Current Images of Socialism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia – Family Memory

The project focuses on qualitative research on family memory in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and creates a space for cooperation between Czech and Slovak experts in memory studies. The focus is on the memories of the oldest generation in the family (people born in 1950 and earlier) and the younger generation (born around 1970 and later) in selected families. The research project represents a basic and largely rescue (given the age of some of the respondents) qualitative research aimed at mapping the phenomenon of remembering in contemporary society. The importance of this qualitative research lies not in the factual reliability of the information obtained, but in the ways in which the past is constructed in the present.

Family members in different generations share a certain degree of similarity, not only biological but also social. As a specific kind of collective memory, family memory is characterised by interaction and communication across generations: between grandparents, parents and children. Repeated recollection of the past, oral accounts of the past at gatherings together (or in other ways), and the exchange of family histories between eyewitnesses from the generation of experience and their descendants are all prerequisites for its ability to be continually reconstructed anew.  This is done in accordance with the needs of the family in order to promote its identity and values. At the same time, family memory is influenced by current social processes.

Exploring family memory in intergenerational communication provides insights into the dynamics and transformation of its normative, formative, value-oriented, and identity-forming functions.

The focus of the research team is on family memory, which is tied to the lived historical experience of its carriers.  The nature of the communicated images of the past influences the current moods in society, the reactions of different groups of the population to contemporary social, political and economic challenges, their value orientations and attitudes. And vice versa: the current socio-political situation can influence the construction of images of the past in families.  We are also interested in the relationship between the images of the past communicated in families and the official images disseminated in media and public discourse.

The main aim of the project is to capture, by qualitative research with in-depth (semi-structured) oral history interviews, the following parameters of family memory:

• contents: what situations, events from the communist regime period are remembered in the family; what attitudes and evaluations the memories contain;
• actors: who remembers and who receives the memories;
• the “carriers” of memory: stories, relations to personal role models in the family, objects that are inherited, family photographs, representations of the past in pop culture observed in families;
• occasions: when, on what occasions memories are present and in what contexts, family gatherings, ‘rituals’.