Nostalgic Anti-Communism? Contesting the Socialist Past through Cinema in the Czech Republic

Abstract: The opening of the controversial Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in 2007 marked a discursive shift in the Czech Republic, with the socialist past becoming a newly reactivated site of contestation. As elsewhere in the region, the late 1990s and the 2000s saw a wave of nostalgia in relation to the socialist past in the Czech Republic, but recent years have been marked by a reinvigorated institutional anti-communist discourse, consolidated, for instance, in the 2011 act which equated resistance against the communist regime with that against the Nazi occupation. In light of these changes, is nostalgia still a meaningful paradigm through which to understand socialist memory in the Czech Republic?  This paper seeks to address the changing responses of culture and institutions to the legacy of socialism in recent years by focusing on cinematic representations of the socialist era and their interactions with institutional forms of remembrance, such as educational projects in schools. Two main representational trends can be identified: nostalgic portrayals of everyday life via small and personal stories, and grand tragic narratives with clear educational intentions. The paper will propose that viewing nostalgia and anti-communism as two opposing means of dealing with the socialist past, though seemingly intuitive, is a false dichotomy. Through their thematization not of socialist utopia, but of a longing for reliving resistance against the communist regime, nostalgic representations are not necessarily at odds with anti-communist sentiment present in more didactic representational projects, and ultimately support institutionally dominant political agendas.