Veterans Day Celebration in a Hlučín Village: A Unique “Confirmatory” Military Reenactment Event

Abstract

The historical region around the town of Hlučín (Hultschin, Hulczyn), today in the Czech Republic and previously in Germany, is a space in which representations of national indifference as a principle of social organization are still discernible on many levels. One of the most obvious examples is the celebration of Veterans Day (11 November), including a multilayered commemorative ceremony and a military reenactment performance which defy the usual allegiance to discourses of 1945 "liberation" and the Czech-German historical antagonism. The current oral history project on the contemporary history and culture of military reenactment in the Czech lands, carried out at the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University in Prague, has, among other things, explored the military reenactment in the Hlučín region. This article reveals the complex context and structures of meaning of the annual Veterans Day performance in the region, which refers to various historical and contemporary cultural discourses.