“Communism Didn’t Touch My Kids Like Me.” Images of Communism in a Family Perspective

Abstract

Abstract The target of this study is to introduce one particular life story and on the basis of its content analysis to focus on the narrator’s connection with the period of so-called normalization era in Czechoslovakia. Based on oral history interviews with one narrator during the longitudinal oral history project, the author focuses on whether the memories of a given period change over time and how the narrator reflects on his memories. The author maps the narrator’s family background, the extent to which it shaped him and how he evaluated it as a thirty year old man and now, when he is fifty years old. The core of our narrator’s life story stays the same in principle; he did not change it after twenty years. The reason is that the narrator’s experience and the memories have sunk in and are consistent. What changed in the narrator’s story is the amount of self-reflection that was reflected during the last interview. It was confirmed that shifts in the reflection are a common phenomenon and that some variability may not be conscious. Interpretations and evaluations of life can change, but the experiences themselves do not change.