Paper short abstract:

Focusing on two local institutions in Czech Silesia, this ethnographic study explores a tension between the hegemonic narrative of essentialized Czechness and the grass-root Hlučín Museum's historical accounts of Silesian ‘Germanness’ and Silesian cultural hybridity and fluidity.

Paper long abstract:

There is a general agreement and widespread acceptance by the Czech majority population that the Czech Republic is a country of one language, one culture, one ethnicity, and one history. However, this hegemonic national narrative is being openly and systematically challenged by various social actors, who are employing diverse counter-narratives. In what follows, I present a fine-grained ethnographic study of a memory war between the hegemonic narrative of essentialized Czechness on one hand and vernacular counter-narratives of Silesian cultural hybridity and fluidity on the other, that are currently happening in the border region of Czech Silesia over its collective identity and cultural heritage. The first narrative is presented through my encounters with the work and views of academics at the provincial Silesian University in Opava. The bottom-up counter-narrative, depicted through my experience with the Hlučín Museum, represents its demotic counterpart. In particular, I explain how the hegemonic narrative, together with ‘methodological nationalism’ of Opavian academics leads to an overt promotion of homogenous Czech national identity and simultaneously also to a strong neglect of any traces of the pre-war German heritage. In the second case concerning the grass-root Hlučín Museum, I observed how local mnemonic actors, the Hlučíns, incorporate alternative historical accounts relating to Silesian ‘Germanness’ and to Silesian experiences of the Second World War into their museum exhibitions, treating it as Silesian ‘difficult heritage’.