<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

This text focuses on qualitative research of the past when it comes to the communist regimes in Europe, particularly Slovakia (as part of former Czechoslovakia). The authors introduce the ongoing research project Current Images of the Socialism as well as its methodological and theoretical frames. They present the findings and challenges, as also articulated during the international conference Memory of the Communist Past (2020) and introduce selected articles included in this special issue.
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Introduction: Remembering the Socialist Past

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Memorial sites document aspects of history. Thus, they represent a historical past deemed relevant by the initiators in the public sphere. The former Stasi detention center and district administration in Dresden Bautzner Straße is a memorial site that is dedicated to a critical representation of the communist dictatorship in East Germany. This does, however, not tell much about the historical site's meaning to the visitors. In order to get an impression of the visitors’ spontaneous reactions and thoughts, I systematically examine and categorize the memorial site's visitor books. Through these books, memorial sites offer visitors the opportunity to write down their thoughts thereby enabling an open channel of communication. My focus is on entries by persons who explicitly identify as former inmates of the very detention center they visited. They make up roughly 10 percent of all entries. I examine which thoughts former Stasi prisoners wrote down having visited their place of ordeal. What feelings and thoughts emerge after the visit? My aim is to shed light on the memorial site's significance and importance for the prisoner's individual memory by analyzing the entries’ type and content. The visitor books offer an authentic and intriguing access to former political prisoners’ mental world and their individual memory. This contribution connects the media representation of the communist dictatorship and its meaning for the former prisoners’ individual memory.
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Visitor Books and Memory – Evaluating the <italic>Bautzner Straße Dresden</italic> Memorial Site's Significance for Former Stasi Prisoners’ Individual Memories

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On July 26, 1963, a calamitous tremor struck Skopje, the capital of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, the southernmost Yugoslav federal unit. The politically nonaligned Yugoslav government immediately issued a call for help for its third-largest city. The call was initially picked up by the Yugoslav republics, who were then followed by more than 80 states across the globe and a high number of international organizations, all providing help to Skopje and Skopjans in the aftermath of the catastrophe—an episode of human solidarity many contemporaries described as unprecedented. This paper aims to provide an overview of commemorative activities held in Skopje from 1964 to 2020 related to the 1963 Skopje earthquake. I aim to reconstruct both the commemorative events and commemorative narratives about the 1963 Skopje earthquake in Skopje as well as its major memory agents and agencies by triangulating archival materials, media and institutional discourses, and secondary literature. I identify and discuss three commemorative phases, 1963–81, 1981–2000, and 2001–20, and I structure the argument on the multidirectionality of the notion of solidarity in the public domain.
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The City of Solidarity's Diverse Legacies: A Framework for Interpreting the Local Memory of the 1963 Skopje Earthquake and the Post-earthquake Urban Reconstruction

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The Italian Communist Party created the most effective political school—and the only one in Italy—aimed at creating cadre leaders. The first schools were in Rome and Milan, and over the following decades the school system spread throughout the country, eventually counting about a hundred schools active throughout Italy until 1989.
The school in Rome, which was the only one to remain open for a further four years, was the main model for the others. Called the Frattocchie School, it was a residential school in the hills of Rome and was in operation from 1944 to 1993. The students attended classes from six months to a year; they studied historical materialism and the history of Bolshevism but also experienced collective life, group identity, and the theoretical and practical values of communism.
The Frattocchie model began with an initial period in which training consisted of the organization and acculturation of the working classes, starting with workers and peasants, according to a schema influenced by the Soviet schools but where the socializing bent of the Italian institutes mitigated the sectarianism and dogmatism of Moscow.
The aim of the training was to build the careers of future politicians capable of embodying the ideals of a party that demanded control, preparation, and discipline. For this reason, the Italian Communist Party schools represented an original example in teaching methods and curricula, handing down the memory of communism over time. The diaries, questionnaires, and testimonies of the students who attended the Frattocchie School in its 50 years of activity are important sources and a precious heritage to understand how the Communist “faith” became a vehicle of recognition and belonging. Even today the name Frattocchie is associated with a model of party school to be imitated in order to teach methods and principles to those who want to pursue a political career.
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Lessons on Communism: Party Schools in Italy in the 20th Century

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The two main issues that continue to be in the focus of hot public discussions in Russian society are the Great Patriotic War (the German–Soviet war of 1941–1945, as part of World War II) and the tragedy of Stalinism. While the Great Patriotic War was widely reflected in Soviet literature and cinema, the Stalinist issue was seldom represented in Soviet art. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a period when Soviet and post-Soviet art contributed much to the debates on the Soviet past, and several significant anti-Stalinist films and literary works were created. Since the early 2000s, the cultural situation in Russian society has changed and nostalgia of the Soviet past has spread in the mass consciousness. The purpose of this research is to analyze how the Stalinist past is reconstructed in public memory in contemporary cinema narratives. We arrive at the conclusion that since the 2000s, public interest has drifted from images of war heroism to ordinary people’ lives under Stalin; the contemporary public interest is not the war heroes and famous victims of repressions, but the everydayness of ordinary Soviet citizens who tried to build their private lives, careers, friendships, and family relations under the conditions of pressure from the authorities, spreading fear in the society, shortage of goods, and loss of loved ones. We concentrate on several representative Russian TV serials, such as “Liquidation” (2007), “Maryina Roscha” (2012), and “Leningrad, 46” (2014–2015), because all of them are devoted to the first year of the Soviet peaceful life in different Soviet cities, such as Odessa, Moscow, and Leningrad.
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Department of Theory of Culture and Philosophy of Science

The Stalinist Past in Contemporary Russian TV Serials: Reconfigurations of Memory

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For Slovenian society the turning point in 1989 meant many things: the making of a new state, a transition to a new political and economic system, but also a new dimension of remembrance. The democratization process that started in the late 1980s and continued in the 1990s was deeply interwoven with the reconfiguration of public remembrance and the legitimation of the nascent Slovenian state. This resulted in a long and still ongoing project of reconciliation (sprava), a process of surpassing the divisions in society caused by the injustices and crimes committed by the Communist leadership in the previous decades. Its goal seems simple: to reach a point where history will no longer be a source of division in politics and where a relative unity could be established within the society.
As it moves away from the discussion of the disputed past itself, this article focuses on the history of the concept of reconciliation and the state's subsequent memorial policy of the last three decades. The development of the concept entails changes in the understanding of the past after two major political shifts: after 1990, when Slovenia became an independent state; and again after 2004, when it joined the European Union (EU). The identification of these shifts is based on the changes in the content of political and public debates. I propose that the Slovenian reconciliation between 1990 and 2004 be regarded as a specific element of the period from the end of communism until the Slovenian accession to the EU (transition), during which the political system changed.
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Reconciliation: The Institutionalization of Memory in Post-Yugoslav Slovenia

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This article presents an example of trauma recovery and post-traumatic growth in the story of three generations of a family that lost five sons in World War II and post-war mass killings, experienced the imprisonment of one son and the emigration of two daughters, expropriation of their possessions, and post-war communist harassment. With the help of the village community, the connection between family members, and because of their inherent faith, the pain of trauma has been transformed through three generations into national awareness, courage, emotional vulnerability, and creativity. In Slovenia, there are a few examples of villages that resisted partisan violence against the population and held out against the communist revolution but paid for it with several people who were killed, abducted, or imprisoned. These villages became a source of national consciousness and political social activity and strongly supported Slovenia in 1990 in the process of gaining independence from Yugoslavia. In most of these villages, affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church, the connection between the village community, and the connection between the younger generations and the older ones are also strong. We will present the stories of three women, a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter, and through their narration illustrate the process of moving from PTSD to post-traumatic growth.
</abstract>

University of Ljubljana – Faculty of Theology

Trauma and Community

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 17 (2023): Issue 3 (December 2023) Special Issue: Reconsidering “Post-Socialist Cities” in East Central and South East Europe

Volume 17 (2023): Issue 2 (December 2023)

Volume 17 (2023): Issue 1 (July 2023)

Volume 16 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 16 (2022): Issue 1 (July 2022)

Volume 15 (2021): Issue 2 (December 2021)

Volume 15 (2021): Issue 1 (July 2021)

Volume 14 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Volume 14 (2020): Issue 1 (July 2020)

Volume 13 (2019): Issue 2 (December 2019)

Volume 13 (2019): Issue 1 (July 2019)

Volume 12 (2018): Issue 2 (December 2018)

Volume 12 (2018): Issue 1 (July 2018)

Volume 11 (2017): Issue 2 (December 2017)

Volume 11 (2017): Issue 1 (July 2017)

Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics

 Journal of Nationalism, Memory &amp; Language Politics is a peer-reviewed journal published by De Gruyter on behalf of the Charles University.  It is committed to exploring divergent scholarly opinions, research and theories of current international academic experts, and is a forum for discussion and hopes to encourage free-thinking and debate among academics, young researchers and professionals over issues of importance to the politics of identity and memory as well as the political dimensions of language policy in the 20th and 21st centuries. The journal is indexed with and included in Google Scholar, EBSCO, CEEOL and SCOPUS.  We encourage research articles that employ qualitative or quantitative methodologies as well as empirical historical analyses regarding, but not limited to, the following issues:    Trends in nationalist development, whether historical or contemporary  Policies regarding national and international institutions of memory as well as investigations into the creation and/or dissemination of cultural memory  The implementation and political repercussions of language policies in various regional and global contexts  The formation, cohesion and perseverance of national or regional identity along with the relationships between minority and majority populations  The role ethnicity plays in nationalism and national identity  How the issue of victimhood contributes to national or regional self-perception  Priority is given to issues pertaining to the 20th and 21st century political developments   While our focus is on empirical articles, our scope remains open to exceptional theoretical works (especially if they incorporate empirical research), book reviews and translations.  Rejection Rate:   70%   Articles must adhere to the journal’s editorial policy and formal guidelines (including author-date Chicago Style). All manuscripts must undergo a double-blind peer review in line with the journal standards. Typically, decisions will be made and applicants will be notified within four months of submission. Accepted articles are not subject to any article processing charges (APC) and are published free of charge for the authors.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 