People in Non-Democratic Regimes. 1938-1989 in the memory of the Slovak majority and the Jewish community. An ethnological perspective

This is a primary research project and its results will summarise as well as expand (in book form) selected aspects of the issue, which proponents have studied for a long time. Building on a critical analysis of the current state of the knowledge, combined with their own recent investigations, they study the images of non-democratic regimes – the Ľudák one (1938-1945) and the Communist one (1948-1989) – which persist in the memories ofthe people who lived through them, as well as the content of what these people have passed on to the subsequent generations. The proponents plan to compare, contrast deepen the knowledge of two distinct groups of the population: the Slovak majority and the Jewish minority. Utilizing the concepts of individual, social, collective memory, as defined by A. Assmann 2016, and in the intentions of the concept of divided memory (Herf 1997), data acquired by qualitative ethnological research methods will be analyzed with a focus on the chosen groups of Slovak society.