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Remembering Communist-era Czechoslovakia: A Museum's Role in Facilitating History, Identities, and Memory Communities
Smith, Rose ; Králová, Kateřina (advisor) ; Mole, Richard Charles McKenzie (referee) ; Matějka, Ondřej (referee)
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, post-Communist states had to interpret and portray their past in the context of post-Cold War politics. In the Czech Republic, reflections on the memory of communism have gone through peculiar waves that travel between indifference to anti-regime. The Museum of Communism serves as the only social institution that deals with such memory exclusively. Its goal is to create a simple and objective account of communism. However, with museums reinventing themselves as performative spaces that aim to empower their visitors, engage them emotionally and provide them an opportunity to (re)live a past they have not experienced first-hand, this thesis aims to identify what group identities the museum promotes, how it gives substance to them, and what kind of memory community it adheres to and fosters. Drawing on the rich literature on both memory studies and museum studies, this thesis examines the museum through lens of critical discourse analysis. It argues that the Museum of Communism ́s portrayal of the past maintains and participates in the pan-European discourse of the Czech Republic as a western nation kidnapped by the East and its victimhood status is defined by the global holocaust discourse.
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