Spatial Creativity as a Method: Resounding Lidice,Sacralization of Silence and Gendered Representations of Trauma at the Lidice Memorial

Abstract

After forty years of Communist control of collective memory in public space, in the decades since 1989 all post-socialist countries have witnessed intensive institutional efforts to either reinterpret and resignify existing monuments and memorials of the recent past or build entirely new memorial landscapes. These official projects have exhibited varying degrees of continuity and change in the spatial and gendered constructions of heroism, victimhood, and perpetration, as well as notions of national belonging and collective inclusion/exclusion. As space has been used as a major narrative medium of official, national histories of Nazism and Communism, accordingly, spatial creativity has emerged as a corresponding reaction by diverse actors to express disagreement, outrage, solidarity, or alternative versions of the recent past. The article analyzes one such example of spatial creativity in the post-socialist landscape of the Czech Republic, the spatial audiodrama project Resounding Lidice. Through this case study, the article examines spatial creativity as a stimulating concept to broaden our understanding of post-socialist dealings with the recent past of violence and trauma. The article explores three central questions: How can creativity contribute to democratization of commemorative practices? How can we break the cult of death and reverential silence that often dominate memorial landscapes? How can we support a complex treatment of gender at memorial sites? The article argues that spatial creativity can function as a method to challenge hegemonical commemorative practices; as a form of collective activism, reconciliation, and intergenerational dialogue; and as an opportunity to transcend conventional gendered constructions of collective memory.

For centuries, historical triumphs and losses have been communicated through the use of space as a narrative medium. Scholars from various disciplines have analyzed the complex relationship of history, memory, and landscape. ¹ While the intense process of national monument building, which accompanied the rise of modern states in Europe, culminated sometime between the second half of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, the period after World War II (WWII) was marked by a fundamentally changed attitude toward the politics of memory and public space. Commemorative practices of trauma, collective mourning, and historical responsibility have gradually replaced the emphasis on monumental structures that celebrated the heroism and victories of national struggles. ² More sophisticated ways of remembering supplanted the building of descriptive monuments, a key element of modern nationalism. Narrative structures of heroic figures, what Barry Schwartz called the “registers of sacred history,” were replaced by trends toward egalitarianism, equity, and conscious efforts to symbolically remember and integrate all historical actors, not just warriors, leaders, and great personalities. ³

After forty years of communist domination and control of collective memory in public space, post-socialist countries have witnessed intensive institutional efforts to either reinterpret and resignify existing monuments and memorials of the recent past, or to build entirely new memorial landscapes. ⁴ These official projects have exhibited varying degrees of continuity and change in the spatial and gendered constructions of heroism, victimhood, and perpetration, as well as national belonging and collective inclusion/exclusion. As space has been used as a major narrative medium of official national histories of Nazism and communism, diverse actors have used spatial creativity—defined as a complex interplay of layered spaces, the use of sound and other senses, agency, and interaction by participants—to express disagreement, outrage, solidarity, or alternative versions of the recent past. ⁵ This article analyzes one such example of spatial creativity in the post-socialist landscape of the Czech Republic, the living audiodrama project Resounding Lidice. Through this case study, the article explores spatial creativity as a concept to broaden our understanding of post-socialist dealings with the recent past of violence and trauma.

By interpreting memorial landscapes as open-ended symbolic systems and employing an intersectional gender analysis, this article explores three central questions. How can creativity contribute to more inclusive and critically open commemorative practices of a violent past in the post-socialist context? How can we break the cult of death and reverential silence that has often dominated memorial landscapes as the only acceptable way of remembering a traumatic past? How can we support a complex treatment of gender at memorial landscapes? The Resounding Lidice artists challenged hegemonical commemorative practices by using methods of spatial creativity, fostering collective activism, stimulating intergenerational communication, and transcending conventional gendered constructions of collective memory. Their experimental methods and unofficial content could not break the post-communist memory politics in Lidice, or the Czech Republic more broadly, but they showed spatial creativity as a method of coming to terms with a traumatic past. ⁶

The thought-provoking, technologically complex, and innovative audiodrama project Resounding Lidice was designed in 2012 by local citizens and artists. They aimed to provide a creative contribution to the official commemorations held as part of the seventieth anniversary of one of the most traumatic episodes in Czech modern history and a key event for the construction of Czech national history and identity—the annihilation of Lidice, a small village razed by the Nazis in 1942. ⁷ The project, however, met with a fierce rejection by the official Lidice Memorial museum, village authorities, most survivors, and their descendants. ⁸ These opponents considered their negative assessment of the project self-evident, rational, and historically correct, but their categorical dismissal and the argumentation used were far from obvious. Creative and unofficial memory projects can highlight issues that official sites cannot and demonstrate that both collective memory and memorial landscapes are indeed dynamic. ⁹ By allowing the Czech public to interact with an official memorial site, Resounding Lidice invited new discussions about the relationship between collective memory and memorial landscapes in a post-socialist context.

Contextualizing the Lidice Memorial and Resounding Lidice

The Lidice Memorial is one of the most important memorial landscapes in the Czech Republic. ¹⁰ While most Czech sites and commemorative practices of collective memory of trauma related to WWII underwent some degree of revision after 1989, official politics of remembering at the Lidice Memorial have remained remarkably stable since the end of the war. ¹¹ To discuss the tensions between the official and unofficial commemorative practices at the memorial and analyze the concept of spatial creativity in the Resounding Lidice project, a brief historical contextualization of the site and the communist appropriation of Lidice are necessary to set the stage.

Lidice was a small village near Prague with 503 inhabitants at the beginning of WWII. On 10 June 1942, based on a direct order from Adolf Hitler, the village became the site of an annihilation massacre by Nazi soldiers as a retaliation for the assassination of the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich in Prague on 27 May 1942. During the massacre, all 173 adult men over the age of fifteen were shot to death in the garden of one of the houses, all women and 105 children were taken to the nearby town of Kladno, and the entire village was burned down and leveled to the ground. Twenty-six village residents who were not present in Lidice on the day of the massacre were shot to death days later at the execution grounds in Kobylisy, Prague. Among them was a worker, dragged to the execution with a leg cast from the Kladno hospital, and two young boys, who had just turned fifteen only a few days earlier. Three days after the massacre, the women and children kept in the gym of Kladno high school were separated. The women were taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp; eighty-eight children were sent to the Chełmno concentration camp, where eighty-two of them were murdered in gas vans. Only two children were deemed eligible for adoption by racially pure German families. The systematic, precalculated brutality of the massacre did not stop at murdering the village inhabitants and blowing up all the private houses and public buildings. By 3 July 1942, over one hundred men from the working units of the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD), the Waffen-SS, and the Wehrmacht platoon Morigl worked for over twenty-thousand hours to disintegrate and remove all construction material from the devastated site. The village’s annihilation ended only in 1943 with the destruction of the nearby cemetery and creek. All material evidence of the formerly existing village disappeared, and until 1945 the empty terrain was marked only by signs forbidding entrance onto the grounds. ¹²

A total of 143 Lidice women who survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, arriving in the village of Kročehlavy near Kladno, along with only seventeen children who survived the war. In 1947, the local and state authorities decided to rebuild Lidice just three hundred meters from the original site. Reconstruction started in May 1948, three months after the Communist Party took control of Czechoslovakia. Hundreds of volunteers from across the country and abroad built the first houses by 1949, and the rest of the village (including a municipal building, a post office, a cultural building, a shopping center, and 150 identical private houses) was completed by the mid-1950s. Every Lidice woman and every fully orphaned child were entitled to a house as part of the massive state effort to support the survivors of the Nazi massacre. ¹³

Alongside the unwavering and generous support of women and children, who lived through the terror during the war and were forced to suffer the traumatic physical and emotional consequences of the event after the war, the Czechoslovak socialist state also created a useful symbol and a narrative tool of remembering the war for its own ideological purposes. ¹⁴ The Lidice Memorial and its annual commemorative ritual became cornerstones of a new Czechoslovak postwar national identity, which centered its self-conceptualization around the combined wartime heroism of the Communist Party and the collective memory of random Nazi brutality against innocent Czechs. The ideological construction of the Lidice massacre as the pivotal event of WWII in Czechoslovakia, and the orchestration of public memory through the memorial landscape and commemorative practices at the Lidice Memorial, constructed a simplified, self-centered, and ideologically charged official narrative of Czech innocence and victimization during the war. In this account, the communist Czechoslovak state purposefully diminished the Jewish Holocaust, completely ignored the Romani Holocaust, and legitimized the postwar expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia. ¹⁵

Red Army soldiers built the first informal memorial immediately after the end of the war in June 1945 at the site of the mass grave of the murdered Lidice men. ¹⁶ The history of an institutionalized Lidice Memorial dates from the early 1950s when the state socialist authorities created the first museum at the edge of the former village. In 1955, the Rose Garden of Peace and Friendship opened, connecting the memorial grounds with the new village. In 1962, a new museum, overlooking the memorial grounds, was opened and the Lidice Memorial was declared a “cultural monument.” The museum held annual commemorative services and hosted hundreds of school groups and educational programs every year, thus shaping the collective understanding of the history of both WWII and the postwar period in Czechoslovakia. After the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, the Lidice Memorial experienced a decade of neglect because of the intense interest in the period of state socialism, overshadowing the Memorial. In 2001, the Czech Ministry of Culture declared the area a Cultural National Heritage site and the Lidice Memorial a state cultural organization, thus assuming institutional authority and control of both the site and the collective memory of the Lidice tragedy. During the 2000s, the Memorial renewed the Rose Garden of Peace and Friendship; expanded the memorial site by adding an art gallery, an educational center, and a research room; and opened an interactive permanent exhibition. ¹⁷ The Lidice Memorial, together with the village authorities, the surviving women, and their descendants became the uncompromising and unquestioned gatekeepers of official commemorative practices in Lidice.

Their authority over public memory in Lidice was first challenged in 2012, when a group of local activists and artists decided to contribute the audiodrama Resounding Lidice to the seventieth anniversary of the annihilation of Lidice. The project originated in the late 2000s when Vilém Faltýnek, his wife Lenka, and their small children moved to Tuchlovice, a village, located near the Lidice Memorial. Lenka Faltýnková was born in Kladno district, so the surrounding villages, towns, fields, and nature, all loaded with the heavy and traumatic history of Lidice’s annihilation, were part of her daily life since childhood. Violence leaves traces and shapes future possibilities, so the Faltýneks soon felt that their sense of citizenry and belonging was deeply intertwined with the commemorations at the Lidice Memorial. ¹⁸

The audiodrama Resounding Lidice is a technologically inventive, creative project. It combines authentic memories of survivors of the Lidice tragedy, collected by the Faltýneks, with fictional dialogues written by Czech writer Tereza Semotamová. The Czech and German language versions of the audiodrama were recorded in a radio studio with sixty Czech and German adult and child actors as a series of sixty-five independent, fragmented dialogues and monologues. The authors then spent hours in the archives to figure out the precise location of all 102 private houses and public buildings, which stood in Lidice before the 1942 massacre. A crucial part of the project is an audio-guide application for a smartphone with an Android operating system, which accompanies the visitor through the Lidice Memorial landscape. The application includes a virtual map with a list of places, integrated through Global Positioning System (GPS), where the audio guide starts playing dialogues from the audiodrama. ¹⁹

The focal point of the Lidice Memorial landscape, surrounded by the museum building, the Rose Garden, the edge of the new village, and a distant forest line, is the large empty field where the original village once stood. As visitors walk through the empty meadow of the Memorial site, the application automatically plays dialogues into their headphones from the daily life of the villagers before the tragedy. Dialogues start at forty-three locations of the former buildings. Visitors walk through an empty site, but through the dialogues and monologues activated by their bodily movement at relevant locations of the original village, they feel like they are walking through the actual streets: turning corners where they used to be intersections; passing the school and church where they once stood; hearing characteristic sounds from shops; listening to a dialogue of a small girl with an older woman; eavesdropping on a romantic date of a young couple; and witnessing a quarrel between spouses. The project application has advanced technological functions, such as intelligent mixing of the dialogues, to change to new dialogues if the listener exits a given space and enters a new zone before the previous dialogue is over. A layering of dialogues enables the application to remember the listener’s route and react to it. If a visitor walks twice through the same place, the application automatically plays a different dialogue from a repertoire of dialogues connected to the given spot, so the visitor does not listen twice to the same piece. The application even registers from which cardinal directions visitors enter the memorial site and plays the dialogues accordingly. ²⁰

In 2012, the audiodrama was ready to be launched. For the seventieth anniversary of the tragedy, the Lidice Memorial planned an ambitious, broadly conceived cultural event with Resounding Lidice premiering on 9 June. The director of Lidice Memorial, Milouš Červencl, promised a “very powerful experience.” ²¹ During the preparations, the Lidice Memorial agreed to support the project not only by promoting it as an anniversary event but also through a direct collaboration. Visitors to the Lidice Memorial were supposed to receive the audio guides and headphones when exiting the museum’s permanent exhibition and entering the memorial site. In early 2012, it became clear that Resounding Lidice offered visitors an individualized, uncontrolled, and creative way to experience the Memorial site. As a result, the museum leaders, the village authorities, some of the survivors, and their descendants instigated a fierce and irreconcilable attack on the project. ²²

The opponents of the project articulated two main concerns. First, the fact that the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft (SGL) supported the project financially. ²³ That contribution amounted to only 8,000 CZK (equivalent to 320 EUR in 2012) of the total expense of about 3 million CZK, but the Lidice Memorial, some women survivors, and their descendants condemned the SGL’s participation in the project. ²⁴ As the Lidice mayor Veronika Kellerová stated, “the memorial site is no place for reconciliation.” ²⁵ With the agreement of the project authors, the SGL withdrew its contribution. Gradually, however, a second major concern surfaced as critics voiced another reason to reject the project: its creativity was seen as the antithesis of “historical truth.” By being creative, the project allegedly lessened the collective memory of the tragedy and dishonored the memorial site.

Conceptualizing Spatial Creativity

“No memorial speaks for itself,” noted Derek Dwyer and Owen Alderman, arguing that all memorials are dependent on the ways in which diverse audiences interact with them and thus create (or challenge or betray) the meanings vested into them by their designers. ²⁶ Critical reflections of slavery, together with colonialism and the complex nature of complicity for the Holocaust, contribute to the consensus that the distinction between monuments (as structures celebrating victories) and memorials (as structures dealing with losses) creates a false duality and is analytically unproductive. ²⁷ To bring the complexity and fluidity of commemorative processes together, Dwyer and Alderman proposed the concept of a “memorial (or heritage) landscape.” ²⁸ To analyze the sacralization of the memorial site, the gendered representations of trauma at Lidice Memorial, and the spatial creativity of Resounding Lidice, I borrow their concept, along with their analytical frames and metaphors for approaching and studying memorial landscapes as text, arena, and performance.

Authoritarian regimes during state socialism most often used a combination of ideological sedimentation and coercion to impose their preferred interpretations of the past and elicit corresponding behavior at memorial spaces. In post-socialist times, memorial landscapes have opened to a multiplicity of actors and audiences who started to interpret moral imperatives, authority, and authenticity in diverse ways. ²⁹ Battles over the authenticity of memorial landscapes and authority over commemorative practices thus offer an interesting analytic opportunity to examine such relationships. James Young famously theorized the concepts of “anti-memorial” or “counter-memorial” to underscore the ambivalences and insecurities of national narratives. Instead of celebrating the unproblematic heroes and martyrs, anti-memorials focus on own historical mistakes, crimes, and exclusions. ³⁰ Critiquing the “straight-forward aesthetic” of conventional monuments and memorials, Ágnes Erőss argued that counter-memorials are especially relevant in post-socialist societies because their “living dimension” contributes to democratization by exposing social tensions and political discussions over cultural norms and values. ³¹

My own conceptualization of spatial creativity as an analytical tool is inspired by scholars and artists who in the past two decades creatively critiqued hegemonical practices of selective remembering and forgetting through spatial forms. Creativity is a widely used concept in academic fields ranging from cognitive psychology and urban studies to public space design and architecture. While a common topic of cultural history, consumerism, and material culture, it is much less often used to study connections between collective memory and memorial landscapes. ³² At the same time, memorial landscapes are often imbued with a dose of creativity that challenges undisputed historical narratives and offers alternative ways of coming to terms with a traumatic past. In 2000, the Jewish Museum in Berlin introduced in its Memory Void, one of the symbolic spaces in the building, an art installation titled Shalekhet—Fallen Leaves by Israeli sculptor Menashe Kadishman. The installation consists of more than ten thousand metal faces with open mouths cut from heavy iron plates that cover the floor of the void, inviting the visitors to start walking over them. ³³

In 2007, Canadian historian and artist Sorouja Moll started an annual provocative Writing Names Project, chalk-writing the names of over one thousand missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls on the sidewalks of Canadian cities. First, Moll wrote alone. Later, onlookers started to join her, turning from spectators into practitioners, wanting “to do something,” to actively challenge the historical ignorance and exclusions in Canadian national history. ³⁴ In 2012, Mexican artist Elina Chauvet created her acclaimed Zapatos Rojos, a traveling memorial to the murdered women of Quintana Roo, Mexico, which consisted of hundreds of pairs of red women’s shoes of all types and sizes spread around large city squares as a provocative reminder of the loss, absence, and lack of care for marginalized memories in the collective consciousness. ³⁵ In 2014, activists and historians from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences created a living counter-memorial in front of the official Memorial to the Victims of German Occupation at the Freedom Square in Budapest. The memorial, which presents Hungary as a victim of Nazi occupation and is completely devoid of any references to the Holocaust, was erected by the ruling Fidesz party despite objections voiced by both scholars and the public. The protesters thus literally occupied the space in front of the official memorial with objects of daily life, personal belongings, and photos of Hungarian Jews murdered in the Holocaust, creating an alternative spatial reminder to protest the “forgery of history.” ³⁶

While commenting on different historical events in different geographical or cultural contexts, these projects share an artistic approach to dealing with the collective memory of violence and trauma, which they articulate through a creative engagement with space. Moll’s project exists only when people actively write the names of the murdered Indigenous women and girls. The fewer people write, the smaller the memorial. As soon as it rains, the memorial disappears. Similarly, Kadishman’s installation is a powerful and emotionally challenging commentary on connections between the past and the present. In Shalekhet, visitors activate the chilling “crying” of the thousands of mouths with their own steps as the metal faces crushed by their feet clang over each other. The more people walk over the faces, the louder the crying. Such embodied engagement makes it impossible to escape inner contemplations of one’s own personal responsibility and participation in moments of violence and injustice surrounding one’s existence.

The project most similar to Resounding Lidice is The Invisible Camp—Audio Walk Gusen, persuasively analyzed by Tanja Schult. ³⁷ Audio Walk Gusen is an artistic sound collage of the former WWII concentration camps in Gusen, created by Austrian artist Christoph Mayer in 2007. Like the audiodrama Resounding Lidice, Mayer’s Audio Walk Gusen covers a historical site with audio narrative via MP3 player. Unlike Resounding Lidice, it is firmly situated within the field of Holocaust Studies where the term “performative,” Schult writes, “captures the tension between the moral obligations of ‘never forget’ and ‘never again.’” ³⁸ Accordingly, in the audio guide in Gusen the visitors listen to the survivors of the camp, who were forced to witness acts of extreme violence, such as “the murder of small children who were put into bags and smashed against a wall until they were dead.” ³⁹ Seventy years later, through the traumatic experiences shared by the survivors, visitors are forced to witness as well. Schult sees Audio Walk Gusen as “an exceptional artwork.” Her analysis strives to capture “a sense of the aesthetic experience” and to mediate “a sense of emotional experience” that the project provides. ⁴⁰

While Mayer’s artistic sound collage uses spatial creativity to expose crimes, to retroactively empower survivors, and to come to terms with and reconcile with the violent past, Resounding Lidice takes a different approach to both sound and space, thus inviting new questions and explorations. Unlike Mayer’s project, which directs visitors where to go and then to press the audio, in Resounding Lidice visitors activate the audio through their own bodily movement as they walk the former village grounds. Resounding Lidice also does not concentrate on the Nazi crime itself but rather on the life in the village before the massacre. The visitors’ movement through the memorial ground is narrated not by survivors but by professional actors. By focusing on an ordinary day before the tragedy and by filling the audio guide with actor-performed dialogues from a drama play, the project purposefully and creatively challenges the cult of death and reverential silence surrounding the memorial grounds.

The Sacralization of Silence and the Challenge to the Sacred Grounds

Space has more than a metaphorical meaning, since memorial landscapes do not function only as “memory containers.” Through the construction of memorial landscapes, collective memory, national identity, and social relationships are directly formed, reinforced, or challenged. ⁴¹ The Lidice Memorial is a uniquely complex structure with material, symbolic, discursive, and above all human dimensions. At the center of the Memorial and its commemorative practices is not only the past violence, but also the survivors themselves. The Lidice women who survived the massacre and the annihilation of the village in 1942, and their children and descendants, are considered the most important, active, and powerful actors. Along with the village and museum authorities, these victims consider themselves the owners of the collective memory and the physical space of the Lidice tragedy. The fact that for more than eighty years most of them lived in the new Lidice, directly next to the memorial landscape of the annihilated village, only strengthens these material and symbolic ties. ⁴²

The reverent area of the Lidice memorial landscape qualifies as a “sacred ground,” as theorized by Katharina Schramm. ⁴³ Its meaning is considered self-evident and indisputable by Czech history textbooks and in the public discourse. The violent past determines the site’s present meaning, while the narrative figures of the survivors render the inexplicable legible. The (gendered) spatial choreography of the memorial site gravitates toward two sacred centers, the Children’s Memorial and the mass grave of the murdered men, guarded by the mourning women statues nearby. The surrounding emptiness accentuates the inevitability of a single interpretation, further supported by all the activities and the discourses of the museum, the Lidice authorities, and the associations representing the survivors. The sacralization of the trauma experienced by the survivors and their descendants has been facilitated by the endless repetition of the annual commemoration and reinforced by the cult of reverent silence, historically required and culturally accepted as the only legitimate and respectful way to encounter the memorial landscape and the collective memory of Lidice.

Thomas Laqueur warns that trends toward sacralization are dangerous because they reinforce hegemonical interpretations of the past and prevent more objective historical research. ⁴⁴ Sacralization of collective memory and silence also prevent the active engagement of ordinary citizens and undermine their agency. Individuals and groups of people might disagree on the “proper” representation of the past and related commemorative practices. The insistence of cultural institutions on controlling the only appropriate ways of remembering thus inevitably leads to social conflict. Resounding Lidice also elicited conflict over challenges to the institutionally produced sacred grounds. When asked to evaluate the conflict between the Lidice Memorial and the Resounding Lidice authors for the Czech public radio, respected intellectual and historian Pavel Kosatík remarked, “You know, I don’t think that the memorial site or Lidice as such belong only to the people who work there, the survivors or other people who have created a strange power bond to Lidice and think that they themselves can make all decisions. I think, Ms. Senková [the reporter], . . . that Lidice is as much yours as it is mine.” ⁴⁵

The goal of Resounding Lidice was to “contribute to the collective memory of the Lidice tragedy in a way that is a bit different and creative, and also to address new generations,” explained Vilém Faltýnek. ⁴⁶ Lenka Faltýnková added that they were “looking for a way to enrich the memorial site but not disrupt it. From the beginning it was clear that it is impossible with traditional means.” ⁴⁷ Their innovative approach created a completely original memorial soundscape. The authors always explicitly acknowledged the audiodrama as a work of art, but its elusiveness and uncontrollability irritated the Lidice authorities, used to having full control over the memorial site and all practices related to the collective memory of Lidice.

For Antonín Nešpor of the Civic organization Lidice (Občanské sdružení Lidice) Resounding Lidice “dilutes history. That’s unacceptable, especially at the memorial space, even though it’s a work of art. Only truth or silence belong on the reverent area.” ⁴⁸ Klára Kalibová, the granddaughter of one of the longest-living survivors Miloslava Kalibová and a vocal opponent of Resounding Lidice, agreed, arguing that the “project does not resemble the memory of the survivors and does not correspond to reality.” ⁴⁹ Like many others, she considered the project’s focus on everyday life before the tragedy outrageous, dishonoring the memory of the survivors and lessening the tragedy itself: “You can learn in it that in Lidice kids went to school, young people dated each other, people washed clothing and cooked lunch. But you will not learn that these people died, and how they died.” On the seventieth anniversary of the tragedy, Kalibová shared with journalists her satisfaction that the Lidice Museum denounced Resounding Lidice, noting that “the memorial site is not a golf course.” ⁵⁰

Not all Lidice survivors and descendants, however, shared such dismissive opinions about Resounding Lidice. František Kolář, the son of a Lidice woman who survived the war but lost her entire large family, considered the project valuable. Interestingly, he addressed the same issues as Kalibová but interpreted them as worthwhile additions to the commemorative experience. “The project is trying to communicate to visitors that they are standing at a place where real people lived. He [or she] can hear in the headphones what people might have talked about at home without knowing that such a tragedy is about to come,” Kolář said to highlight the spatial value of the project. ⁵¹ His family lived in the Lidice area before the tragedy, in a house not included in the official memorial site because it (and a few others) was too far from the construction of the memorial reverent area. Standing among trees and bushes behind a road which cuts the memorial site in half, Kolář pointed out that “this was Lidice, too. As much as the houses in the center. Why is this not a part of the memorial site as well? In Resounding [Lidice], you at least learn about this fact.” ⁵² Kolář’s position demonstrates that the identification of memory with space is not uniformed or fixed but always contested, constantly produced and reproduced by different people.

Sadly, only the opinions of those who rejected or denounced the project were considered by Lidice authorities as relevant and legitimate. Both the mayor of Lidice and the organization Lidice Women (Lidické ženy) presented their dismissive view of Resounding Lidice as unified. Speaking for all, the mayor argued that the “Lidice citizens do not wish to see the Resounding Lidice Project at the Lidice memorial site.” Speaking “on behalf of the survivors,” she further claimed that they “do not like the fabulized texts [because] they do not bring anything new to the history of Lidice. On the contrary, [the survivors] are afraid that the memorial grounds are going to be dishonored by the texts. . . . Our feeling is that the audiodrama should be realized in a radio or on TV but not on the memorial grounds themselves, which should be respected as a space of quiet, piety, and contemplation. Certainly not in this sense. . . . We all agree, there is absolutely no disagreement here. . . . The project can exist, but it must be reworked in a way that suits Lidice as well.” ⁵³

Miroslav Kaliba, a former mayor of Lidice, similarly argued that “residents do not object to the audioproject as such but [it must be] outside of the real place where people lived their real lives and also lost those real lives,” adding that “victims have the right to remain silent.” ⁵⁴ There is no question that victims have the right to be silent. What is noteworthy is that silence was somehow seen as more authentic than sound. Silence is seemingly reverential and dignified, but it is also passive and obedient. Only silence, however, was articulated by the opponents of the project as compatible with the institutionally endorsed, controlled narrative of the Lidice tragedy. Survivors and descendants who expressed agreement with and acceptance of the project, such as Kolář, were deemed as troublemakers who “lack respect.” ⁵⁵

Only the women survivors and their descendants who rejected the project were allowed to have a voice in the Lidice memorial landscape. It was a highly controlled and scripted collective voice, appropriated by the Memorial and village authorities as the only way to not be silent. The site’s authenticity was rhetorically reinforced as the objective evidence of the past and silence was equated with historical truth accompanying spatial authenticity. The central question is how to break the cult of silence and death that dominate the acceptable ways of remembering at the memorial landscape? Is there an alternative to just inserting ourselves into a memorial culture and adopting a pre-existing script? The answer, offered by Resounding Lidice, was spatial creativity.

Spatial creativity needs the embodied, active, and performative participation of the viewer/listener. The visitor becomes an active maker of commemorative practice. As Moll observed, from a passive witness the observer becomes an active practitioner, a transformation that frees the visitor from institutional oversight. ⁵⁶ The most threatening aspect of spatial creativity is the embodied interaction that creates meaning. Jillian Rickly-Boyd invoked “existential authenticity” to highlight the relationship between space and experience, agency, and spatial awareness. ⁵⁷ Individualistic interactive creativity and imagination cannot be institutionally controlled. People who cannot actively take part in their national heritage become passive recipients of official history from above, and thus docile citizens. The spatial creativity of Resounding Lidice exposed the authoritarian grip and the sense of ownership of the Lidice Memorial institutions over the Lidice memorial site, and their unwillingness to democratize commemorative practices. The opposing positionalities of subject/object, active/passive, and recipient/participant articulated in the conflict over the project suggested that creativity was incompatible with a singular, hegemonic understanding of a “historical truth.”

For Moll, “embodied performative acts can acknowledge and honor those who have been forgotten.” ⁵⁸ The women and men of Lidice were never forgotten but their acknowledgment and memory, even though culturally significant and nationally revered, has been kept under exclusive institutional control, unavailable for any meaningful engagement and dialogue. When Resounding Lidice offered spatial creativity as a new way of engaging with the traumatic memory of the past, the attempt was not only rejected but also discredited as illegitimate, disrespectful, and inappropriate. However, this was not the end of the project. Not because the two sides would continue to argue and keep the conflict alive but because the project, using both innovative technology and spatial creativity, built an alternative memorial landscape in an individualized sound experience.

Through the creative engagement of sound, the authors unlocked the fourth dimension, creating a new individualized memorial soundscape, grafted onto the physical memorial site, and activated exclusively by human movement. Such commemorative practice requires an active participant since it can be activated only through the participant’s embodied engagement. One cannot just look or listen. The visitor must walk through the site to activate and materialize the traces of the past in the soundscape with his or her own movement. The acoustic space in the headphones challenges the way we experience and remember the memorial landscape, engage with collective memory, and become an integral part of it. Most importantly, such ways of engaging with the memorial landscape are outside of institutional management and supervision, beyond anyone’s control.

By its very existence, the spatial creativity in Resounding Lidice criticizes supervised mourning as a monopolized form of healing and grieving and challenges the notion that there is only one acceptable form of dignified mourning. By employing spatial creativity, Resounding Lidice demonstrated impressive resilience and emancipation from hegemonic practices. The Lidice Museum did not support the presence of Resounding Lidice on the memorial site, but its disapproval had no effect on the virtual nature of the soundscape and the project kept operating on its own. The question, “to whom does the memory of Lidice belong,” thus, had a remarkably simple answer: to anyone with a smartphone, headphones, and a willingness to visit the site and to reflect on its meaning. ⁵⁹

Transcending Gendered Representations of Trauma

While never discussed in scholarly debates or public discourse, both the spatial construction of the Lidice memorial landscape and the collective memory of the Lidice massacre are gendered. “A Lidice woman” (lidická žena) became a crucial and irreplaceable symbol of the tragedy and collectively shared trauma, while “Lidice women” (lidické ženy) became a culturally and politically significant discursive institution. All 143 Lidice women who survived the massacre and deportation to Ravensbrück were offered to move into the freshly built houses in the new Lidice village. Most of them did. Every year on the anniversary of the tragic events, they had to relive their trauma and publicly perform their mourning. Year after year, the women survivors provided the authentic “evidence of experience.” ⁶⁰

Janet Jacobs argues that women are often forced to submit to the process of nation building after war or violence not only in the present but also in the ways in which they are allowed to work through their own traumas of the past. Analyzing the Srebrenica memorial and the gendered dimensions of collective memory of genocide, Jacobs argues that Bosnian women were expected to participate in national rebuilding by suppressing the memories of their own trauma, especially of genocidal rape, which would otherwise undermine the positive building and self-understanding of Bosnian men, ethnicity, and culture. The Srebrenica Memorial was constructed to honor the memory of murdered Bosnian men and boys, but at the same time it prevents any visible memorization of genocidal rape and violence against Bosnian women, which also took place during the Serbian aggression against the Bosnian Muslim populations in the 1990s. Jacobs finds that only men and boys are constructed as victims in the structure and the commemorative practices of the Srebrenica memorial, while women are expected to perform and articulate only their roles of grieving mothers and wives. Because the memory of a raped body is marked by personal, familial, and national degradation, Jacobs argues, the memorialization of suffering and honoring of those who survived this violence are antithetical to the project of nation-building and ethnic pride. ⁶¹

Similarly, the surviving women of Lidice were allowed to perform only expected forms of grief compatible with postwar socialist nation-building and the central place of the Lidice massacre in that process. The trauma of the Lidice women, as the trauma of the surviving mothers and wives in Srebrenica, was appropriated by the socialist Czechoslovak state as a symbol of national victimization; their pain became a public property. Not allowed to forget, their living near the site of the massacre and continued forced vigil over commemorative practices were presented by the state and the Lidice Memorial as evidence of historical wrongdoing and as an ongoing healing process of the whole nation. The women survivors were not invisible or silent (or silenced); rather, they embodied the very core of the collective grieving process. The surviving women were always placed at the center of the annual commemorative services and their shared memories occupied (and still do occupy) a key place in the permanent exhibition of the Lidice Museum. The main exhibition, “And the Innocent Were Guilty,” ends with television screens featuring recorded interviews with the surviving women. Importantly, the only memories shared by the women survivors on those screens are their memories of the massacre and their subsequent trauma. ⁶²

The murdered Lidice men are repeatedly and explicitly described as “heroes,” but the women, both those who were murdered and those who survived, have never been constructed as “heroes” or given any collective identity beyond their womanhood. In the materials, they are “women,” “mothers,” “grandmothers,” “wives,” “sisters,” “aunts,” “girlfriends,” and “cousins.” Only their family and kinship status frames their collective and individual identities. While the museum website lists the occupations of all murdered men buried together in the mass grave, we do not learn anything about the women beyond their immediate relationships with the men. The comprehensive website of the Lidice Memorial has special sections devoted to men and children, but no section specifically focused on the lives and experiences of women. Of the sixty-six episodes of “History Minutes” available on the website, only two are about Lidice women; the other sixty-four episodes follow the activities of male heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance and male figures of larger historical events. The two episodes devoted to women describe their hard work, physical punishment, and suffering in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Although it is made clear that the imprisoned women in Ravensbrück faced inhuman conditions, violence and constant abuse, their behavior and survival are never conceptualized as heroic. ⁶³ All of the murdered men have their names spelled on the museum wall. The women, both survivors and murdered, have no individualized commemorative presence in the Lidice memorial spaces.

Gendered constructions of collective memory and gendered narratives of victimization and virtue permeate the Lidice memorial landscape as well. The lush grassy landscape rolls gently down the hill from the museum building and then picks up again to a forest line, which encloses the empty field. The field is crossed only by a long, narrow path that travels around a few barely visible landmarks: the foundational remains of a village house, the stone outline of a church, and a school building. The only commemorative intervention that immediately catches a visitor’s eye is the Memorial to the Children Victims of War on the right side of the rolling meadow. The memorial consists of a deeply moving bronze sculpture by Czech artist Marie Uchytilová: a life-size portrayal of the eighty-two Lidice children murdered in the gas van near Chełmno. The children’s memorial was Uchytilová’s lifetime work, which took her more than twenty years to complete. ⁶⁴ Although the museum argues that the empty field neutrally echoes the grim historical facts, subliminal gender stereotypes shape and guide the narrative offered by the memorial landscape. As Jacob argues, women’s suffering at memorial grounds is often visible, legitimate, and understandable only through the suffering or heroism of men and women’s grief over the loss of men. ⁶⁵ The Lidice memorial landscape is a fitting example of Jacob’s observation.

Across the field from the Children’s Memorial are the foundations of Horák’s estate and the garden where the men were murdered. The stone remnants of the garden wall carry a memorial engraving: “Although dead, they are still fighting—173 Lidice heroes were murdered in this place” (Ač mrtví, stále bojují—v těchto místech bylo zavražděno 173 lidických hrdinů). The murdered men were executed without any possibility of fighting for their lives, but their death was symbolically and discursively framed as heroic. Conceptualizing the murdered men as heroes stands in sharp contrast with the material representations of women at the memorial site. The landscape contains three larger-than-life statues of women, titled Woman with a Child, Weeping Woman, and Lidice Woman with a Rose. The three statues are placed far apart on the memorial grounds. They are delicately shaped, slim, feminine, and fragile. The women cover their faces in visible despair, broken, and resigned. ⁶⁶ Their suffering is constructed as natural, without the need to conceptually frame it, and Lidice women thus do not have subjectivity beyond their mourning of their men and children. Moreover, while men’s death is constructed as active and heroic, women’s survival is portrayed as passive and mundane.

This stereotyped material representation of women through the traditional metaphors of grieving motherhood and of men through the trope of heroic manhood is not innocent or without consequences. What is visible is present, what is present is real, and what is real is true, summarizes Tim Edensor about the narrative simplicity of visual presence that informs most ordinary visitors of memorial landscapes. ⁶⁷ “Images of helpless mothers and children contribute to the construction of an empathic-based collective memory that facilitates an emotional connection to the horrors of the past,” argues Jacobs. ⁶⁸ The prevalence of maternal imagery and the trope of suffering motherhood carry universal symbolism that constitutes an “especially emotive context through which to view and remember the history of Nazi crimes against humanity,” she adds. What is at stake, according to Jacobs, is not who was the victim of a given historical event or who suffered, but how our images and understandings of collective heroism on one hand, and victimhood on the other hand, are shaped. Emotional associations connected to the traumas of the past construct our national history and collective memory. Moreover, the mental pictures and frames, in which we think about suffering, injustice, and violence in the past, have deep consequences for gendered stereotypes and relationships in the present as well.

Resounding Lidice transcends these gender stereotypes through spatial creativity directly at the memorial site. Although visitors are surrounded by essentialized gendered representations of the collective memory of the Lidice tragedy, the audiodrama offers a plastic picture of people’s lives before the massacre took place. The individual lives of women and men are not flattened by their official representations into conventional metaphors of active manhood and passive womanhood. In the audiodrama dialogues, women possess agency, act, make decisions, and are differentiated by age and positionality. Faltýnková noted that when preparing the project, she and her husband “discovered that Lidice survivors are actually not perceived at all in complex ways.” ⁶⁹ In their opinion, publicly available memories of the Lidice women were devoid of any detail beyond descriptions of places and demographic data of what stood where and who lived here and there. To correct this oversight, the Faltýneks started to make regular trips to Lidice and record survivor narratives. As she recalled,

The survivor accounts were so colorful, with so many details and stories that one suddenly started to understand that the village really stood there. That it was not only 503 residents, which today is just a number. Suddenly, there were real stories, real fates of the families who lived there. Suddenly, even contours of problems or neighbor conflicts started to emerge, and it was possible to also see the similarity of their lives with our own. ⁷⁰

Her observation inadvertently points to the careful choreography and sanitation of collective memory for the sake of nation-building, especially in the socialist period. As the key historical event of WWII and the foundational narrative of Czech postwar collective consciousness and history textbooks, the official collective memory and institutional commemoration of the Lidice massacre was carefully staged, diligently controlled, and performatively cemented for decades by the Czechoslovak communist regime to support the ideological exploitation of the tragedy. This process also included the ways in which the surviving Lidice women were inspired (or discouraged) to remember. Faltýnková suggested that

the narratives which we collected were new in some ways because everyone before us asked only about the fateful day or night of the tragedy or later events. When we asked about old Lidice and their lives long before [the tragedy], witnesses were sometimes surprised. Sometimes, they were happy that they could remember and were excited that they remembered something they did not recall for many long years. ⁷¹

Faltýnková’s contextualization of the beginnings of the audiodrama project further reveals the troublesome sedimentation of ideologically accepted memories. Some survivors, like Mrs. Kubíková for example, shared their memories for the first time. Because Mrs. Kubíková emigrated with her mother to Canada in 1949, the Czechoslovak communist authorities and journalists were never interested in her story. Throughout the socialist period, the existence and memories of this Lidice woman and her family were taboo. Resounding Lidice became the first opportunity to incorporate Mrs. Kubíková’s personal memories in the collective memory of Lidice. ⁷²

Conclusion

The audiodrama Resounding Lidice provides a thought-provoking example of the recent global trend toward self-reflective and active commemorative practices used to come to terms with a violent past. Traditional commemorative practices fail to speak to diverse audiences or offer complex ways of bridging the past with the present and the future. In the East European post-socialist context, this argument is more relevant than elsewhere. In those states, post-war nation-building processes faced no significant external pressures or international critical dialogue. This led to ideologically charged hegemonic interpretations of historical narratives produced during the socialist era. After forty years of communist use (and misuse) of collective memory, the traditional understanding of silence and passivity as unequivocal and universal expressions of respect and reverence has a limited potential to address the urge for dialogue and active citizenship. Creativity and artistic forms of expression arose as understandable but also the most challenging response to the hegemonic narratives and institutional control over the interpretation of the past.

The creative memory projects of Chauvet, Moll, Kadishman, and Mayer inspired me to rethink Resounding Lidice outside of the flattened discussions that took place in the Czech public and media discourse, which mostly only echoed the dismissal of the project. Its opponents deemed the project as historically inaccurate and having no place at the Lidice memorial site. They were concerned that artistic fabulation disrespected the collective memory of the tragedy and dishonored the survivors. An exploration of the multilayered dimensions of Resounding Lidice revealed that creative challenges to memorial landscapes can fuel the democratization of commemorative practices and increase the acceptance of alternative, more inclusive and more critical ways of coming to terms with a traumatic past.

The audiodrama brought the disembodied authoritative discourse of the official memorial landscape (which rested on controlled, directive learning) and the unofficial memorial landscape built on individual embodied experience/reflection (which supported uncontrolled, creative learning) face-to-face. Ultimately, the project did not manage to formally break through the barriers of memory politics in Lidice, but its spatial creativity challenged the reverential silence and offered a productive conceptual lens through which to investigate hegemonic commemorative practices and the sacralization of memorial sites in a post-socialist context. By simultaneously employing space, embodiment, and sound, the project demonstrated the potential of spatial creativity to serve as a tool of communal engagement, active citizenship, and intergenerational dialogue. Last, but not least, through its spatial creativity and individualized soundscape experience, the project transcended the conventional gender dichotomy of heroic manhood and suffering womanhood to offer a complex, embodied, and personalized opportunity to contemplate the meaning of Lidice in the Czech collective memory and public consciousness.