Výsledky projektu Pluralita identit československých Židů v zahraničí a její narativní vyjádření

This article explores selected aspects of narrative expression of identification with social entities in Holocaust survivors’ oral history testimonies, including the related conflicts of identities. In its empirical dimension, the study is based on secondary analysis of archived interviews with people born in Czechoslovakia and labelled as Jews by the Nürnberg laws, who had left Czechoslovakia and remained abroad. Oral history interview is conceived as a social and linguistic interaction of interviewer and interviewee, aiming towards collaborative production of a comprehensible account of the past. The results show how the religious, ethnical, political and national identity of narrators is expressed in the interview as a part of the life-story plot. Second explored topic is the spoken tongue as an attribute of national identity during the pre-war, war and post-war period. Considering the characteristics of the analysed interview-sample it is precisely the (absence of) language knowledge, which is reflected in the interviews as an obstacle that had to be overcome by the narrators, often quite soon after the traumatic events of the wartime.

Various attempts to conceptualize the often vaguely used term collective memory come to the conclusion that collective memory is deeply related to linguistic and narrative phenomena. In the present paper, I aim to provide an overview and discussion of the link between language and collective memory in the context of social theory. In the case of the founding theoretical figures, M. Halbwachs and J. Assmann, the importance of language in relation to the issues of collective memory is profound. In the past two decades, the specific role of narrative and conversation had become an important subject in researching collective memory. In empirical research, on the other hand, the relationship of language and collective memory seems to be rather underrepresented. Various fields and disciplines deal with similar topics quite differently, and they also differ in the degree of explicit scrutiny of the collective memory phenomena.