Overcoming the Mnemonic Security Dilemma: How Transnational Activists in Czechia and Germany Disarmed the Past

A mnemonic security dilemma occurs when two states endorse conflicting narratives regarding historic, usually traumatic events such that the efforts of one state to bolster its own narrative, often for instrumental reasons, necessarily challenge the credibility, and hence the mnemonic security, of the other (Malksoo 2015). This paper, in a case with potential implications for other memory conflicts, examines how transnational memory activism in Germany and Czechia helped overcome a mnemonic security dilemma where political authorities could not (or did not want to). Competing narratives surrounding the often violent expulsions of 2,5 millions of German speakers from Czechoslovakia after World War II have burdened German-Czech relations for decades. Even after the two governments in 1997 agreed to draw a line under these events by negotiating and signing the “Czech-German Declaration on Mutual Relations and Their Future Development” in order to closed some of the controversial issues in Czech-German relations stemming from the past and improve mutual relations, individual political leaders and interest groups repeatedly raised the specter of the past to mobilize support for their own interests. Based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with memory activists from both Czechia and Germany, we explore the converging, and sometimes diverging interests, transnational actions and framing that allowed them to rethink and “disarm” the past to promote dialogue rather than hostility.