They Shall—or Shall Not—Pass? Communist State Borders in the Czech Culture of Remembrance after 1989

Abstract

This article is part of the special section titled From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area, guest edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Libora Oates-Indruchová.

This article analyses the formation of the two mutually opposing memory poles of the communist past that crystalized in Czechia after 1989. To this end, it focuses on the issue of communist state borders, which slowly developed into one of the most controversial memory conflicts. Anti-communist Iron Curtain discourse established a new mainstream “national memory” using the previous border regime as a prime example of the non-democratic rule that violated values that were constitutive of liberal democratic order after 1989. Nevertheless, the Communists’ border discourse did not fade away after 1989. It was sustained by communist politicians, party members and former Border Guards. It still influences the public memory of state borders by stressing their legitimacy, legality, and ultimately the inevitability of protecting them. The search for unequivocal heroes and evil-doers of the communist state border regime strengthens this split memory and makes embracing its complexity hardly possible. The existence of these two opposing memory discourses, which refute one another, is not just an example of group conflict over the “right” memory. It also illustrates deep postcommunist divides in Czech society going beyond the watershed events of 1989.