Abstract
Post-transition, post-authoritarian regimes face the need, among other pressing issues, to come to terms with the past, with the previous dictatorship, and to create a relatively coherent narrative about it. Ideally such a narrative should be supported by a reasonable consensus among the citizens and could thereby form the basis for the society’s collective memory. Memory in this sense is ‘essentially social’ and located in laws, standardized procedures, records, books, holidays, statues, souvenirs (Klein, 2000). In fact, this phenomenon is not new: Eric Hobsbawm noted ‘the proliferation in the mid- to late nineteenth century of state-led efforts to “invent” useful traditions to shore up their fading legitimacy’ (qtd. in Olick and Robbins, 1998, p. 117). Usually it is a selective and manipulative use of collective memory, elevating certain bits while suppressing others, in a functional way or in order to create links between the past and the present (Said, 2000, p. 179). Post-communist countries in Eastern Europe also faced this task, and they tried to solve the problem through various means, among others numerous vehicles of memorialization. Such efforts included the renaming of public places, assigning new national holidays, rewriting textbooks and publishing numerous memoirs, biographies and various history books, as well as creating museums to provide a narrative of the past.
Published Version
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