‘…. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly towards death’. (Kundera Reference Kundera1996, p. 119).
Introduction
In December 1977, the writer and exile from Czechoslovakia, Milan Kundera, wrote a letter to his friend, the writer and fellow exile Josef Škvorecký, who had founded the exile publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto, Canada, in 1971. He expressed how much he appreciated the fact that Škvorecký had decided to publish Kundera’s novels in Czech: ‘I cannot even express how much I respect what you are doing for Czech books from abroad …You are thereby extending and keeping alive the memory of the nation, as if it has moved outside the body of the nation, becoming something like a patient who is attached to an artificial kidney. The artificial kidney is your publishing house’. (Přibáň Reference Přibáň2023, p. 157).
The nation, as an ill patient, whose memory has moved outside the body, is a remarkable metaphor which the writer characterised as the feeling experienced by individuals, refugees torn from their environment. They have to try to integrate into a new, foreign world while maintaining their identity (among other things) by means of writing and reading texts in their native language.
Kundera’s reference to ‘the memory of the nation’ can be understood as a reference to the collective memory and ‘social frameworks’, in terms of language, space, and time (Halbwachs and Coser Reference Halbwachs and Coser1992). These were gradually updated on the basis of the new and evolving life conditions and situation of emigrants. ‘Memory of the nation’ consists of the memory of a book for Kundera, that is, one of the media that played a key role in preserving and transforming the collective or social memory (Assmann Reference Assmann2011).
Kundera has concretely in mind books published by exile figures abroad. These primarily consisted of books by authors who were banned in their own country for political reasons, in other words, those who were supposed to be wiped from the memory of the nation at home. The Communist regime removed books by these authors from the libraries and bookshops. They also eliminated their names from textbooks and specialised publications, that is, from all areas where information and media were stored and which helped to form and maintain cultural memory (Assmann Reference Assmann2001, pp. 23–24).
Refugees published abroad not only books, but also newspapers and magazines in order to preserve and maintain this forbidden collective memory as one of the sources and pillars of identity. Transformations of collective and individual memory can be observed and analysed in all of these kinds of media, making use of examples of the media coverage of a wide range of events and themes. These were introduced by various groups of emigrants in a range of countries, who were trying to integrate into the majority society.
Migration – emigration – exile
This paper explores the migratory experiences of refugees from Czechoslovakia in the historical context of the second half of the twentieth century. It reflects on the issue of migration and memory through research into media representation of the large-scale migration wave of refugees from communist Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989. During the first refugee wave, after the Communist coup in February 1948 alone, some 60,000 people left Czechoslovakia, often under very dramatic circumstances involving direct threats to their lives (Jirásek and Trapl Reference Jirásek and Trapl1996, p. 71). Another massive wave of migration from Czechoslovakia was triggered by the occupation of the country by the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. In the post-August two decades, leading up to the fall of Communism in 1989, some 150,000 people left the country (Orság Reference Orság2016, pp. 65, 271).
The large number of exile figures and their exile experiences provided an extensive repertoire of testimony for the formation of the exile collective memory. This amounts to a truly broad research theme. For the purposes of this text, I have focused my research on the issue of exile media representation and the ways in which three selected exile periodicals, published in Western European countries, formed the exile collective memory with their texts. The specific periodicals were chosen so as to represent the members of both massive waves of political refugees from Czechoslovakia, in other words, after February 1948 and after August 1968. They also consisted of essential opinion-forming periodicals for the exile communities. The media reflections on the complex exile are understandably limited to the life experiences and ideological positions of the magazines’ editors and contributors. These factors impacted the selection of themes and the way in which they were treated. The analysed magazines were consequently only relevant for part of the exile experiences of the Czechoslovak refugees scattered around the world.
There is a need here for a terminological aside concerning the topic, as this has a wider socio-cultural context under the Czech conditions. Czech social scientists primarily work with the term emigration (respectively, the superordinate term migration), which they view as value-neutral and which encompasses not only political emigration, but also, for example, economic or religious (Nešpor Reference Nešpor2005, pp. 245–284). Among historians, the term exile is usually understood as political emigration, which came about due to persecution, discrimination, and other threats from the domestic political regime. The term emigration amounts to a voluntary departure from the country abroad, with the motivation being, for example, economic. This text will work with the concept of exile, in the sense of political emigration. The exiles were interested in carrying out active operations in order to bring about change to the domestic regime from abroad. Most of the journalists and writers involved in Czechoslovak exile media and publishing houses understood their role in this manner.
It might seem as if this only consisted of a technological problem. The perception of exile/emigration, by the majority society in the Czech Lands, is a sensitive theme, which in the history of the twentieth century has also had a definite impact on the present. It also has an influence on how Czechs view refugees in their own country.
The cultural anthropologist Ladislav Holý recalled the essential difference in the perception of emigration in the West and in Czechoslovakia. Western liberalism and individualism view emigration as a personal decision, as a private matter. In an ideology which emphasises collectivism, however, the opposite is the case. Collectivist Soviet socialism construed emigration as a moral problem. It involved betrayal of the country or the nation. This ambivalent perception of emigration, as a moral failure and betrayal, lingered in the collective memory of people in the Czech Republic even after the fall of Communism in 1989 (Holý Reference Holý1996, p. 66–67).
Let us return once again to Kundera’s metaphor of an artificial kidney. This metaphor also suggests the possibility that ‘the body’ here, ‘the body of the nation’, can, but does not have to, accept this artificial kidney. One might recall the return of emigrants after the fall of Communism back to Czechoslovakia, that is, back to ‘the body of the nation’. The successful ones were initially welcomed as heroes, having managed to establish themselves in the Western world. When they, however, began to criticise the lack of social transformation, the enthusiasm waned among the majority of society. People would often accompany this with the words: ‘You have no right to advise us, you did not live here’.
Exile – prisoner – president
The fact that the question of exile/emigration is a specific theme in this case can be attested to with one more unique detail. This concerns the presidents of Czechoslovakia, these being the authorities and leaders of the nation during a concrete period, who were active co-creators of the collective memory.
Out of the overall nine presidents who held this government position during the existence of the Czechoslovak Republic over the years 1918–1993, four of them had been exiles in their previous lives, with one of them actually having been in political exile twice. They therefore had a lived, authentic experience of refugee life and exile. The founders of Czechoslovakia – the future first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (over the years 1918–1935), and the future foreign minister Edvard Beneš arrived from political exile in the West, which they had fled to during the years of the First World War, and from where they had contributed to the foreign resistance against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. They had lobbied intensively in Western countries for the founding of a new state on the ashes of the extinct monarchy. The foundations of the new Czechoslovak statehood were consequently laid by political exiles. Edvard Beneš, who became the second president of the country after Masaryk (over the years 1935–1938, then 1945–1948), was even a political exile twice. The first time was during the First World War, and then during the Second World War, when he abdicated after the Munich Agreement in the year 1938 and left for Great Britain, where he led the foreign anti-Nazi resistance.
Klement Gottwald, the first communist president after the communist coup (over the years 1948–1953), fled prior to the beginning of the Second World War into political exile in the Soviet Union. In a similar manner, the future president of the country, Ludvík Svoboda (over the years 1968–1975), left the country for exile as a soldier at the beginning of the Second World War; first to Poland, then to the Soviet Union.
The remaining five presidents were political prisoners for a certain phase of their lives, sharing therefore this landmark life experience. Although none of them had to flee into exile, two of them had authentic experience with the dilemma of exile. Antonín Zápotocký (president over the years 1953–1957) was arrested in 1939 when attempting to flee into exile. He was heading to the Soviet Union, where he wanted to join the communist exile community in Moscow. He was consequently imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen until 1945. Václav Havel (the final president of Czechoslovakia over the years 1989–1993, after the dissolution of the federation, consequently the president of the independent Czech Republic up to the year 2011) was imprisoned as a dissident several times. The communist authorities suggested he leave for exile, but he rejected all the offers.
The remaining three presidents had prison experience. The future communist president Antonín Novotný (over the years 1957–1968) was arrested for illegal activity during the Second World War and was imprisoned over the years 1941–1945 in the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen. Gustáv Husák (in office 1975–1989) was expelled from the communist party at the beginning of the 1950s and sentenced to life imprisonment in the political trials as ‘a bourgeois nationalist’ by the Communist justice system. He was in prison until the year 1960, when he was released upon receiving amnesty and consequently rehabilitated. Emil Hácha (president over the years 1938–1945) was imprisoned briefly after the end of the war from May to June 1945. He died in prison due to a serious illness.
All the Czechoslovak presidents, therefore, had these formative experiences, either exile or prison. This non-standard period actually came to an end with the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of the Czech Republic. After the former prisoner of communism, Václav Havel, three other presidents were elected whose biographies manifest a much less dramatic life path, not one exile or one prisoner.
Only the first two presidents, Masaryk and Beneš, experienced authentic migration during their offices in the between-the-war period, and consequently the final president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, in the 1990s. Czechoslovakia, as a newly founded country after the First World War, had only minimal experience during its beginnings with providing asylum for refugees. It was therefore not a traditional country where refugees would settle. (Frankl Reference Frankl2014, p. 540).
During the period of the communist dictatorship, when the state borders were carefully guarded and the free movement of people was complicated to the maximum extent, the country was isolated from any potential waves of refugees. Communist Czechoslovakia was not part of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951 Refugee Convention). Asylum was only granted to those who fit ideologically. These were, for example, communist refugees from Greece at the time of their civil war (Reinke and Karasová Reference Reinke and Karasová2021). Meetings with otherness came about, for example, in connection with work or study exchanges with countries in the socialist camp. A large community of Vietnamese, for example, gradually became established in Czechoslovakia.
This unnatural state of affairs, as concerns migration, began to change after the fall of the communist regime in the year 1989, with the country gradually becoming part of the global migration movements (Fňukal and Šrubař Reference Fňukal and Šrubař2008).
Conceptualisation of the theme – exile media as part of the alternative public sphere
The communist coup in the year 1948 and the rise of the communist dictatorship resulted in several waves of refugees from Czechoslovakia, during which tens of thousands of people left for abroad. From there, they actively tried to maintain, in various ways, the continuity of independent culture and ‘the memory of the nation outside the body of the nation’.
It might seem that a retrospective view back to the second half of the twentieth century cannot offer anything more than a description of the long-gone times of traditional media and traditional public spheres and the refugee strategies of the time. But is this truly the case? Perhaps the scenery has changed, but the essence remains similar at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Are not refugees from their homelands currently trying to apply similar strategies to express their personal experience and preserve the individual and collective memory of their communities?
Refugees from Czechoslovakia began to create what I call an alternative or surrogate public sphere in the countries where they received asylum. The gradually established exile media became a constitutive part of this sphere, by means of which refugees articulated most of the essential questions to which every émigré community seeks answers. The general theoretical framework is based on Jürgen Habermas’ normative concept of the public sphere (Habermas Reference Habermas1991) which is used as the starting point for examining the given issue in connection with refugees from communist Czechoslovakia and the development of exile media. One of the unintended consequences of the power ruling of the public space by communists was the gradual creation of replacement, unofficial, parallel communication possibilities and distinct alternative public spheres. (The plural is appropriate here as these spheres were not necessarily defined by the borders of the Communist state). They were formed not only under the domestic, very difficult conditions, defined by the repressive apparatus of the regime, but also abroad, in the environment of Czechoslovak exile.
Several general characteristics can be established for further contemplation of the exile public sphere, out of which its position and relationship to both home and the majority Western society will become more apparent. This elementary categorisation is not limited to refugees from communism; it can also be applied to many exile communities in the contemporary world. I refer to these spheres as alternative, limited, dispersed, imagined, and temporary.
a) alternative
This functioned as an alternative to the domestic official sphere in Czechoslovakia, which was controlled and ruled by the communist regime. Exiles gradually tried to alternate or substitute for many of the parts of domestic public life, with both the possibilities and limitations that were generated by the exile situation.
b) limited
The fact of being limited within the framework of exile public spheres was manifested in many forms. The language limit was important (and partially even cultural) and was therefore limited to members of the exile community who knew the language. (Most of the active members of the exile public sphere both moved within it and became involved in the public spheres of the majority society, where they maintained contacts and links). The limited nature of the exile public sphere was also given by a number of factors linked with the general conditions of life in the concrete host countries, with these arising from local legislation. Communication possibilities and the distractions across continents were also limited.
c) dispersed
The exile public sphere was also a dispersed sphere, as the entire exile community was dispersed throughout the world. Within this dispersion, it was specifically the exile media that played an essential integration role.
d) imagined
Benedict Anderson makes mention, in his considerations on the development and the spreading of national identity and modern nationalism, of the key role of printed media, which helped in forming the views of national society. The modern nation is, in his view, an ‘imagined’ political society, ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’. (Anderson Reference Anderson2006, p. 6). One can speculate in this sense of the exile community as part of an imagined community – living outside the borders of a given state, scattered in a diaspora, but also belonging to a given nation without regard to the concrete political conditions in which most of the nation, living in the borders of a national state, is located. Books and printed materials, the most extensive exile media, ranked among those instruments that helped with the communication, maintenance, and strengthening of national identity.
e) temporary
The final goal of exile figures was to return to the country after the reasons for the departure into exile had changed; in this sense, the exile public sphere could be viewed as temporary (Orság Reference Orság2016).
This paper considers émigré media as an early, but ingenious, example of transnational media impact. It is actually this, long before the onset of the Internet, which demonstrated an ability to overcome the limitations of national states, violent information-communication blockades, and the limitations of the divided bipolar world. Exile media amounted to linking refugees, scattered in a diaspora around the world, with information, thereby creating a framework for sharing experience, stories, and dispersed memories. They were also able to step out of their narrowly defined language borders and, by means of publishing foreign language publications, managed to address the majority public. The transnational perspective was also quite natural for the exile activities and work of exile media. The ‘transnational turn’, which was declared by theorists in various scientific fields (including media studies, memory studies, and migration studies) about two decades ago, is therefore a promising direction of research (Assmann Reference Assmann2014).
The relationship between journalism and memory has been the subject of interest for scholars for several decades already, who have examined it from many different perspectives. Contemporary areas of research tend to focus on journalists’ engagement with the past through practices such as non-commemorative and commemorative/anniversary journalism. The ways in which memory is used by journalists in their coverage of current events are of relevance for the relationship between exile journalists and memory (for more, see Schudson Reference Schudson1997; Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt Reference Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt2014; Tenenboim-Weinblat and Neiger Reference Tenenboim-Weinblat, Neiger, Hanitzsch and Wahl-Jorgensen2020).
Michael Schudson has emphasised how ‘journalism has been our most public, widely distributed, easily accessible and thinly stretched membrane of social memory’ (Schudson Reference Schudson, Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt2014, p. 85). Exile periodicals were such a ‘membrane of social memory’, but they had their limitations. A brief explanation concerning public and easy accessibility and wide distribution needs to be provided.
General characteristics concerning media communication in non-standard exile conditions do not fully apply. According to traditional characteristics, the media ‘usually takes the form of large media organisations, whose message is open to the public, standardized, produced by media professionals, and with the help of technical apparatus communicated to a large, heterogeneous, and dispersed public’. (Reifová Reference Reifová2004, p. 139). None of the exile newspapers or magazines was produced in a large media organisation. Public accessibility, for a potentially large number of recipients, was also problematic under the exile conditions due to a number of factors – the dispersed exiles in the diaspora and their overall limited possibilities. The public accessibility of the particular titles was limited to a maximum of a thousand copies. Exile journalism was also limited, among other things, by the lack of media professionals involved in the creation of media content and by substandard technical facilities, etc. (Orság Reference Orság2016).
Exile journalism was also specific in that its functioning was much more sharply and urgently framed by the need to create an environment for maintaining collective memory, which, in the dispersion of exile, helped preserve the identity of refugees. Caring for the nation’s memory, ‘outside the body of the nation’, required much greater effort and commitment in the difficult conditions of exile.
Exile magazines played an essential role in the transformation of communication memory into cultural memory, this being long-term and transmitted by the media (Assmann Reference Assmann2011). This became the basis of the identity of the exile community.
Exile journalists and writers were all aware of the fact that they, by means of journalism, were in an imbalanced struggle with a powerful enemy, the communist regime, which was trying to erase them from the collective memory of the nation and would make use of all the available resources of the repressive powers of the state. Exile journalists, therefore, to a much greater extent than standard media operations, acted as political actors on the ‘collective memory stage’. (Schudson Reference Schudson1992).
Their opponent also viewed them as ‘political actors’ (not only) on the collective memory stage. This is testified to by the extensive activity of the repressive powers of the communist state directed against exile journalists and media. This amounted to propaganda aimed at the exile community in the official media, to secret operations by communist agents directed against exile figures in the West, including theft of editorial files, sabotage, intervention with foreign governments to intervene in the activities of exile journalists, and even assassinations of editors and leading exile journalists. The stigmatisation of the exile community and its marginalisation in the eyes of the majority of the population in Czechoslovakia was an ongoing part of the strategy used by the communists against the exile community (Orság Reference Orság2016).
The difficult exile situation had a negative impact, in many respects, on the lives of refugees. A positive aspect, however, was that the pluralistic environment of Western democracies made it possible for a number of competing versions of the past and interpretations, which were debated publicly in the exile media, to exist in the exile public sphere. This was extremely different from the situation in Czechoslovakia, where the political authority only promoted one version of the past, remembering and memory, these being bound by the ideological doctrines of Marxism-Leninism. The official memory, which intentionally airbrushed or misinterpreted problematic stages of the past, in accordance with models taken from Soviet communism, took over the public space.
It could be argued, with a slight exaggeration, that the more systematically the political authorities displaced competing versions of history and memory from the public space, the stronger the ‘the will to memory’ (Eyal Reference Eyal2004) was manifested in the alternative public spheres of the domestic opposition and in exile.
Gil Eyal refers to the will to memory as a ‘constellation of discourses and practices within which memory is entrusted with a certain goal and function…’ (Eyal Reference Eyal2004, p. 6–7). Eyal’s research was based on a comparison of the discourses and rituals of collective memory in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, aiming to demonstrate two different types of ‘the will to memory’. In one version, memory is the guarantor of identity and maintains it over time, while in the other version, memory plays a role in overcoming psychic trauma. Individuals are healed by remembering that which was repressed. The first case represents the type of will to memory championed by a group of leading Slovak historians and politicians, while the second is characteristic of the type promoted by a group of Czech dissidents and politicians in Eyal’s research.
The will to memory was powerful among exiles, and one could argue that both of the above-mentioned types are also represented in the magazines. Memory not only served to preserve collective identity in exile, but also served as a tool for overcoming trauma.
Selection of the sample, research questions, and analysis
The focus will now be on selected exile periodicals. I intentionally chose three concrete magazines in order to research whether and how the will to memory was reflected there. These included members of both waves of refugees, in other words, after February 1948 and after August 1968. Each of them had their own distinct ideological starting points, which were also manifested in the themes chosen for the media content.
I will be focusing on the exile magazines Skutečnost (Reality), Svědectví (Testimony), and Listy (Pages). This selection reflects several realities that I wanted to take into account in the research. It was either a magazine that played a significant initiating role in the early phase of exile activities (Skutečnost) or consisted of the most influential exile magazines of the two mass-scale waves of refugees from Czechoslovakia (Svědectví and Listy). Leading exile intellectuals (scholars, writers, and journalists) contributed to all three; in other words, leading traditional producers of collective memory. Both Svědectví and Listy were secretly smuggled into Czechoslovakia, and the editors cooperated with domestic opponents of the regime. Their perspective on the construction of collective memory is therefore not limited to merely an exile environment. Representatives of the domestic alternative public sphere also contributed to its production. While Svědectví and Listy represent the two main stages of exile memory after the years 1948 and 1968, over a longer time framework, Skutečnost provides a picture of the beginning of the formation of exile thinking and exile collective memory after the year 1948.
The selection was also influenced by the availability of publications that allow for such focused research based on an analysis of a larger set of texts. These include a content analysis of the magazine Listy (the author included 5,713 texts in all; Havlíček Reference Havlíček2008), the anthology of texts from Skutečnost, which consists of 169 texts arranged into thematic groups (Prečan Reference Prečan2008, p. L), while the published index of the magazine Svědectví was also organised into thematic groups (Kuneš Reference Kuneš1988).
The monthly Skutečnost (1949–1953) began to be published in Geneva starting in the year 1949 by representatives of the younger generation of refugees who left Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup in February 1948. A number of exiled university students were among the editors and contributors. Although the magazine ended its run after 4 years, its critical approach, breadth of topics, and the debates which the editors launched all anticipated the future discussions of key themes that were returned to in the exile media at a later point. The magazine reflects the earliest and most immediate version of exile collective memory. Memories of the Nazi occupation and the Communist coup were still fresh when Skutečnost began to be published.
Although the magazine only had a circulation of 1000 issues, it was nevertheless distributed to many countries in Western Europe, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand (Prečan Reference Prečan2008, p. XXVII). As a result, refugees across continents became involved in the exile debates, these being, apart from representatives of the exile political elite, students, writers, and public, active personages. Foreign language versions of the magazine, in English and German, were addressed to the majority public in Western countries. This is testified to by, for example, reactions from the British philosopher Bertrand Russell or the chief editor of Deutsche Rundschau, Rudolf Pechel.
The quarterly Svědectví (1956–1992) was initially published in New York, and later in Paris. Although the editor, Pavel Tigrid, was also a member of the post-February exile wave, this was actually his second exile experience. He spent his first years in London during the Second World War, when he fled the country from Nazism. Svědectví was established at the time of the Hungarian Revolution against communism in the year 1956, which was violently suppressed by Soviet tanks. The West accepted this violent confirmation of Soviet power dominance in Central Europe. This altered geo-political context also impacted the concept and content of the magazine. Svědectví soon became known as one of the most influential magazines of the new Czechoslovak exile.
The circulation rose from the initial 1,000 issues up to approximately 20,000 issues at the end of the 1980s (Kosatík Reference Kosatík2013, p. 267). A significant part of the print run, sometimes more than half of the circulation, was sent by secret channels to Czechoslovakia, while the rest was distributed to a range of countries in Western Europe and to other parts of the world. The discussion and polemics, which took place on the pages of Svědectví, were frequently stormy and testified to the fact that its influence on the exile and opposition public sphere was significant (see, e.g., the more than year-long polemic about the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after WW2). The editor was referred to as a communist collaborator by a number of the other exiles due to his support for revisionist communists, the texts of whom were published in the magazine. The remarkable standing of the magazine is also testified to by the ongoing attention it received from the communist powers. The state communist propaganda referred to Svědectví as ‘the most important inflammatory magazine’ in exile (Orság Reference Orság2016, p. 55). The agents of the communist secret police continually followed in the West the activities of the editor Tigrid and tried to prevent the illegal distribution channels of the magazine into Czechoslovakia, or prevent the publication of the magazine by, for example, filling the building of the publishing house with poisonous gas. The goal was to drive the editorial team away from the centre of Paris, which they did not succeed in doing (Schovánek Reference Schovánek and Blažek2005, pp. 158–179). The magazine was published for more than 30 years, and the two-time refugee Tigrid lived to see the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
The bi-monthly Listy (1971–now) not only differs from the previous two by the fact that it was established in Rome by a member of the post-August wave of refugees, but also by the fact that its founder was a reform communist Jiří Pelikán, in other words, a man who had actively helped with building the foundations of the communist dictatorship, but who later became a Marxist reformer.
The aim of the magazine was to become a media platform for an influential group of exile figures from the ranks of the reform communists, these having left Czechoslovakia for the West after the defeat of the Prague Spring. A large group of people assembled around the magazine and gradually established the Listy group, this being the most influential left-wing political group in exile with contacts with the leading political elite in Western countries, such as, for example, Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Olof Palme, or Francois Mitterrand. The magazine Listy ranked among the most respected periodicals of the post-August exile. Its circulation amounted to more than 4,000 issues in the first half of the 1970s. The circulation rose as possibilities for Pelikán to obtain more money for publication increased. This amounted to more than 12,000 copies in the 1980s, part of which was again smuggled along secret channels to Czechoslovakia (Orság Reference Orság2016, p. 116). The communist regime viewed Jiří Pelikán as a revisionist and systematically focused its attention on him for 20 long years. Communist agents, operating in the West, tried to intimidate Pelikán in various ways, even sending explosives to his flat by post in a package, which Pelikán fortunately survived (Schovánek Reference Schovánek and Vančurová2003, pp. 51–56).
Both the magazine and the founder also lasted up until the fall of communism, and Listy is still actually published in the Czech Republic to the present day. It should also be added that Pelikán was imprisoned by the Gestapo during the war and consequently remained in hiding in illegality. He therefore, in a similar fashion as with Tigrid, followed the prison-refugee ‘model’ of the Czechoslovak presidents.
I analysed where the will to memory was manifested in a chosen selection of texts in the magazines. I was particularly interested in the following questions: Did the selected media with its media content have more of the function of preserving collective identity, or was it a tool for overcoming trauma? Did the emphasis placed on the particular events, personages, and stages of the past differ within the particular magazines? If so, what caused it?
It was assumed that, within the non-standard situation of ‘a nation outside the body of a nation’, exile magazines would not only be concerned with the preservation of national identity, but also the treatment of historical trauma. It was also anticipated that the emphases would differ between the two analysed exile generations.
The focus was primarily on texts which can be categorised as commemorative or anniversary journalism (Schudson Reference Schudson, Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt2014). These types of texts are a kind of textual laboratory in the construction of collective memory as they are written with the goal of recalling, newly contextualising, and analysing concrete events or persons. Concrete articulation of expressions of collective identity or trauma can be clearly observed in the texts. In the Czechoslovak case, this consisted of a number of events in the twentieth century, which the particular exile generations would return to repeatedly, and the new interpretations of which were inscribed by means of exile media into the collective memory. The research method consisted of textual interpretation in the hermeneutic tradition (Kronick Reference Kronick1997).
In light of the fact that even this defined sample would consist of several hundred texts at a minimum, analyses were chosen that focus on key historical anniversaries. These can be referred to, in the Czechoslovak case, as ‘the eight years’. These consisted of the following years: 1918 – founding of Czechoslovakia. The texts about this contained a balancing or new period interpretation about the establishment and short existence of this nation. 1938 – signing of the Munich Agreement and the dissolution of the independent country with its original borders. 1948 – February communist coup. 1968 – invasion of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact.
Findings
A number of shared social ‘memory nests or clusters’ arose out of the research, in which (not only) the exile collective memory was imprinted. Attention was only focused on selected clusters, which could be identified and analysed over the course of time in all of the selected magazines. All the clusters have their own internal development logic and dynamics, and the particular magazines exhibit various intensive ‘memory accents’ during the analysed periods. In light of the limited space of this article, the characteristics of the individual clusters are limited to basic attributes.
Memory of interwar Czechoslovakia
This was an essential theme for the post-February refugees. A number of them were part of the founding generation of the new Czechoslovak Republic and deeply identified with its democratic tradition and humanistic ethos. This nation was a reality that they themselves experienced. The fact that President Masaryk himself had been a political refugee also played a role in the formation of the exile memory.
Recollections of the between-the-wars Republic were not, however, idealised; on the contrary. Thanks to the absence of censorship and due to the plurality of opinions, the political, social, and economic operations of the country were subjected to ongoing critical reflections, with various versions of memory competing within the public space. The younger authors, in particular in Skutečnost, were more radical in terms of criticism of the failures in the operations of the political system in the First Republic. Even for the authors of Svědectví, the reflections on the First Republic were not mere recollections of a distant ideal. It was a critical analysis in the spirit of the legacy of Masaryk’s realism.
The between-the-wars Republic was already a distant theme, not only in terms of time, but also ideologically for the generation of (ex)communists who left for exile after the invasion in the year 1968. This exile generation was much more interested in the present and the recent past. The most important moment for them was the violent termination of the reforms of the Prague Spring by the military invasion in the year 1968. If and when Listy returned to the period of the between-the-wars Republic in their texts, they tended to be critical, for example, of the areas of national and social questions, along with other issues. Although the exile ex-communists interpreted the between-the-wars Republic from left-wing positions, they were generally objective. President Masaryk was an authority in their eyes who was worth returning to when, for example, analysing the mistakes which led to the defeat of the Prague Spring in the year 1968.
The idea and goal of commemorating the First Republic was, in particular for the generation of post-February refugees (less so for post-August exiles), to preserve it in the collective memory of the nation as a permanent part of identity and as one of the basic pillars from which one could develop further thinking about the national fate.
Memory of betrayal
Trauma of betrayal is one of the strongest returning motifs in the historical memory of Czechs in the twentieth century. This small nation, located in a difficult geographic position in the heart of Europe, enclosed from the west by Germany and from the east by the Soviet empire, was always limited in terms of its ability to defend its national identity and its borders. This involved not only the abilities of the politicians of the country, but also the willingness of its allies to fulfil its obligations, the internal conditions, and the geo-political situation. Betrayal could come from either outside or inside the national society.
The ‘Munich betrayal’, that is, the signing of the Munich Agreement in September 1938, stood the highest in the list of betrayals which formed the collective memory. This was when the European powers, without the participation of representatives of Czechoslovakia, agreed that Czechoslovakia would surrender its border regions to Nazi Germany without a fight, containing the primarily German-speaking population and thereby losing around a third of its territory. This betrayal in the construction of collective memory revolves around repeated narratives, for example, that the powers decided ‘about us without us’ or that the allied countries, France and Great Britain, actively participated in this betrayal. The domestic political elite, who capitulated to the dictates of the powers instead of calling for armed resistance against Nazi Germany, also betrayed the nation.
‘Munich’ continues to resonate in the collective memory of Czechs up until the present day and is also still present in current debates concerning the future direction of the country in the structures of the European Union and in NATO. The motif of betrayal is made use of by Russian propaganda in their hybrid operations against the West, and part of the population even responds positively to sentences along the lines of ‘the West will always betray you’.
Although exile memory of betrayal took many forms, it was an essential point in the construction of collective memory for all three magazines. The memory of betrayal was freshest for the editors of Skutečnost. It was connected not only with ‘Munich’, but also specifically with the betrayal involving the February coup in the year 1948. The domestic traitors were the Czechoslovak communists who abused democracy in order to destroy it. There were also critical reflections concerning the weaknesses of democratic politicians, who betrayed the ideals of Masaryk.
Svědectví was published for more than three decades, and the memory of betrayal was developed there over a wider time framework and analysed comprehensively and over the long-term. Although its starting point was similar to that of Skutečnost, the larger time distance from the ‘generational betrayals’ – Munich and the February one – made for a more nuanced perspective and analysis.
The traumatic betrayals of the post-February generation were more distant and abstract for Listy. The betrayal linked with the defeat of the Prague Spring was the most painful for them. The memory of betrayal was therefore directed at the Soviet Union, whose armies invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The Soviets were obvious ideological enemies for Svědectví, and Soviet communism was a dictatorship impossible to reform. The relationship to the Soviets was more complicated when it came to Listy. Many of those who cooperated with Listy were former reform communists who believed in the ideal of socialism with a human face. The invasion in August 1968 was therefore not for them merely an external act of aggression, but also a betrayal of the ideals concerning the possibilities of reforming socialism and seeking out ‘a third way’. The domestic conservative communists, who began to collaborate with the Soviets after the invasion, were also viewed as traitors by Listy.
From the perspective of the communist regime, in contrast, the traitors were the political exiles. They characterised them in their propaganda as those who had sold themselves to Western ideological centres for money in order to tarnish the socialist state. Some of those who had returned to the country also became involved in the propaganda campaigns by the regime against the exile community. They were mostly later found to be collaborators with the secret police. One of the most famous examples, out of a range of them, was Tomáš Řezáč, the son of the well-known writer Václav Řezáč, who left for the West in the autumn of 1968, where he was convinced to cooperate with communist intelligence. He managed to get close to a range of respected exile personages, even making the acquaintance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He even published a novel with the exile publisher Index in Cologne. He had a brief brush with fame upon his return to Czechoslovakia when he was presented to the public as someone who had spontaneously come back from the West, as he was unable to live there. The regime made use of his return to carry out carefully planned propaganda attacks on the traitorous exile community in the official newspapers, radio, and on television (Bašta Reference Bašta2001, pp. 6–69).
Memory of defeat
Memory of betrayal is closely linked with memory of defeat, with betrayal followed by defeat. Both of these clusters are closely linked and interwoven in the exile media construction of collective memory. After the betrayal in Munich, gradual capitulation followed without a struggle and with a defeat in the form of the dissolution of an independent Czechoslovakia. After the betrayal by the communists in February 1948, the defeat of democracy followed, and the onset of a communist dictatorship. The defeated democrats were persecuted in Czechoslovakia or ended up leaving for exile.
The magazine Skutečnost tried to come to terms with the defeats of recent years by means of critical reflections in its texts. The end of the First Republic in the autumn of 1938 was interpreted, not only as having been due to external powers, but also as resignation on the part of the democratic political elite concerning the principles and ideals upon which the Republic was based. A similar path of failure by the political elite paved the way, after the war, to February 1948.
The second half of the 1950s provided another geo-political context. Svědectví therefore reacted in a different manner to the previous defeats, but also in an active manner, with a call to dialogue not only within the framework of exile, but with home in particular. This was not only in relation to the domestic opposition, but also with the communists, who had begun to question their own work and who were interested in dialogue. Memory of defeat in Svědectví was linked with an effort to overcome the isolation of exile, and this by means of creating a permanent secret communication link across the Iron Curtain, through smuggling of the magazine to Czechoslovakia and through cooperation with domestic banned authors. Svědectví, with its critical approach to reality, built upon the work of Skutečnost, at times even thematically. It continued, for example, in the analysis of the issue of the expulsion of Sudeten Germans. These texts evoked passionate polemics and discussion more than three decades after the war.
The reform communists experienced a generational traumatic defeat in the year 1968 when liberalisation in the country was brought to an end by Soviet tanks. The departure of a great number of reform communists into opposition and exile, and the massive purges inside the communist party, when around a third of the members, that is half a million people, were either expelled from the party or left on their own, was a symbol of the defeat. The defeat of 1968 was a defining framework for Listy magazine and its founder, Jiří Pelikán, out of which everything else evolved. Listy also reacted to the defeat in an active manner. They called for resistance both abroad and at home and for the defence of the ideas of ‘democratic socialism’. The memory of defeat in Listy was the memory of ‘the incomplete reform-socialist revolution’, for the defence of which or for the continuation of the project of ‘the third path’ they fought for in exile.
Memory of us and the others
Thinking in accordance with the model of binary oppositions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is a general principle that helps both individuals and communities create a relationship with others. ‘Us’ means the group to which we belong and which we understand well. ‘Them’ are, in contrast, those who I cannot or do not want to belong to. I draw my map of the world in my head based on this opposition (Bauman and May Reference Bauman and May2019, p. 41). The media make use of binary oppositions in order to effectively structure their representation and narrative structures (Van Dijk Reference Van Dijk and Van Dijk2011, pp. 396–397).
This memory cluster was truly essential in exile as exile figures were forced to continuously legitimate their existence in relation to many of ‘the others’. Within the framework of the above-mentioned magazines, we can divide them into internal and external.
The basic and most important shared ‘them’ for all of the magazines was, first and foremost, the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. The exiles differed, however, when it came to the other ‘them’. In the eyes of the editors of the magazine Skutečnost, ‘them’ also consisted of the older conservative members of the post-February exile, whose arguments and ideological conflicts were viewed by the editorial team as completely unproductive.
The main ‘them’ was also the communist regime for Svědectví, against whose propaganda they were critically opposed. ‘Them’ were also the irreconcilable exile anti-communists, who criticised Svědectví for their excessive accommodation of communist revisionists in the country, and with whom the editors led a critical dialogue. Svědectví later added yet another ‘them’, these being reform communists in exile. The polemics that the editor Pavel Tigrid led with them were based on an ideological position that rejected the notion that communism can be reformed; in other words, even reform communism still remains communism, that is, a dictatorship.
Listy also made an attempt to be open to authors with a different political orientation, although their primary identity was based specifically on the defence of reform socialism. The main ‘them’, in the eyes of Listy, was also the Prague communist regime, as well as the other exile groups, who stood outside the reform-communism stream.
Apart from these internal ‘others’, all of the exile magazines constructed their memory in opposition to the external ‘them’ – with the Soviet Union in the first place. In terms of open painful themes from the past, Skutečnost and Svědectví also included the Germans, as this had been a generational issue for that generation of editors. The German theme did not play the same kind of role for Listy and their reform-communist constructed collective memory.
Memory of the future
It is seemingly the fate of each exile to plan the future in their country. ‘Memory of the future’ is that which makes the exile’s existence meaningful, in other words, actively working in exile with the goal of preparing the soil for a return home.
Reference has been made earlier to nine Czechoslovak presidents, four of whom had experience of being a refugee and of exile. Three of them also prepared projects for the future nation. The future presidents Masaryk and Beneš prepared, while in exile during the First World War, the project of a new democratic state, which arose out of the ashes of the Habsburg monarchy. President Beneš, during his second exile during the Second World War in London, once again prepared a project for the future state after the liberation of the Republic from Nazism in the year 1945. Finally, the future president Gottwald, in Moscow exile during the Second World War, also prepared a project in cooperation with Soviet communists to take over power and establish a communist dictatorship in the country.
Each of the three analysed magazines formed this ‘memory of the future’ in accordance with their own ideological starting points and based on the generational experience of the editors.
The vision of the future within Skutečnost contrasted with the views held by the older generation of exiles, who believed that the communist regime would soon collapse. The editors, in contrast, estimated that communism in their homeland would not be a short episode but would last much longer. The editors viewed the global conflict of the Cold War as a manifestation of the crisis of traditional democracy, which was unable to effectively counter the rise of totalitarian regimes. The authors therefore refused to see the future as a simple return to the democratic order of the past. They sought a ‘new’ concept of democracy for the future, one which would be active and interventionist, not merely reactive and passive, as had been customary at the time. The editors criticised nationalism as one of the causes of democracy’s weakness and perceived European federalism as the way forward. Exile for them was supposed to be ‘the ideological avant-garde of their nations’ and should not suffer from ‘exile complexes of inferiority’ (Prečan Reference Prečan2008, p. 331).
When it came to Svědectví, the construction of a vision of the future was quite timid in the initial years. This was due to their quite realistic realisation that the world, after the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by the Soviets and the passivity of the West, would probably be waiting a long time for a change, and that there would a difficult co-existence between the democratic West and the communist East, in other words, that which Pavel Tigrid had earlier referred to as ‘armed peace’. The democratic future was distant, but its preparation was essential. For Svědectví, the ‘memory of the future’ was a long-term project upon which Tigrid continued to work up to the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, that is, 33 years.
The ‘memory of the future’ which Listy constructed was the most revolutionary. Their vision was based on the idea that they would carry out the ideals of the Prague Spring and ‘the third way’ between Western capitalism and Soviet Communism. The editors of Listy were convinced that the reforms, which had been attempted, were not a mere utopia, and therefore, the magazine continued to ponder and develop its ideas.
In summary, while Skutečnost and Svědectví imagined the future on the background of Western democratic traditions and innovations based on these foundations, Listy constructed the future as a new and original project of ‘the third way’, whose realisation had been violently interrupted in the year 1968.
Conclusion
The subject of interest of this text has been selected exile media which were published abroad by political refugees from Czechoslovakia. The aim was to demonstrate, using selected magazines, how the image of collective memory was constructed by means of media content.
The study draws, in its wider conceptualisation, from the theories of alternative or surrogate public spheres, these having been formed by refugees in the West during the period of the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. In narrower terms, the text works with Eyal’s concept of ‘will to memory’, which is applied to the exile situation.
When comparing the approaches of all three magazines and the ways in which, in the selected sample of texts, they constructed their version of collective memory, one sees how profoundly and decisively they were influenced by the historical experiences of the particular generations, and how ‘will to memory’ was strongly manifested in them. The media was working on the preservation of collective identity, as well as serving as a tool for overcoming trauma. The exile ‘nation outside the body of the nation’ had to focus on both of these, and exile magazines provided an appropriate space for this. There was an assumption that the accents would differ between the two analysed exile generations.
The research identified several basic shared ‘memory nests or clusters’ in the magazines, in which the collective memory was imprinted. Increased attention was only paid to those that could be analysed over the course of time in all the selected magazines. Three of the clusters – Memory of Interwar Czechoslovakia, Memory of Us and the Others, and Memory of the Future – included texts whose primary goal was the preservation of the collective identity of exiles. Two clusters – Memory of Betrayal and Memory of Defeat – included texts that contained within them a reconciliation with trauma. Both the function of preservation of the collective identity and reconciliation with trauma differed when comparing the generations, and also when it came to the magazines. While the communist coup in February 1948 and Munich 1938 were key traumas for the generation of refugees from the year 1948, the defeat of the Prague Spring and the military invasion of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact were a similar trauma for the generation of refugees after August 1968. The mental hold of this defeat was so powerful that one could argue, with some exaggeration, that it was also part of the identity of the generation of ex-communist reformers. This was not as much the case in relation to the traumatic events of the year 1938, while February 1948 was seen from a different perspective by the former ‘winners’. The older exile colleagues would also remind them of this in discussions; history did not begin with August 1968.
The inter-generational differences were also concerned with three clusters, which were linked with collective identity. Memory of interwar Czechoslovakia was a basic referential point for the post-February generation and served as inspiration when contemplating Memory of the Future; for post-August ex-communists, this was a distant, irrelevant recollection. They were, in contrast, obsessed with the defence of the reforms of the Prague Spring and the search for a third path – this being the basic concept of their project for the future. Both generations also understandably differed in terms of their approach to Memory of Us and the Others, agreeing only on the main ‘them’ – that being the Soviet Union.
One additional detail concerning exile magazines, as laboratories and reservoirs of collective memory, should be added in conclusion. This is linked with the functions of the alternative public sphere. This concerns the role of these magazines as a surrogate and temporary symbolic home for the dispersed, limited, imagined exile community. Svědectví and Skutečnost amounted to mental homes for the older generation of exiles. They did this by preserving the memory of the First Republic, which was a physical home, an authentic experience for post-February refugees. Listy took care, in an intense fashion, of the memory of the Prague Spring, which made up the basic construction element of its identity.
All three magazines kept ideas and themes alive in the public space that were suppressed and forbidden back home. They thereby maintained ‘the memory of the nation outside the body of the nation’ and were at the same time ‘memory in motion’. They actively participated in the process of transmission and transformation of memory. This involved movement in time, from the past to the present and from the present to the future (see the particular clusters), as well as movement in space. The magazines found their way, not only among exiles, but were also a secret ‘memory bridge’ between exile and home. Exile magazines flowed through the smuggling communication channels across the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia, while contributions from domestic banned authors, cooperating with Svědectví and Listy, made their way in the opposite direction. The general perspective of these magazines, for the construction of collective memory, was therefore wider than merely the exile one. It was ‘a shared memory sphere’ which crossed over the borders of nations and continents.
Exile media consequently played an essential role in the construction of exile identity and in the struggle with the communist regime, which was interested in condemning exile personages to oblivion. This media, therefore, tried to ensure that memory and the past did not disappear and that it did not only remain ‘… the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly towards death’. (Kundera Reference Kundera1996, p. 119).
Competing interests
The substance of the content presented here has not been published previously and is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere.
Petr Orság is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Arts, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. A former journalist, Orság’s work primarily focuses on journalism, the history of Czechoslovak exile over the years 1948–1989, and on the role of the Media in totalitarian and authoritarian societies.
Open access
