A Blissful Journey to Collective Victimhood: How the Czech Republic Forgot Its Communist Past

20. 10. 2024 / Muriel Blaive

As we approach the 35th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, this skepticism has been fading. Alas, the reason why is not one that is particularly gratifying: it is only because hardly anyone under 50 years of age still remembers the communist period at all. Those not studying this era professionally have almost no personal memory of it, and the majority never much learned about the communist past in school, as it has largely been left out of the curriculum.

When history doesn’t fit the state narrative, pretend it doesn’t exist

Indeed, it has proved an impossible feat in the past decades to teach in school that communism was evil and “we were all victims” when the students’ parents remembered quite distinctly on the contrary that under communism, no one was unemployed and vacation at the seaside was subsidized by the trade union. The best method to avoid these disquieting challenges in the classroom was to keep silent on the communist past. This isn’t to diminish the commendable work of the educational department at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, which tried to add nuance to this oversimplified narrative without the institute’s founding director ever even realizing it. Although it later thrived under the Hazdra-Matějka leadership, the department lacked the necessary funding and overall political backing, not to mention sufficient time to make a widespread impact. After its collective resignation in 2022, Čeněk Pýcha was replaced at its head by a police expert, the excellent schoolbook the department collectively put together was pulled from the shelves, and a sports journalist was placed at the head of the institute’s flagship journal, Paměť a dějiny. These are indeed marvelous times.

In the years following 1989, family stories about the communist past were often apolitical – they focused on births, marriages, and holidays rather than on political engagement or ideological resistance. By the early 2000s, however, the private narrative had shifted. When I asked my students to interview their parents and grand-parents, they found that, as the economic realities of the post-communist era hit home, the new, mollifying neoliberal public narrative could not hide anymore that the communist regime was now fondly remembered for its social security net.

And yet, a deeper transformation later occurred. In the past 10 to 15 years, the Czech public finally began to internalize the narrative of collective victimhood it has been hammered with. Many now “remembered” how their families had been victim of the regime and had always resisted it – despite those memories not existing previously.

No public figure better represents this collective path towards blissful victimhood than Václav Havel himself. In his famous 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, dissident Havel keenly analyzed Czech society as “auto-totalitarian”, i.e. as supporting, and in fact as embodying, the post-totalitarian phase of the communist regime by accepting to play the role assigned to it by the communist rulers. Yet by the time of his death in 2011, Havel had become deeply conservative and he embraced the anti-communist narrative of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes’ first director, Pavel Žáček. It is one of life’s sweet ironies that Havel would have likely rejected this narrative thirty years earlier, as he would have certainly deconstructed its transparent ideological agenda, one that was meant not to reflect on history but to discredit the left by rewriting the national narrative. As it is, Havel’s heritage can now be equally claimed by the liberal left and by the arch-conservative right.

Turning a once pro-communist country into a nation of anticommunists

I spent a very nice evening of intellectual discussion with young journalists in Prague a few days ago. I introduced myself as a historian of Czechoslovakia and I sensed how odd, perhaps even exotic, this noun, Czechoslovakia, has become. For years, I criticized France, Britain, and the West in general for their dismissive attitude towards what they called “Eastern Europe” – something Kundera spent much of his life trying to correct by putting Central Europe back on the Western mental map. Time and again, I condemned the unacceptable phrase by which Chamberlain betrayed Czechoslovakia at the 1938 Munich Agreement, which took the Sudetenland away from Czechoslovakia to give it to Hitler (and yes, a historical parallel to the current situation in Ukraine is entirely warranted here): “How horrible, fantastic, incredible” that we should risk a world war, he mused, for a “quarrel in a faraway country between peoples of whom we know nothing”? To my own surprise – I must admit also I never saw this one coming –, Czechoslovakia has become a faraway country of which we knew nothing also for today’s young Czechs.

After 35 years of misrepresenting the communist period, i.e. our immediate past, as “criminal” and “illegal” in Parliament, after echoing the same message time and over in Czech politics, after creating a national memory institute (ÚSTR) to give a new momentum to this narrative when it started to lose purchase within society, after enlisting the complicity of the Prague-centered media, after numerous films presenting a melodramatic and misleading vision of the past – think of Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush (Hořící keř) or more recently, of Jiří Mádl’s Waves (Vlny) –, and after failing to teach a more critical view of history in school – or more to the point: any view at all –, the Czech public has finally been badgered into submission. The self-designated “anticommunists” have succeeded in creating the national fiction according to which nearly everybody suffered from, and was a victim of, communism. Don’t look at the details too closely, but remember the message: communism was evil. Vote for ODS!

People once knew that this “evil communism” narrative was quite artificial; back in the day, I received a fair share of support on the part of everyday viewers of my documentary film on 1956 or of readers of my articles in Britské listy, for instance, even if one would rarely read about such ordinary people in mainstream media. But this generation is slowly dying out and their memory of the past is largely erased from public consciousness

The situation of a country which now knows little or nothing about its own recent history all the while being educated in the standard way about the more distant past is odd. It is all the more peculiar that those of us who do remember it can easily discern a lasting influence of this recent past on the present, be it in the widespread distrust of politicians, a general contempt for the public good and welfare of others, rampant corruption, racism, a societal reluctance to engage in abstract reflection and a dislike of intellectuals, and a general predilection for black and white narratives – just like in the good old days, when Rudé právo told us all we needed to know about the world.

The fragile relationship between past and present defines society’s psyche

The question remains: can the present exist in such an abstract vacuum, distinct from the past that immediately preceded it? Can the present and the past be two independent entities? For how long can society maintain a distorted version of recent history, a crudely manufactured representation as it happens, without it unraveling? As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus suggests, our identity is shaped by the way we have been formed over time. For a society to forget its recent past is to create a kind of historical schizophrenia, one in which identity is fractured and memory disconnected. At the level of the nation, it is rigorously impossible to conceive of a society suspended in time and related only to a more distant future while forgetting about its recent past. It is as impossible as if identity could exist without memory. Who would we be if we didn’t know what our own personal history is, where we come from, who our parents are, and what our experiences have made of us? The few people who have lost memory after a trauma and who remember nothing about their earlier life and loved ones can testify how painful it is.

Episodes of such collective amnesia lead individuals to act in strange ways. I can’t help but think of Javier Cercas, the Catalan writer who authored a striking book on lies and deception around the case of Enric Marco, a worker from Barcelona who volunteered to work in Germany during World War II, but passed himself off, after Franco’s death, as a political prisoner in the German concentration camp of Flossenbürg. His deception went so far that he became a spokesperson for Holocaust survivors in Spain’s new democracy. He was eventually exposed as an impostor by historian Benito Bermejo, but only after a quarter century of persistent public lying.

Interestingly, many of Marco’s new, post-Francoist comrades had sensed over the years that something didn’t quite add up in his story, but they didn’t mind – Marco was likable, and he did good public relations work for their victims’ association, so what did it matter if some details didn’t entirely fit? This case reveals how murky the notion of historical truth can be. What is the truth: what actually happened, or what people want to believe happened? Perhaps we should call this “desired historical truth.” Historians tend to refer to it as the political instrumentalization of history, something as immemorial as history itself.

The former German Democratic Republic offers an interesting counterpart to these Czech and Spanish cases. As I have often mentioned in Britské listy, East Germans had a vested interest in defending their own historical experience of communism, i.e., their identity, against what felt like a colonial takeover by West Germany. Far from forgetting their communist past, they sought to remind West Germans of it for two seemingly contradictory reasons: to have their suffering recognized, and to defend the notion that not everything under communism was worse than in the West German capitalist “paradise” – quite the opposite in some respects. For example and although she is American, anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee captured the imagination of audiences around the world with her claim that women had better sex under socialism.

French historian Nicolas Offenstadt has examined the material and immaterial traces of the former GDR after reunification, too. He views the former GDR as a “laboratory of memory”, a space where different interpretations of the past have been contested. His work has shown, perhaps sadly so, that many memories of the GDR have failed to be included in the new narrative of reunified Germany, a disappearance which has contributed to a feeling of exclusion on the part of many East Germans. The surge of the far right at the recent elections in Saxony and Thuringia certainly attests to this. Despite monumental efforts compared to the other post-communist countries, such as the almost immediate opening of the archives of the East German secret police, the Stasi, which drew over two million visitors in the first years, considerable investments in education made possible both by the takeover of the state by West Germany and by the unique fact that West Germans spoke the same language and could easily replace discredited officials, the implementation of justice concerning the former officials responsible for communist repression, an unprecedented level of compensation for the victims, the useful experience brought by West German historians, who had developed a social history of Nazism which proved largely adaptable to communism – just another home-grown dictatorship –, or, as I wrote about recently, a sophisticated methodology to restitute the memory of this period in German museums of the communist period, the former East German society still largely feels marginalized, neglected, and resentful.

The radiant future of collective victimhood

Increasingly fewer people in the Czech Republic and other post-communist countries can still remember that our present image of the past has been artificially constructed and imposed to populations who didn’t necessarily agree with it, but had no voice in the matter. But when the media and politicians distort our representation of the past as one of “collective victimhood” to the point that we don’t remember anymore what truly happened, how do we accurately define the present that has grown from it?

This artificial divide between past and present, and the artificial present which stems from it, is not just an academic concern; it weakens societies’ sense of historical continuity and responsibility. Without confronting the past, particularly more uncomfortable parts like collaboration or accommodation to the communist or Nazi rule, the victimhood narrative remains unchallenged and this selective amnesia hinders the self-reflection that is essential for genuine reconciliation. The resulting vacuum of historical knowledge makes it easier for populist and authoritarian movements to manipulate and reinterpret the past, potentially reigniting undemocratic tendencies – Viktor Orbán’s Hungary being a case in point.

Such a void in historical consciousness will inevitably lead to a collective memory loss that will deprive society of important lessons learned from its own past. Citizens who are unaware of the dangers, mistakes, and resilience shown during the communist era are also less equipped to handle the new challenges posed by populism. Societies need a sense of historical continuity to understand where they have been, where they are, and where they are heading. The historical schizophrenia in which it might celebrate its ancient heritage but feel disconnected from the more recent past, cannot but result in an incomplete or fractured cultural identity. Victim signaling, while comforting at a superficial level, is not a productive way to build collective identity.