Finding the Boundary between Historical Revisionism and Critical Reinterpretation of History: Contemporary Military Re-enactment of Estonian SS Units in the Czech Lands
Abstract
As part of the GACR research grant project 22-07058S, "Contemporary military re-enactment in the Czech lands: its history and culture in an interdisciplinary perspective," a number of oral history interviews are being recorded. From the perspective of post-positivist oral history (Portelli, Thomson, James, Shopes, etc.), the first phase is concerned with mapping the extreme historical subjectivities (identities) that define the boundaries of the "horizon of shared possibilities" (Portelli).
A group of these extreme subjectivities has been discovered, among others, in the re-enactment association, which has re-created the Estonian SS units of the WWII. The re-enactors try, among other things, to influence the politics of memory at the end of World War II., and, in the spirit of contemporary historiographic debates about the Postoloprty (Postelberg) Massacre, point out the post-war massacres, killings and torture perpetrated against the many prisoners of war from Estonian SS units in the Mladá Boleslav and Nymburk regions.
In doing so, they declare a fundamental rejection of neo-Nazism. Their symbolic cultural communication crosses several possible borders: the border between revisionism and critical reinterpretation of history, or the border between the metanarrative of the 1945 "liberation" and the narrative of the rise of a new (stalinist) totalitarian regime.
The paper will analyse the ways in which these narrators construct their historical subjectivity through reflection on these and other cultural historical borders.