Abstrakt
Contrary to the memory culture in Germany, which is marked by "commemoration saturation" (Blumer 2013) and where therefore the commemoration of the Roma genocide has been experienced "as a gap of remembrance" in the narrative of persecution, the memory scape of post-socialist Czechia is continuously being reframed towards a nostalgic experience. The memory of the Roma persecution is therefore being cast as "only political" and inauthentic.
In this talk, I will attempt to reshuffle the logic of the contradiction and evidence how authentic the politics of memory of Roma suffering is in creating a memory-scape of its own. One of the elementary principles that I am applying is memory not as a given, but as under permanent construction.
This is what makes unifinishednes central to both, Roma's projects of the future as well as the readiness of the majority to accept Roma subjectivity.