"Our Germans"? Challenges in the Musealisation of the History of the Sudeten Germans in the Czech Republic and in Germany
Abstract
In 2020 and 2021, after almost ten years of preparation and controversy, three permanent exhibitions were opened that can be understood as central institutions of the Sudeten Germans and other expellees - Sudetendeutsches Museum (the Sudeten German Museum) in Munich and the permanent exhibition Naši Němci (Our Germans) of Collegium Bohemicum in Ústí nad Labem/Aussig as well as Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, Vertreibung, Versohnung (Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation) in Berlin. In Germany, this was the culmination of more than 70 years of development in the museum landscape and public discourse about the Sudeten Germans, represented by Heimatstuben and several regional museums; in the Czech Republic, it was the first significant attempt to systematically musealise the history of the German-speaking population of the Bohemian lands.
The article will follow the media discourse surrounding the founding, creation and opening of the permanent exhibition Naši Němci in order to evaluate which conflicts, controversies and difficulties the project entails. In the second step, the Czech project will be compared with the discussions about Sudetendeutsches Museum. Do the two institutions face the same challenges? How controversial is the topic of coexistence and expulsion after more than 70 years in the two countries? How did the media responses and public reception change at the time of the foundation and before and after the opening? These questions will be answered using a discourse analysis of the Czech and German daily press, journals and specialist literature; special attention will also be paid to the final form of the two exhibitions.