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POLITICIZING JEWISH MEMORY IN POSTWAR CZECHOSLOVAKIA

The main goal of this article is to trace the histories of three major Jewish memorial projects in postwar Czechoslovakia: the Memorial to the Victims of Nazi Persecution in Prague’s disused Pinkas Synagogue, the Terezín National Memorial (located on the site of the former Nazi Jewish ghetto and concentration camp), and the celebration of the combined millennial anniversary of Jewish settlement in Prague and the 700th anniversary of Prague’s famous Altneushul (the Old-New Synagogue) in the late 1960s. The construction of public memorials and public commemorations of specific historical events are inherently political processes, subject to complex historical, economic, aesthetic, and political arguments and lobbying. In the former Soviet-bloc countries, official public memorials and celebrations served one chief purpose—to generate and deepen socialist, i.e. class-based, historical consciousness.1 Moreover, with the communist elites’ insistence on a monopoly of power and doctrine, the writing of history and the authorization of memorial projects and public commemorations were the prerogative of the communist party-state. As the past was typically read from the highly politicized present, the production of official histories and memorials took on “tremendous political, ideological and moral significance.”2 For most of their rule, Czechoslovak communist party-state officials used their monopoly of power and doctrine either to erase Jews out of history, or to present them in an unfavourable light.3 Unlike in the prewar Czechoslovak period, Jews were not regarded as having a separate nationality. Instead, they were referred to in official documents and speeches as persons or citizens of “Jewish origin” or “Jewish denomination.”4 Czech and Slovak school textbooks also did not use the word “Jew,” not even in connection with the Shoah.5 As in the rest of East Central Europe, Jews were accorded special rights of commemoration only as general victims of fascism or as active anti-fascists. Thus an official Czech tourist guide to Terezín published in the 1980s “spoke of ‘360,000 Czech citizens killed by the Nazis,’ without mentioning that nearly all of them were Jews.”6 In a similar vein, Charter 77 Document No. 29/1989 is highly critical of the fact that