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From Curated Nostalgia to Cheerful Kitsch: The Remaking of 17 November

19. 11. 2025 / Muriel Blaive

čas čtení 9 minut

This year’s 17th November celebrations in Prague offered a strangely endearing mixture of retro charm, commercialized nostalgia, and gentle absurdity. Everywhere I went, people were cheerfully engaging with the past. The irony is that it was not necessarily with the past in all its complexity, but rather with a softened, stylized, and sometimes cartoonish version of it. It was both delightful, amusing, and unsettling. As I wandered through the city, I found myself moving between illuminated trams, historical exhibits packed with laughing visitors, glossy commemorative debates, and an abundance of flags, pins, and candles. It was festive, touching, absurd, and deeply thought-provoking.

History as a good-natured farce

One charming scene, for example, was an old tram decorated in national colors, repurposed into an exhibit about Tuzex shops. Crowds formed to see it—people queueing not for scarce goods, but to see an exhibit about queueing for scarce goods, I couldn’t help laughing at the irony. One father, born after 1989, was reading the panels aloud to a little girl, born not long before covid, about what Tuzex actually were: shops filled with luxury goods from the West where one paid in hard currency, and which therefore symbolized for the public both the inaccessible capitalist dream and the arrogance of the communist elite that had privileged access to such shops. Father and daughter were doing their best to appropriate a reality that was completely foreign to them both.

Then I stepped into another tram-exhibit, this time about socialist women’s integration into the workforce since the 1950s. It was crowded and lively, full of visitors laughing at socialist propaganda, news reports, and clips from early Czech television, curated by a historian who also wasn’t born before 1989 (and who did an excellent job of presenting this material, I might add.) One interview from 1965 showed a young woman explaining with an ironic smile that she had “three jobs”: her actual profession, her full-time studies at school, and her work at home caring for her family since her husband was “good for nothing” in the domestic sphere. The entire tram burst out laughing. Women around me joked that they too wanted to become “traktoristky” or other heavy-industry workers like in the old propaganda reels, professions socialism supposedly opened to them. But the laughter carried knowledge in it. Everyone instantly recognized the double, sometimes triple burden of women, then and now, in a spontaneous, collective acknowledgement that history changes, but not always as much as we like to pretend.

History as a (bad-natured) tragedy

Elsewhere in the city, the three pillars of Czech memory politics of communism that I have inwardly dubbed the “trio from hell”, i.e., the Museum of the Memory of 20^th Century History (the clunky name says it all), the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, and Memory of the Nation (Paměť národa), were exhibiting in side by side booths. As I underlined it multiple times in Britské listy, their interpretive framework relies on a stark moral dichotomy between victim and culprit, dictatorship and innocence. They present the communist past in terms that are reassuringly unambiguous, reducing the complexities of life in communist society to an artificial binary code.

But what is interesting and disturbing to me is that these institutions fit seamlessly in Monday’s environment of aestheticized nostalgia and commercially packaged patriotism. It leads me to wonder what this means when organizations committed to a moralized rewriting of the past find themselves entirely at home amid its commodified remembrance?

History as performance

A commemorative debate at Divadlo Image further illustrated the shift between history and the rewriting of history. Its polished production, sponsor wall, and QR-code translation contributed to a sense of detachment from the historical event ostensibly being honored. The Velvet Revolution, once associated with spontaneity, risk, and improvisation, now appeared overlaid with a modern veneer of cultural branding. With the exception of Anna Šabatová, the substance of 1989 seemed secondary to its representational form. “Image” truly is the operational word here.

And everywhere, patriotism was for sale under the form of flags, candles, and pins, all bought eagerly and worn with pride. On the one hand, it was sweet; people clearly meant it sincerely. On the other hand, I felt uneasy watching the accelerating canonization of Václav Havel and of the Velvet Revolution, drifting toward the same sentimental myth-making that transformed Masaryk and the First Republic into objects of symbolic worship rather than subjects of nuanced understanding – a confusion that had already disturbed me when I visited Czechoslovakia for the first time in April 1990. It’s troubling to see a culture forget how Havel was (mis)treated during his presidency, but whose memory is now replaced by a convenient and simplified heroism. If the creation of a collective narrative requires the construction of innocence (but does it?), then Havel has become a consensual icon and the Velvet Revolution has been reimagined as a clear-cut moral victory rather than the negotiated, often messy transition it actually was and gave birth to.

The appropriation of commemorations by ordinary people is, in principle, something very welcome and for which historians strive. History belongs to everyone; it must live beyond archives and seminars. But this popular engagement comes at the cost of complexity – the uncomfortable truths, the contradictions, the messy gray zones that make history history rather than folklore. Here, a rich history has become a souvenir stand, one that is comforting, simplified, and beautifully incomplete.

Ouch – I was busted

The irony even became personal. When I was a young historian in the 1990s, people who had lived through the era loved to challenge me: “How can you know anything? You weren’t there!” I spent three decades interviewing witnesses, digging through archives, proving that hindsight and method can sometimes illuminate more than immediate experience. Hardly anyone questions my legitimacy anymore. I have, it seems, paid my dues for the most part.

Yet today, watching young visitors born long after 1989 interact with the commemoration and with historians also born after 1989, I caught myself thinking exactly what used to be thrown at me: “What do they know?” The irony stung but also made me smile. The generational wheel turns, and suddenly I find myself playing the role I once resisted.

This raises, again, a larger question, perhaps the central question for those of us who care about public history: how do we cultivate a shared, popular understanding of the past without flattening it into something kitschy, commercialized, or sentimental? How do we make history accessible without stripping it of its uncomfortable edges, its sophistication, its emotional and political depth? How do we remain authentic in our storytelling while recognizing that authenticity itself is contested, filtered, and performed?

The curation of commodification

Here is where the rise of the organization Díky, že můžem (“Thanks that We Can”), which changed the shape of the 17 November commemoration in notable ways, comes into question. Established as a civic association of young professionals and activists, this NGO now organizes the flagship event Korzo Národní – the public celebration of the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Day (17 November) – on Národní třída each year. Since 2014, this festival‐style event has drawn tens of thousands of visitors, introducing concerts, interactive installations, debates, and merchandise into the fabric of commemoration. Before it existed, I spent many anniversaries of 17 November chasing the minimal public recognition I could find, with little to no pageantry, few organized gatherings, and a gentle fading of the date into routine. The transformation is remarkable; what was once a “non-memory” for many has become a major cultural event.

The very fact that an NGO has successfully turned this date into a popular spectacle raises questions about this dynamic of commodification. The past is now both publicly embraced and packaged. Public memory is being curated for mass consumption. From this reflective standpoint, let me summarize again the two issues that emerge.

First, that of popular appropriation vs. institutional narrative: public engagement with history, if sincere, is a healthy sign: people want to remember, to participate, to make the past meaningful. But when that engagement aligns seamlessly with institutional frameworks that favor simplicity and moral clarity, the risk is that nuance is lost.

And second, the commodification of history and the spectatorship of memory: when commemoration becomes festival, when queues form around historical re-enactments, when the past is lit in neon and sold in souvenirs, one must ask: what is gained and what is lost? The tools of memory – exhibits, films, debate forums – are valuable, but the rhythms of consumer culture – visibility, branding, staging – may privilege spectacle over depth. The very success of Díky, že můžem demonstrates the potency of this model, but also its vulnerability to turning memory into merchandise.

Conclusion: the past as commodification

After years of analyzing memory, public history, and reckoning with the past, studying how societies appropriate history, ritualize it, and reshape it, the irony that we are now watching all these processes unfold in real time. Everything was simultaneously happening yesterday on “Korzo Národní”: the simplification, the enthusiasm, the selective amnesia, the performative remembrance, the laughter, the commodification, and the sincere, public longing to connect. I could only enjoy the spectacle. As a historian of memory, I have become a spectator of memory in motion. History doesn’t just repeat; it reinvents itself with a wink and a souvenir stand.

What next, though? The Velvet Revolution was neither a fairy tale nor a relic; it was a complex event shaped by political tensions, social compromises, and genuine popular enthusiasm. If that balance can be maintained, the result of its commemoration will not be an artificial purity of memory, but something more valuable: a democratic engagement with history that acknowledges its messiness while resisting the temptation to replace it with kitsch. But I might be overly optimistic in hoping that kitsch can ever be defeated.