Heritage of the Pre-war History of Communist Parties in Contemporary Museums: Meanders of Public Discourse and Challenges
Abstract
Pre-war history of the communist parties in Central Eastern Europe, as a part of founding myth of the postwar socialist regimes in those countries, from the very beginning was the spotlight of its politics of memory. We can see the reasons for this interest in the area of the basic struggle for the cultural and symbolical hegemony, where the use of themes from the history of the workers' movement and its narrativization was to serve to perpetuate the specific revolutionnary mythology (in the Barthesian sense of the word) and to building new semiotic order of the regimes.
The privileged position of the history of the revolutionary movement in the public space was in this context also the result of a strong bond of scientific communism with historical science and the historicity in general. Finally, it was an expression of an understandable endeavor to remember and document the experience of a particular generation of the communists.
This was expressed in a specific historical culture, a part of which was also musealization of that period. Main acting institutions in this process were both museums purely dedicated to the theme of the history of the communist movement (such as museums of the revolution in Yugoslavia or Klement Gottwald Museum and V.
I. Lenin Museum in Czechoslovakia) and small regional museums and cultural institutions.
After fall of the socialist regimes in 1990s, this part of the historical heritage became a hostage of other struggle for the symbolical hegemony and was often ostentatiously rejected as a legacy of the "criminal" ideology and policy. As such it was partially excluded from the dominant public discourse, but on the other hand has also became a tool for establishing a kind of "dissent" historical culture.
In last two decades we can observe a kind of a renaissance of the professional interest on problems of musealization of the workers' movement history. However, the themes of the older history of the communist parties are still less visible in public space compared to post-war history of the socialist countries.
The contribution will focus on problems of displaying pre-war history of communist parties in contemporary museums and its larger context. Based on cases of the exhibition in the Museum of Yugoslavia and the using of the collections on the history of workers' movement in the Czech National Museum we will examine mainly following questions: - how is the pre-war history of communist movements exhibited today? - what role the tendency to settle with post-war narratives about this period plays in its today's representations? - in which way those representations interact with public opinion and collective memory? - to what extent they have the potential to become an actual part of cultural memory again?