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 article focuses on the problem of „štatl“ of Brno and its inhabitants, the so called „štatlaři“. The term „štatl“ can signify the city of Brno itself, or the city center, but also a certain type of subculture and, in connection with the term „štatlaři“, the specific group of the inhabitants of Brno. The core of the article consists in the analysis of images and meanings connected with štatl and štatlaři, their image and interpretation in memories and the exploitation of their image at present (commercial use in advertising). Besides štatl, the article also reflects the specific language, the so called “hantec” that is inseparably connected with štatl. The chronological frame of the article is from the 1960s to the present, but it mentions also the so called “Brno stove” (plotna) from the beginning of the twentieth century that is often mentioned in connection with štatl. The methodological basis of research consisted in especial in oral history and analysis of documents. The basic sources for the article were interviews, memoirs and published scientific articles. The results of the analysis should serve on the one hand as contemporary interpretation of life of certain group of people in urban setting during the period of socialism, on the other hand for better understanding of the processes that are connected to the contemporary creation of local identities, as well as commercial use of cultural artifacts.
The International Oral History Association in collaboration with the University of Guadalajara and the Mexican Oral History Association sponsored a conference 23 to 27 September 2008 on the topic Oral History - a dialogue with our times. The academic program has accepted more than 650 submissions from oral history specialists from five continents. Among the topics are those that reflect upon the memories of violence and war, memory and politics, gender and so on. and Pavel Mücke.
The political changes after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Czechoslovakia fundamentally affected the life of society, including the form of education. The socialist concept of the unified school was abandoned in connection with the overall desire to decentralise and deregulate the structures created during the period of state socialism. However, the immediate impact on the life of schools can vary locally and be influenced by the nature of the environment. The study focusses on the context in which these changes impacted the everyday life of elementary schools in rural South Moravia, and it traces local specificities by analysing school chronicles and the memories of teachers who experienced the period of transformation in rural schools. It focusses in particular on personnel changes, the transformation of the relationship between schools and municipalities, and the dynamics of the influence of long-term processes of modernisation and political changes on school life.
This treatise presents the interpretative research on newly created sources which emerged from oral-historical interviews with protagonists from an association of military re-enactment of diverse conflicts from the 18th through 20th centuries, which are active primarily in the Czech Republic, but also in Central Europe,
and also with a relating group of narrators who serve in the Czech Army´s Active Reserve. The vast majority of research on military
re-enactment focusses on the research into three interconnected
problems of authenticity, historical authority, and reflexivity self-consciousness). However, this text focusses newly on the problem of loyalty. Interviews are aimed at the experience of this specific group of narrators with their military service, performed at the time of normalization and transformation after 1989, especially
in relation to the issue of ambivalent loyalty to the political regime
for which they took an oath during their military service. This experience is analysed in relation to non-contradictory and strong
loyalty, felt to the experienced and performed values, which were perceived as being key values for historical military cultures of a specific re-enactment period or conflict, by which the participants express their loyalty through similar rituals of a military oath. The key research question is how this loyalty, experienced in relation
to historical military culture (at one sub-group of narrators even interconnected with their membership in the Active Reserve), relates, in a conflicting way, to the loyalty which was required to the former Czechoslovak People´s Army, or to later forces of democratic Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic, during compulsory military service performed by the narrators.
This paper is based on a study which was conducted within the research grant ''Institutions in Life Stories. Multilevel Comparative Analysis of Biographical Narratives of Three Groups of Participants in Czech Society in 20th Century''. The aim of this research was both to describe one possible way of using a corpus to identify relevant differences between three types of text (in this case biographical narratives of three groups of speakers: communist officials, dissidents and so-called common people) and to serve as a basis for further analysis (be it a linguistic, sociological or historical analysis). We tried to point out typical features of the language of each group based on the most frequent expressions (nouns, adjectives etc.) and especially collocations. We also compared the corpus Příběhy (Stories) as a whole with the ORAL2008 corpus of synchronic spoken Czech, the SYN2005 corpus of synchronic written Czech and the Totalita corpus (a corpus of communist propaganda).
The study acquaints the readers with the life story of one of the leading personalities of Czech ethnology in the second half of the 20th century - University Professor PhDr. Antonín Robek, DrSc. - the leader of the Department of Ethnography and Folkloristics at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, and the accredited director of the Institute of Ethnography and Folkloristics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The biographical sketch is based on the combination of biographical research, oral history method and analysis of historical sources. The resulting image is an intersection of the fundamentally subjective memories that the oldest and middle generations of Czech ethnographers and ethnologists have of Antonín Robek, with hitherto (un)published information about his person and activities.
.
Constitutive meeting of the Czech Oral History Association took part on 8th January 2007 in the Academy building. The method of oral history in Eastern Europe is less prevalent than in the West so the meeting was some kind of breakthrough. and Pavel Mücke.
Při zpracování oficiálních písemnosti vzešlých z činnosti různých složek bývalé Československé akademie věd (řídící orgány, výzkumné ústavy) bylo již na počátku sedmdesátých let 20. století zjevné, že jejich informační hodnota jako historického pramene je značně limitovaná. K doplnění celistvého obrazu vývoje české a československé vědy v druhé polovině 20. století jsou proto v Archivu Akademie věd ČR (dříve Ústřední archiv ČSAV) zaznamenávány řízené rozhovory s vybranými pamětníky z řad vědců i pracovníků aparátu akademie věd. Tímto způsobem postupně vznikla sbírka nahrávek rozhovorů a její katalog je zde předkládán. Vedle nejzákladnějších údajů o respondentovi je obsah každého interview zachycen ve stručných heslech a poté krátce zhodnocen. Rozhovory přinášejí velmi cenné a nezřídka unikátní informace o fungování ČSAV, o dobových souvislostech a podmínkách vědecké práce. V úvodní stati je vylíčen vývoj použití metod orální historie v Achivu AV ČR a neúspěšné snahy téhož archivu koordinovat práce v tomto oboru mezi archivy akademií věd socialistických zemí v 80. letech., Witnesses and cooperators of the history of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The collection of interviews in the Archive of the Academy of Sciences It was evident already at the beginning of 1970s, during processing of official documents from the activities of the management and research institutes of the former Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, that their value as a historical source is limited. For this reason, witnesses chosen from scientists, scholars, and officials of the Academy of Sciences were interviewed to provide a more complete and compact picture of Czech and Czechoslovak sciences in the second half of the 20th century. The interviews records gradually accumulated, and their catalogue is submitted here. Besides basic data on each respondent, the content of each interview is conveyed in short entries and then briefly reviewed. The interviews bring rich and often unique information on the operation of the Academy of Sciences and on contemporary relations and conditions for research. The introduction describes the use of oral history in the Archive of the Academy of Sciences and the efforts of the Archive to coordinate work among archives of the academies of sciences of the so-called socialistic countries during the 1980s. (Translated by Hana Barvíková.), and Překlad resumé: Hana Barvíková