The policy of forgetting: Narratives that shaped the 2022 commemorations in Upper Silesia

Abstract

Forgetting differences among groups within a nation-state as one of the strategies deployed in the nation-building process was established by Ernst Renan in the 1880s. This strategy is defined here as the “policy of forgetting”. However, the analysis of what has been forgotten in narratives has rarely been undertaken by researchers. The intention of this paper is to study how narratives about the past influence the political situation today and, vice versa, how today’s political circumstances shape memory narratives. We intend to demonstrate how forgetting and omissions are used by actors to shape national (or ethnic) identity through the example of the narratives of the 2022 commemorations in Upper Silesia. We observed that the strategy of omitting certain elements of history is indeed both prevalent in and typical for narratives rooted in national identity but is less likely to occur in the vernacular narratives of ethnic or regional communities.