Power and Politics in the Stories of World War II Memorials
We have published an electronic exhibition entitled Power and Politics in the Stories of World War II Memorials!
The exhibition focuses on memorials built before 1989. We proceed from the assumption that the memory of World War II and liberation was one of the important ideological pillars of the communist regime. Like any topic relevant to the regime, this memory was subject to political control, exploitation, and manipulation. This was inevitably reflected in the creation of monuments, whose form, function, and meaning reflected, among other things, current political emphases and their transformations. A historical cross-section of the memorial scene can therefore clearly document the development of post-war and communist Czechoslovakia. The exhibition does not aim to present World War II memorials in all their complexity and interconnectivity; naturally, it does not cover the entire vast volume of memorial production, nor does it deal with memorials in Slovakia. Our ambition was to capture the construction of monuments as a process in its internal dynamics and time-space distribution, to show how its actors, forms, and symbolic contents changed depending on the political and cultural contexts of the time. We followed general trends as well as specific stories of individual monuments anchored in local politics. We tried to capture the various forms and ideological meanings of commemorations and rituals and to present monuments as local symbolic centres of materialised memory of war, liberation, and the building of socialism.
The exhibition consists of the following sections:
- Monuments – Typification and Allegorization
- Slavic Brotherhood in Battle
- National Piety and a New Future
- In the American Liberation Zone
- Stalin and the Limits of De-Stalinization
- The Sixties and the Loosening of the Artistic Forms
- The Restoration of the Monumental Order
- Rituals