“Since 1999 I’ve been working - certainly more than necessary - on a project planned for 2003 for the German Historical Museum in Berlin. It is the continuation of the 1998 exhibition »Myths of Nations«. My task is to show in texts and images how the Czechs remembered and still remember their national traumata between Masaryk’s death in 1937 and the show trials of 1952. The main themes include the German occupation from 1939 onwards, resistance and collaboration, the expulsion of the Germans and the communist coup d’etat of 1948. Compared to Germany, Poland and Israel, war and the Holocaust play less of a role for the Czechs. The assumption of power by the local communists was already planned during the war and was noticeable from 1945 onwards. Communism was not imposed on the country from outside. Many of President Edvard Benes’ statements, even from the time of the war, amount to support for the communist infiltrators, even though it can be assumed that he had not imagined the totalitarianism that broke ground from 1948 onwards.
Perhaps you can’t call trauma what you helped to bring about, but you can call the effect of such actions, and that applies to the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. In the official literature, this subject has rarely been mentioned for forty years. However, there has been much lively discussion of this in the exile and samizdat literature, not neglecting the damage this has done to one’s own country. It is also important that other traumas, strokes of fate - whatever you want to call them - such as the Stalinist regime with its show trials, the Soviet occupation in 1968 and finally the division of the country, faded from the collective memory.
My interest in this subject goes far beyond the plans set by the Deutsches Historisches Museum. It’s as if I’ve owned a video cassette for decades and only now got around to looking at its images and content. I’m not done with that yet, but already now, in July 2002, I gratefully accept the honorary citizenship of my hometown Horšovský Týn (Bischofteinitz).”
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 304f (translation)
Wilma Iggers wrote an academic paper entitled ‘Czechoslovakia/Tschechien. Paradise Lost’ as part of the exhibition ‘Myths of Nations’ (Berlin, 2004/2005).