The Croatian society is still coping with traumatizing events (World War II and civil war) and memories of them. The politics of memory, articulated by Tudjman´s strategy of generational and memory reconciliation of the society in the early 1990s, led to the relativization and even promotion of the pro-fascist Ustashe regime, and simultaneously to the marginalization and stigmatization of narratives relating to the role of national liberation struggle within multi-ethnic partisan movement. This also included members of local Czech minority. The study shows how - despite this - the narratives concerning the partisan resistance are still alive in family memory, and they form, through generational transmission, a value alternative to the contemporary nationally-oriented state ideology as well as to the cultural presentation of Czech minority. Family memory works as an autonomous ”intimate space/area” of expatriates in Croatia, which is based on searching for a generational value continuities in the period of post-communist social uncertainties.
The study deals with the content and transmission of “images” connected with forced displacement and the relating processes in two three-generation families. The families were chosen based on the oldest generation´s personal experience with the forced displacement after World War II (a family of “deported” Germans living in Germany today and a family of German origin remaining in Czechoslovakia after 1945). The analysis focusses on family memory, whereby the authors ask not only about the content of memories of persons who are part of the “generation of experience”, but also about the transmission of these contents down to the generation of children and grandchildren, as well as about in which way the follow-up generations came to terms with the experience of the oldest generation. The authors point out the importance of family memory to create the identity of persons participating in that memory, and they demonstrate one of possible types of family remembering, whereby the youngest and the oldest generation are its major participants (transgenerational remembering).
The Academy of Sciences Library has purchased a so far unknown illumination with Bohuslav Hasištejnský’s epitaph of Jan of Vartenberk († 1508) from the Swiss antiquarian bookshop Dr. Jörn Günther Rare Books AG. The illumination, Hasištejnský’s epitaph (with the meaning adjusted to the context) and the commemorative inscription present the figure of the Litoměřice Canon Jan of Vartenberk, who was sent to Pavia by Charles IV in 1355 to fetch the relics of St Vitus. We suppose that this illumination was probably made for Jan Jiří of Vartenberk as a component of a larger whole around 1615.