The Skeletons in the Family Political Closets: Moralizing in Narratives of Communism in the Czech and German Families

The presented paper investigates family political narratives about moral aspects of contemporary history in the Central European context. It deals with family transmission and shaping of “second-hand memories” of the period of late-socialism and post-communist transformation in former Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic. On coping with family communist legacies, which was selected as the case of a potentially controversial issue, the paper aims to illustrate communication strategies about recent history during primary political socialization in the contrasting country contexts. The analysis focuses on “Children of the Revolution”, a generation born during or slightly after the fall of the Iron Curtain and socialized in a democratic political system. Paper draws upon a unique dataset of 60 semi-structured interviews with university students conducted in the Czech Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. It uses the method of applied thematic analysis, through qualitative software Atlas.ti. The analysis examines young people's views on communist remembrance in their families concentrating on various types of (dis)engagement of their family members in the period of “real socialism”. It traces interviewees' perceptions of family discussion climate focusing on themes that appeared in discussions about recent history as well as on issues avoided from family political talks and investigates the reasons why. Moreover, it describes the implications of family political narratives about the past for shaping present political values and paths to the activism of the young generation. In this respect, the analysis seeks to find the linkage between talks about contemporary history and other politically or morally touchy issues in family conversation (such as migration crisis, radical aspects of activism, deep value disagreement). The contribution of the paper is the original typology of political narratives. It distinguished among “power-free discourse”, “discourse of avoidance" and “discourse of ignorance”. “Power free-discourse” is characteristic by mutual trust, openness and tolerance of different opinions. In families with “power-free discursive strategies”, experience with the communist regime was discussed which sometimes meant long and painful process. Nevertheless, interviewees appreciated the openness of their relatives and considered them formative and encouraging for their current activism. In contrast, in families where “discourse of avoidance” prevailed, membership in the Communist Party was either taboo or taken for granted. In this narrative setting also other political taboos appeared. Interviewees did not speak about sensitive issues for the sake of keeping peace in the family, maintaining their ideals about their parents, or because of a lack of interest. As discouraging for activism, the analysis identified “discourse of avoidance” for which political apathy, alienation and low internal and external efficacy was typical. Politics including the issues related to contemporary history was considered a distant topic that they did not understand well, was not particularly important for their lives, which they were not interested in, and which was perceived negatively.