National Indifference Concept and Contemporary WWII Military Reenactment in Czech Lands: A Comparative View of the Groups Reenacting Hultschin and Estonian SS Conscripts

Abstract

For the first time in the Czech Republic, a research project on contemporary military re-enactment has been carried out based on oral history. The research team managed to record memory narratives of, among others, three military reenactment associations, two of which still engage in a controversial reenactment of Wehrmacht Heer units (coming from the Hultschin/Hlučín/Hulczyn region). At the same time, the third reenacts Estonian SS units. In the spirit of post-positivist oral history, the collected narratives have been analysed primarily to reveal the cultural content, forms, and processes that shape the historical subjectivity of the narrators, that is, the way they understand themselves in history. One key cultural form the narrators use is the so-called ‘national indifference’. The reenactors refuse to identify themselves ethno-culturally (and ideologically) with German or Czech/Czechoslovak warring sides. These cultural forms are further augmented with the concept of an ‘ordinary soldier’, which is well-known in reenactment studies. As a result, reenactors self-interpret themselves as subjects who reenact Axis German armies, but consciously, within liminal contexts, whilst rejecting Nazi ideology, which makes them significantly more acceptable in Czech military reenactment milieus. In this respect, the study provides a comparative view of the Hultschin and Czech Estonian SS reenactors within the context of reenactor associations.