Jáchymov: Borders of Oblivion

Jáchymov is a small spa town in the southwestern Czech Republic whose history began with the discovery of silver deposits in the area. The treasures hidden deep in the earth helped raise one of the largest and most famous cities in the Kingdom of Bohemia during the Renaissance (Kašpar & Horák 2009, 95). However, as the city was growing, the deposits were depleting. When they were completely depleted, the town slowly began to die. It only came to life for the second time in the 18th century, when the local mines began to extract cobalt, which was used to color glass (Hornátová 2000, 26). Despite this, the blue glass did not allow the town to regain its silver shine.

At the end of each silver bed, there was always a heavy black stone: pitchblende, marking the end of the bed. However, with the discovery by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaptroch, it became apparent that the pitchblende could mark not only the end but actually the beginning of something new that was valuable in its own right. In 1789, Klaptroch discovered uranium in this very Jáchymov pitchblende.

Martin Heinrich Klaptroch explained uranium more precisely as a separate element, but he did not obtain it in a pure state. Eugène-Melchior Péligot achieved this in 1841 (Urban, Slánský, & Mach, 1960, 23).

In 1898, Marie Skłodowska-Curie isolated radium from the fallout from the Jáchymov factory.

There is also radium in uranium ore.

The history of Jáchymov as a spa destination began in 1906. The radioactive water flowing from deep underground provided an impetus for Jáchymov's development, especially its lower part, as the town lies in an ascending valley. The upper part of the town was – and still is – dominated by the shaft of a uranium mine. Like radium, the extraction of uranium was initially linked to its healing properties and use in glass, where it provided color in the local glassworks. In autumn 1938, Jáchymov became part of the Reichsgau Sudetenland. On April 1, 1939, Third Reich authorities leased the mines from the mining company St. Joachimsthaler Bergbau GmbH to use the extracted ores primarily for military purposes.

Radon water was also extracted for use in the spa.

Except for the residential district and the adjacent forest areas, the upper town today consists solely of the remains of labor camps, because forced laborers not only comprised the workers in the uranium mines, but also the first prisoners of war in the Third Reich (Soviet, Polish, and Czechoslovak citizens). After the Second World War, Germans were displaced from other areas of Czechoslovakia, including criminal and political prisoners. Furthermore, the war contributed to a complete change in the town's social structure. The Beneš decrees led to an ethnic cleansing, namely expulsion of all Germans, leaving only those who were necessary for the operation of the local mines and factories. Uranium mining continued until 1962. During this period, the town lost its spa character, only to regain it in 1963 – when uranium mining for the Soviet Union ceased – which it enjoys until today.

Jáchymov's extraordinarily dynamic history offers an opportunity to trace the dynamics of memory, a memory that is always a sinusoid of forgetting and recalling, constant rewriting and negotiation, both in terms of the place of individual memories and the hierarchy of events worth remembering and those that should be forgotten. The German, Soviet, and Czech presence intersects here with Jáchymov's spa and military character – on one hand, the martyrological memory of the displacement of the German population just after the Second World War, and on the other hand, the fate of the political prisoners of the 1950s, who were forced into slave labor in the local uranium mine. Today, all these layers continue to be remembered in Jáchymov's urban landscape, to refer to the title of Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska's book. I would add that it is a landscape in which the air refracts the image of reality, making it fluid and somehow elusive. Bruno Schulz expresses this very well in The Street of Crocodiles: “I could see the trembling of the air, the fermentation of too rich an atmosphere which provoked that precocious blossoming, luxuriation, and wilting of the fantastic oleanders which had filled the room with a rare, lazy snowstorm of large pink clusters of flowers.” (Schulz 1995, 68).

Out of the many intertwining layers of memory in Jáchymov, I choose the one that concerns the presence of the German-speaking population. Although I am aware of other layers and I mention them in my reflections, for the sake of brevity I consciously choose to focus only on one of the many threads that, in this case, form a thick and rather tangled rope. Thus, I omit the obliterated traces of memory about the Soviet presence, or negotiating the memory of the martyrdom of the political prisoners forced to work in the local uranium mines.

Disputes about the shape of memory proceeded between the Confederation of Political Prisoners (Konfederace politických věznů), an association of former political prisoners and their families and people who were granted political asylum between 1945 and 1989 or joined the anti-communist resistance movement, and the Association of Political Prisoners.cz (Spolek Političtí vězni.cz), a non-profit organization whose members are dedicated to documenting and popularizing the memory of former political prisoners in Czechoslovakia.

Moreover, because space remains the source material for my analysis, I will limit my considerations to the documentary, material trace of memory remaining in the space of today's Jáchymov. Consequently, the main axis of my reflection will focus on town space as the site of memory, and all theses and conclusions formulated in this text will refer to it.

According to the 1930 census, there were 17,190 German nationals and only 653 Czech nationals living in the Jáchymov district, which consisted of 25 villages (Řeháček 2018, 43). In May 1945, there were 9,000 ethnic Germans and 45 guilds in Jáchymov (Bauer 2019, 67). After the Second World War, the Czechoslovak state seized most properties without compensation and deprived the Germans of their Czechoslovak citizenship and thus their civil rights.

Without going into the details of how the German population from Jáchymov was transferred – precisely described by Karel Řeháček in Obyvatelstvo německé národnosti jáchymovska po roce 1945 [The German Population of Jachymovska After 1945] (Řeháček 2018, 43) – I only want to indicate that after the organized part of the displacement at the end of 1946, 1,236 Germans remained in the town, the vast majority of them due to being German anti-fascists,

By holding a German antifascist or specialist card, citizens of German nationality were granted a special status that protected them from certain strictures against the German population. However, this did not protect everyone, and because too many cards were issued, sometimes based on false evidence, they were frequently revised (Řeháček 2018, 53). The issue of antifascists was also undertaken by Adrian von Arburg and T. Staněk (Eds.). (2011). Vysídlení Němců a proměny českého pohraničí 1945–1951: dokumenty z českých archivů. Díl II., svazek 1, Duben-srpen/září 1945: “divoký odsun” a počátky osídlování. Susa; K. Kaiserová (Eds.). (2007). I oni byli proti: Sborník z mezinárodní historické konference. Muzeum města Ústí nad Labem; S. Kokoška and T. Oellermann (Eds.). (2008). Sudetští Němci proti Hitlerovi Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR; Kovařík, D. (2007). Mezi mlýnskými kameny. Němečtí antifašisté v Československu v roce 1945. Dějiny a současnost. Kulturně historická revue 4: 41–43; T. Okurka (2008). Zapomenutí hrdinové. Muzeum Ústní nad Labem.

In 1947, there was a second wave of verification of antifascist cards. From a letter of the Okresní národní výbor (District National Council) dated November 27, 1947, to the Zemský národní výbor (National Council), we learn that in Jáchymov alone, there were 880 people of German origin, mainly specialist miners and their families (55).

Citing the Jáchymov chronicle, Zdeněk Bauer states that at the beginning of 1947, 779 miners and 393 other specialists of German nationality remained in the town (Bauer 2019, 68, after: https://www.portafontium.eu/iipimage/30360268/soap-kv_00245_mesto-jachymov-1949-1970_0250?x=515&y=161&w=391&h=219, access: February 3, 2022). In this case, the sources can be imprecise, not only because we deal with a period of continuous population movement, but also with different ways of establishing data. Nevertheless, it perfectly illustrates Jáchymov's transformation in just a few years from a predominantly German town to a Czech town with a small German minority that was left only because there was a shortage of laborers and specialists.

After the Second World War, the Czechoslovak borderlands

In the Polish original, I use the word pogranicze as a translation of the Czech word pohraničí in the sense and for the reasons presented by Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska in her book Zapamiętane w krajobrazie. Krajobraz kulturowy czesko-niemieckiego pogranicza w czasach przemian [Remembered in the Landscape. The landscape of the Czech-German border in times of change.] Despite its equivalent sound in Polish, the word has different connotations in Czech. First of all, pohraničí is used in a historical context rather than a geographical one. As Ćwiek-Rogalska writes “what in the Czech Republic was historically called pohraničí, did not always coincide with the actual borderland in the sense of land on the edge between the Czech lands and another country.” Later, Ćwiek-Rogalska adds after Jan Jeništa: “in the Czech sense, pohraničí connotes a place where German-speaking communities lived until 1946” (Cf. Ćwiek-Rogalska 2017, 40).

Otto Patek from Jáchymov was held in the internment camp in Ostrov nad Ohří with other Germans from the town and surrounding area, and this is how he recalls the scale of the violence he witnessed on the night of June 5–6, 1945. A dozen Czechs came to the place where the German Jáchymovians were being held around 10 p.m. The Czechs brought with them a bench – as it later turned out, a murder weapon – and blankets with which they covered the windows. They chose Johann Müller, a local watchmaker, as their first victim. They laid him on the bench and cut off his ears, gouged out his eyes, and stabbed him in the mouth with a bayonet. The Czechs knocked out all his teeth and broke his arms and legs. Since he was still alive, they tied a rope around his neck and dragged him around the room. That night, they murdered six more Germans in the same way. Patek describes the dramatic events in the following manner: “The murdered Germans screamed terribly because they were being murdered with full consciousness. Three other prisoners went mad because they had to co-experience all this and I was close to going mad myself” (Dědinová 1991, 179). The killing stopped when the military commission arrived.

Ostrov nad Ohří is located about sixteen kilometers away from Jáchymov. It is the place where the Jáchymov Germans experienced their trauma, but not the only one: it also happened in their native Jáchymov. Based on the town chronicle, we may determine, relatively precisely, when and where the execution of the town's German citizen Maximilian Steinfelsner happened.

On June 4, 1945, a guerilla troop from Karlovy Vary led the owner of the local wine and vodka distillery

According to Otto Patek's memoirs published on www.mitteleuropa.de/joachimsthal01.htm, Maximilian Steinfelsner owned a sawmill (access: April 4, 2022).

Apart from rare traces like the one in the Jáchymov chronicle, or in Zdenek Bauer's book Jáchymovské tabory – PEKLO, ve kterém MRZLO [Jáchymovské camps – HELL, in which it was FREEZING], or from the living witnesses (if any), the event left no physical presence. Noteworthy, just as in field research the ethnographer or anthropologist becomes a “specific subject in the foreign discursive space” of the community under study, this may also be the case here. The negligible and hidden traces from the events outside the 1945 Jáchymov town hall may emerge thanks their introduction into the broader discourse through my considerations. Any intrusion into a given environment changes that environment irrevocably, creating an “ethnographic present tense” (Hastrup 2008, 28).

I judge not whether a place of memory could emerge from the execution site of an “important Nazi” and his friend in front of the German Jáchymovians, who were forced to watch this death spectacle, let alone consider the unclear legal background of this event and its moral dimension. This is not a relevant question. The question about what is worth remembering, who and what can be remembered, and who and what must be forgotten always closely follows the answer of whoever creates the dominant discourse. As Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska writes, after Aleida Assmann: “spaces of memory are determined by power relations” (Saryusz-Wolska 2011, 142). Later, Saryusz-Wolska doubts whether there is history independent of relations of power and domination (Saryusz-Wolska 2011, 143). Following Dolores Hayden, Saryusz-Wolska adds,

Power manifests itself not only in edicts about the present and the future, but – as it is obvious today – also in constructions of the past. … Ideological-discursive neutrality, even if it were to result from the apparently material and objective existence of places, will always remain a delusion

The dominant memory discourse is shaped by the winners, and they are always right:

Although memory is not merely a source of propositional knowledge of the past, it has a significant cognitive aspect. Memory involves a claim to truth, and it will not serve its other functions if that claim fails. But it is, as we are aware, all too fallible: it needs confirmation from, and is sometimes corrected by, other sources of information about the past

In this regard, Aleida Assmann refers to the English historian Peter Burke, who reminds us that as much as history is written by the winners, it is also forgotten by them (Assmann 2009, 134).

We may always express one thought in at least two ways: there are events that we had better not remember, erasing them from memory or town space so that no material or symbolic trace remains. There are also events that have passed into oblivion, with no material or symbolic trace remaining. In the first version of this sentence, this process seems to be external to the remembering subject; it consciously rejects traces of the past. In its impersonal form, the sentence describes a natural process as certain phenomena are forgotten because they are not necessary from the perspective of forming or realizing a present identity. Therefore, forgetting can be a natural process or a mechanical detachment from the past, and it would seem that in either case it must inevitably involve loss. Indeed, in both cases, we experience a loss, and we deprive ourselves of something, or we are deprived of something. However, let us remember that not every forgetting involves loss: “Yet forgetting is not always a failure, and it is not always, and not always in the same way, something about which we should feel culpable” (Connerton 2008, 59). There are also situations when we need to forget something in order to remember something new. Both individual and collective memory have their limits.

Commenting from a psychological-science perspective on Paul Connerton's article “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Matthew Hugh Erdelyi cites another psychologist, Frederic Bartlett, who questions the forgetting curve created by Herman Ebbinghaus, arguing that “remembering involved constructive and reconstructive processes in which our experiences are reworked by mental schemas – mental structures embodying our notions of reality, logic and culture” (Erdelyi 2008, 273). Bartlett challenges Ebbinghaus's notion of the decaying memory trace and instead proposes that remembering involves constructive and reconstructive processes in which our experiences are reworked by mental schemas – mental structures that embody our notions of reality, logic, and culture.

Of course, there was place for odsun (expulsion) in the official narrative, but until 1989 it was clearly limited. The authorities presented it as necessary and just, both morally and legally. According to the propaganda, odsun enabled postwar Czechoslovakia to solve the problem of the ever-dangerous German minority. The authorities presented the Czech crimes as justified by the earlier scale of violence, or passed them over in silence, trying to erase them from memory. Except for the short Prague Spring and the dissident discussion of the issue of expulsions – and a few texts written mainly just after the end of the Second World War

We may find an example of such a narrative in the novel Dům na zeleném svahu [A house on a green slope] (1947) by Ann Sedlmayer, in which Czech-German relations are initially rather positive, only later for there to emerge the problem of violence against Germans, and the issue of the intrusive desire of the new settlers of the borderland to get rich.

Among the seven types of forgetting distinguished by Paul Connerton, we find repressive erasure. Although it is a state act, it does not need to be implemented with violence: “Repressive erasure need not always take malign forms, then; it can be encrypted covertly” (Connerton 2008, 60). Connerton indicates that repressive erasure denies historical events and leaves a gap in memory, causing history to lose its continuity (Connerton 2008, 60). In this case, the continuity of history is lost only in the sphere of the documentary trace of memory. This event as a whole and as a transfer of the German population after the Second World War exists both in historical consciousness

Following Miroslav Hroch, I understand historical consciousness here as a disordered collection of memories, perceptions, and knowledge that form a mythical image of the past with only a tenuous connection to historical knowledge. Hroch argues that everything about the past stretches on the line between knowledge and historical consciousness (Hroch 2014, 27).

However, we also encounter here features of prescriptive forgetting: “Like erasure, it is precipitated by an act of state, but it differs from erasure because it is believed to be in the interests of all parties to the previous dispute and because it can therefore be acknowledged publicly” (Connerton 2008, 60). It was in the interest of all parties to the conflict not to inflame recent offenses and not to escalate the right to revenge. Therefore, the authorities attempted to arrange the wild odsun fairly quickly and conduct it within the shortest possible time. While it is undoubtedly right to regard Beneš's statements

The most famous example is Edward Beneš's Brno speech of May 13, 1945, during which he stated: “My program is – and I make no secret of it – that we must eliminate the German question in the republic” (qtd. after Spurný, http://souvislosti.cz/clanek.php?id=327).

Lacking traces of the dramatic transfer of the German population from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War seems to also and above all indicate forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity: “The emphasis here is not so much on the loss entailed in being unable to retain certain things as rather on the gain that accrues to those who know how to discard memories that serve no practicable purpose in the management of one's current identity and ongoing purposes” (Connerton 2008, 63). A complete change in Jáchymov's social structure required the introduction of a completely new identity, built from the beginning, not based on German roots and the continuation of the traditions of those who turned out to be traitors and criminals worthy only of condemnation, which would evoke a desire for retribution for wrongs and revenge for committed crimes.

So pieces of knowledge that are not passed on come to have a negative significance by allowing other images of identity to come to the fore. They are, so to speak, like pieces of an old jigsaw puzzle that if retained would prevent a new jigsaw puzzle from fitting together properly. What is allowed to be forgotten provides living space for present projects”

Jáchymov's German character had to be annulled – or at least forgotten as much as possible – to bring to life a new Czech identity, which fit perfectly into the Communist plan to create a “new socialist man.”

On the one hand, we observe here a repressive erasure and prescriptive forgetting framed by the dominant, totalitarian discourse of historical consciousness, while on the other hand, we notice forgetting that simultaneously means creating a new identity and rejecting the difficult past to build a more durable future. This correlates closely with Eagle Glassheim's conclusions about the identity created in the borderlands after the Second World War among the new inhabitants of the area:

during the settlement and in the following years, a new type of identity emerged in the borderlands, one characterized by the predominance of materialistic ideas and interests, which at the same time pushed the natural environment in the North of the Czech Republic to the edge of the field of vision

Let us add that this identity stood in contrast to the one characterizing the German inhabitants of the borderland: “These newly promoted identities adopted by the new inhabitants from the North of the Czech Republic were not only national (Czech) in character, but they were also distinguished by a strong reference to late modernism, socialist-inspired industrialism” (Glassheim 2005, 464). Even the borderland's inhabitants considered tall chimneys and mine shafts to be the key symbols of North Bohemian identity, and although the region itself had long been an industrial center, it was only after the Second World War that there was a sudden shift from the romantic image of a small homeland in Sudeten – rooted in its attachment to nature, religion, and architecture – toward the industrial and modernist landscape created by the new, socialist reality, which Glassheim further notes (2005, 464).

In “Building Memory: Architecture, Networks and Users” (2009), Michael Guggenheim employs Bruno Latour's actor-network theory to present how buildings themselves can serve to stabilize memories in relation to functional systems. Guggenheim argues that functional systems cannot control buildings, because it is impossible to isolate a building from the memory network. As I mentioned above, it is also impossible to remove all German traces from Jáchymov. According to Guggenheim, functional systems can control objects through two basic mechanisms, namely, isolation and multiplication. The first of these seems almost impossible in the case of architecture, since it is extremely difficult to isolate such an object from public access, and thus to limit its occurrence in different networks, namely different memory variants. Nevertheless, in this case, such a situation seemingly occurred – albeit partially and for a limited period – when part of Jáchymov's architecture was physically and thus meaningfully isolated from the network of cultural communication.

Already by the end of the Second World War, in connection with the mining of strategically important uranium in Jáchymov and the establishment of forced labor camps in its vicinity, the town and its surroundings were subject to various security regulations restricting free movement. As Kovařík notes: “During the Cold War, there was intensified pressure from Czechoslovak officials and Soviet experts to increase the security of the Jáchymov mining area as a state secret” (Kovařík 2018, 60). The Czechoslovak authorities treated this area with special care. For example, from 1948, entering the mine's vicinity required a pass. To get an idea of the situation, we must know that the mine in question – Svornost – is located in the central, upper part of town, about 30 meters in a straight line from the Roman Catholic Church of Saint Joachim.

As Jáchymov is located in close proximity to the border, it was also gradually and briefly included in the so-called border belt. From April 1, 1950, the belt was two to ten kilometers wide and ended a few hundred meters from the town's borders (Kovařík 2018, 61). However, on September 19, 1951, the political secretariat to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (ÚV KSČ) decided to declare the whole of Jáchymov and its surroundings a “restricted area,” with all constraints analogous to those in force in the “border range.”

Persons residing or permanently employed in the border zone, farmers owning agricultural land in the zone, and doctors, and clergymen whose district or parish included the border zone needed special permits issued by the appropriate authorities. It was also forbidden to travel outside designated roads in the border range from dusk to dawn. All “suspicious” citizens would be expelled from the border zone (Kovařík 2005, 686 and f.).

Undoubtedly, this situation significantly limited the inhabitants’ possibilities of assigning meanings, but expanded the authorities’ potential to do so. As Guggenheim writes, isolation is

a powerful tool of functional systems to create and control new networks and cut unwanted ones, and to create truth. Furthermore, the isolation of the objects stabilizes possible interpretations by users: specimens have written descriptions that offer authoritative interpretations about the provenance of objects and their meanings

The city and its buildings ceased to function normally. They became strictly controlled by the authorities and were therefore not fully owned by their inhabitants. The Czechoslovak authorities determined the overriding semantic value of this heavily restricted space.

Moreover, we should remember that the expulsions after the Second World War prevented the German population in Jáchymov from superimposing their interpretation of this space, disconnecting them from the expellees’ memory for a long time. They did not have the opportunity to create their memory network, their truth, about the past.

Paradoxically, the restriction of possibilities for new inhabitants to assign their own meanings to the space in which they lived due to isolation, combined with the earlier almost complete replacement of main actors following the expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, enabled the ensuing multiplication of meanings. The old meanings were eliminated and the attribution of new ones – everyday ones, produced in everyday situations during the standard activities of each day – was temporarily limited. Once people could tame this space to its full extent by mapping it with their own meanings, it was precisely these everyday, functional meanings that became the most important, and their semantic value clearly increased.

According to Guggenheim, multiplication comes down to multiplying the meaning of an object, thanks to which “[t]hese objects all have the same history, and this history is accessible for any user dealing with such an object” (Guggenheim 2009, 45). In relation to architecture, the process of multiplication is also extremely difficult, but not impossible. It often involves changing an existing building's function. Any use other than the original one adds a new layer of meaning. Thus, in a way, it is a process opposite to isolation; creating many new networks also creates new memory versions. These devalue specific networks, in this case simply replacing those that were isolated, while simultaneously leading to the formation of diverse and equal networks. In the case of residential buildings, new meaning networks emerge through the practices performed in them, especially everyday ones. Undoubtedly, in Jáchymov, the practices underwent a profound transformation, first because of the changing occupants, and second because some of the tenements had lost their residential function, especially those located in the restricted zone. New everyday practices create new memory networks and stabilize the memory of space as it relates to the everyday life of the inhabitants, rather than to Jáchymov's past.

Today, the site of Steinfelsner and his friend's execution is no more. The tree had already been cut down for the construction of the street at the end of 1949 when Anna Šelová was writing the chronicle. Her chronicle's aim was to fill in in the missing years (1945–1949), or rather, as she suggests when starting the town history from scratch: “to impartially and fairly describe the new history of this town” (Šelová 1949, 2), which was to have new inhabitants from then on. The chronicler thriftily cuts off the town's German history, justifying it as historical justice against the traitors of Czechoslovakia who had sided with Nazism: “The settlement period was very turbulent. The Germans were reluctant to move out, knocked out of their plans for a Greater German Reich. And the Czechs found it hard to forget the wrongdoings. One does not trust traitors, and so Jáchymov gained new inhabitants.” Moreover, Šelová employs the notion of the inevitable changes in history to motivate the new beginning: “Jáchymov used to welcome Henlein, even hosted Hitler; today Jáchymov is Czech. History has come full circle. Evil is crushed by good, violence is suppressed by law. Only truth, justice, and love prevail over everything” (2)

The chronicler paraphrases here an expression which is of considerable importance in the history of Czechia. It comes from a letter written by Jan Hus to Jan of Rejštejn in 1413, “Nade vším vítězí prawda” (“Truth will prevail over everything”) and was repeated by him in similar form in a letter to the University of Prague, written from prison in Constance: “Stůjte v poznané pravdě, která vítězí nade vším a sílu má až na věky” (“Keep to the truth you know; it conquers all and is strong until eternity”). In 1914–1918, this slogan was popularized by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and since March 30, 1920, it has appeared in Latin on the flag of the Czechoslovak president (“Veritas vincit”). However, after the breakup of Czechoslovakia, it was changed to the Czech-language version.

Today, the town of Jáchymov is a place of non-memory. To simplify, it is a place that differs from a place of memory, just as in Marc Augé's descriptions a place differs from a non-place (Augé, 1995, 79). It is space without history, devoid of commemorative perspective. At the same time, the town is a non-place (not just a place of non-memory):

The real non-places of supermodernity – the ones we inhabit when we are driving down the motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting in an airport lounge waiting for the next flight to London or Marseille – have the peculiarity that they are defined partly by the words and texts they offer us: their ‘instruction for use,’ which may be prescriptive (‘Take right-hand line’), prohibitive (‘No smoking’) or informative (‘You are now entering Beaujolais region’)

Today, the site of Steinfelsner and his friend's execution is a parking lot in the town's main street with street signs, a bus stop, and lines marking both the path and the space in which to stop one's car. “The traveler's space may thus be the archetype of non-places,” Augé summarizes in his reflection (1995, 86). The trees have only recently returned to the site, and they do not form a shaded avenue among streets; they are few, and form part of the parking space, a space that appears as a typical non-place.

In offenses and favors, as in defeats or triumphs, there are always two sides–the executioner and the victim, the benefactor and the recipient, the loser and the winner. The memory on either side will always differ. Consequently, after 1989, the dominant discourse in Czechoslovakia on the transfer of the Germans after the Second World War slowly changed, opening space for voices from the other side. The apogee of this metamorphosis occurred before the Czech Republic's accession to the European Union.

Without going into detail in this extensive multi-level discussion (legal, political, journalistic, literary, film, television), we may state that new issues emerged in the discourse on memory about the German population's transfer after the Second World War. These issues were often sensitive for the Czech community and disturbed the hitherto-established order of memory. In the beautiful, clear, and sunny landscape, the air began to break, contours blurred, and some events revealed themselves as mere illusions, mirages, while other appeared clearly in their place. There surfaced questions about the justice of collective guilt, accounts of crimes committed by Czechs against expelled Germans, descriptions of the traumatic fates of expelled Germans, and other similar stories.

It seems that we encounter here at least two overlapping processes. The first is the transformation of communicative memory of mainly (or mostly) biographical character, which includes memories of the closest personal past, into cultural memory that has the modus of a foundational memory that functions based on permanently objectified media (Assmann, 2009, 84). In other words, living memory has transformed into a media message. Obviously, it happened at different paces and at different times in the Czech Republic and Germany, but it is notably the German memory of the savage transfer of the German population after the Second World War that penetrated the Czech media space on a fairly large scale. The mechanism appeared simultaneously with a specific political situation. The Czech Republic's accession to the European Union clearly intensified discussion and the atmosphere of conflict between the German memory of the expelled victims and that of the Czech victims of the Second World War. As Piotr Buras describes, if until the last decade of the 20th century, the German collective memory's

dominant attribute was, at least since the end of the 1960s, the memory of the Holocaust, then today there is a growing awareness that Germans were also victims. The memory of the German victims of the Second World War (the expelled, killed in allied air raids) is no longer only a private matter. It is becoming a permanent element of the public sphere, just as the memory of Auschwitz

We may observe the “expellees’ return,” as Buras (15) calls it, in the Czech public sphere, and these are not only voices from the German side, but also Czech polemics against German martyrdom and the search for film or literary inspiration in the expellees’ dramatic fate. We may multiply examples,

Denemarkova Radka, Peníze od Hitlera (2006), Tučková Kateřina, Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch (2009), Urban Josef, Habermannův mlýn (2010, a film directed by Juraj Herz was made in the same year), Urban Josef. 7 dní hříchů (2012, a film under the same title directed by Jiří Chlumski was also made in 2012), Jakuba Katalapa, Němci, (2012), Mornštajnová Alena, Slepá mapa, 2013; for but a few selected examples.

Despite the discourse of “wild expulsions,” the Jáchymov memory about the transfer of almost all the town's inhabitants remained without a permanent trace in space, although traces of the town's Germanness are visible at almost every turn. Traces of Germanness are indispensable and indelible in Jáchymov. It is not only the gravestones with German names in the local cemetery – often written in Swabian – but also many buildings in the town and its surroundings. Jáchymov's center, its geographical backbone, namely the main road where most of the post-German houses stand and from which the streets with later buildings expanded, dates back to a time when the town was inhabited almost exclusively by Germans.

Germanness emerges from beneath Czech memory because Czech memory cannot cover the entire past. Although Czech memory seeks to forget the German character of this place, traces of Germanness remain in the space. The German inscriptions emerging from under the falling plaster of the buildings being renovated in Jáchymov are a great metaphor for this.

Ross Poole considers the question of collective memory that establishes the moral order of the present. He claims that collective memory sets the moral agenda of the present. Because certain things were done or not done in the name of the group, we now have a responsibility to do certain things – to carry out the commitments made in the past, or to compensate for wrongs. Of course, Poole highlights, in neither case are the responsibilities absolute. The commitments may be overridden by other and more urgent commitments, or there may be strong moral reasons why one should disassociate oneself from predecessors. However, in the light of my considerations, the most important outcome is that, even in these cases, the effects of these policies and projects remain on one's current moral agenda (Poole 2008, 159). The moral order of the few months after the end of the Second World War was the order of revenge, or rather the right to revenge – retaliation for all the wartime wrongdoings, and the desire to get even for betrayal and humiliation.

This moral order appears to exist to this today, even though it is now challenged by questions about the legitimacy of atrocities (even against former perpetrators), the moral right to use collective guilt, and the humane dimension of the then-undertaken actions. In this case, the various ways of forgetting analyzed above complemented each other, culminating in the creation of a new space of memory, a new identity built on the total disregard, not so much of history as a whole, but one of its episodes – namely, the transfer of the German population from Jáchymov after the Second World War. It was effectively removed from the town's space, while Germanness itself remained firmly rooted within it, albeit deprived of the remembering subject. The dramatic transfer of the German population after the Second World War remains in the Czech narrative the “great migration” and the “great move,” which is what the audience gathered in front of the town hall could hear during the video mapping presented on the building for the quincentenary of the town's founding, on the exact site where Jáchymov's German citizens were forced to watch Steinfelsner and his friend's execution.