The Croatian society is still coping with traumatizing events (World War II and civil war) and memories of them. The politics of memory, articulated by Tudjman´s strategy of generational and memory reconciliation of the society in the early 1990s, led to the relativization and even promotion of the pro-fascist Ustashe regime, and simultaneously to the marginalization and stigmatization of narratives relating to the role of national liberation struggle within multi-ethnic partisan movement. This also included members of local Czech minority. The study shows how - despite this - the narratives concerning the partisan resistance are still alive in family memory, and they form, through generational transmission, a value alternative to the contemporary nationally-oriented state ideology as well as to the cultural presentation of Czech minority. Family memory works as an autonomous ”intimate space/area” of expatriates in Croatia, which is based on searching for a generational value continuities in the period of post-communist social uncertainties.
Up to 9,000 Italian soldiers are believed to have been massacred by the German Army (Wehrmacht) on the Greek island of Cephalonia in September 1943, after Italy had switched to the Allied side in the World War II. Yet, until the end of 1990’s, the tragic event was completely ignored by the (Western) German public. The first attempt to break the silence was made by Der Spiegel magazine
in December 1969. It did not succeed to provoke hardly any public reactions; it disturbed, however, the part of the West German society which was interested in maintaining the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht”. The paper examines how the Cephalonia case was investigated by international, Italian, and West German justice in the period 1945–1970, in which the Western Allies changed their attitude towards punishment of the war crimes carried out by the German Army. It also analyzes how this event was interpreted by the German Foreign Ministry and the veteran association whose members were possibly involved in the Cephalonia war crime and how they prepared themselves to face a possible public debate
about the massacre on Cephalonia. The study based on archive documents reveals that more strategies were considered by the Foreign Ministry as well as by the veteran association, yet, silence proved to be the most efficient one. and Článek obsahuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou