PAMÄŤOVÝ AZYL A EMÓCIE. ROK 1968 V LISTOCH NA VÝZVU SPOLOČNÉ POZNANIE

• Authors: Kusá Zuzana

Title variants

EN

Asylum of memory and emotions. The 1968 in the letters responding to the call Common Knowledge

• Languages of publication: SK

Abstracts

EN

Research of memory of events that were excluded by the totalitarian regime from the institutionalised history or had prescribed uniform interpretations, suggests considerable fragmentation and incoherence in their depiction even by direct witnesses. Our study of the letters written in the early 1990 to have shared personal experiences of the Velvet Revolution, however suggests that despite of their displacement from the official memory people tend to preserve vivid memories of bygone political events if these are important for their personal coherence or identity. Moreover, they manage to link them meaningfully with the current experiences. We suggest that vivacity of memories could have been fostered by moral emotions linked to that period and was paradoxically sustained by their forced holding back and public refutation. Memories of the 1968 do not have form of chronological description of events: they are rather recollection of atmosphere of the period and often expressed metaphorically as the age of light or influx of truth that was thwarted by the invasion of the Warsaw pact forces and then by the officially enforced interpretation of the 1968 in the normalization period. Narrating about private preservation of the 1968 message and private memory asylum does not however release letter writers from the suspicion of hypocrisy and double-dealing during the normalisation. Building moral coherence of the 1968 and November 1989 in their personal narrative could be the way how writers might cleanse themselves from this suspicion and increase their trustworthiness of the Velvet Revolution at their workplaces and communities.

Keywords

EN

MEMORY; EMOTION; IDENTITY; VELVET REVOLUTION; NOVEMBER 1989

• Publisher: Institute of Ethnology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovak Ethnological Society, and Slovak National Museum - Ethnological Museum (in Martin)
• Journal: Etnologické rozpravy (Ethnological Disputes)
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 27
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 7 – 29

Contributors

author

Kusá Zuzana

• Sociologický ústav SAV, Klemensova 19, 811 09 Bratislava, Slovak Republic