Monuments and Collective Memory
There was plenty of snow on the ground one Saturday in early December 2010 when my friends, Oksana and Viktor, and I decided we needed to go to Kosiv, a town in the Carpathians some fifty miles away from Chernivtsi. This small town on the Rybnytsya River in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast is well known as …
Continue reading “Remembering the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War in Western Ukraine”
I saw my first Soviet war memorial in Vienna when I was a grad student. I’d wandered onto Schwarzenbergplatz and, lo and behold, there it was: in front of a semi-circular white marble colonnade was a tall column topped by the figure of a Red Army soldier. He was wearing a gold helmet and had …
An obelisk honoring the “fallen military heroes” of the US Army’s First Infantry Division—the Big Red One, the army’s oldest—during the Second World War was unveiled outside Cheb, a small Western Bohemian town, on October 26, 1946 in connection with Czechoslovakia’s annual October 28 independence day activities. It is one of five that commemorates the …
Continue reading “The End of the First Infantry Division’s Second World War: Cheb”
Czechoslovakia’s political elites attempted to shape national memory after the Second World War by creating a popular narrative linking an “acceptable” past with the reconstructed state. Naming and commemorating helped establish a Czech national-historical version of the events of the interwar era and the war as they revised the character of private and public spaces …
Of Monuments and Memory