exhibition representations of year 1989, its role as an emblem of social change.