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Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses stories regarding everyday life in the socialist time told over family photographs by old(er) generations to their (grand)children and asks how family recollections of the socialist past are transmitted within the family.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on a project which has been recently carried out in the Czech and Slovak Republics. The (grand)children at the age of 14-18 years asked their (grand)parents for choosing the most important/significant photographs from the family albums regarding the socialist period. (Grand)Parents were to describe them and discuss situations depicted at the chosen photographs. The collection of personal memories represents an interesting data file documenting both individual and collective memories, the ambiguous ways of remembering of the socialist past and - last but not least - the mechanism of passing on family memory to younger generations. It helps us to understand "how people are both an object and a subject of the world and history in their social and cultural sphere, or how they experience their reality and how they keep creating it" (Lüdtke 2001: 563).

In my paper I draw my attention not only to topics that have been chosen using photographs as important/significant for the socialist past (topics related to the most important fields of everyday and public life, and social structures in socialism) but also to ways of narrative transmission of attitudes and values, meanings and images of the socialist past within the family. In my analysis I am also aware of the fact that though investigating the period prior to 1989, my research is both about the remembered past and the present situation of remembering.