This study explores several military reenactor performances through the optics of reenactment studies after the affective turn and post-positivist oral history. These are co-organized or independently produced by a Czech military history reenactment club, which is specific for its unique affectivity, experience, and production of historical meaning. In action and film reenactment performances, which we refer to as The West, The March, and Division 45, the reenactors focus on the reconstruction of the final phase of the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) combat journey in the Czech lands in May 1945. In doing so, they produce meanings that conflict with contemporary Czech military culture and official memory, but they avoid historical revisionism. In this sense, the reenactor performances touch upon, among other things, the still highly conflicting local issues of the politics of memory – the so-called crimes of the victors of the summer of 1945, especially the crimes committed against prisoners of war of various types of the German armed forces, subjected to highly inhumane treatment. Until now, these crimes have been debated in the Czech historical community more or less only in relation to German civilians.
This article, one of the first to examine the situation in the Czech Republic, presents a group of reenactors of the early Middle Ages with an emphasis on high material and experiential authenticity. Oral history in its post-positivist paradigm was the dominating method to reveal their subjective experiences. The representations contained in the interviews are a source for modulated personal experience that express the role, perceived by the actors, inside the reenactment movement as well as for the formulation of their self-concept in history. The text focusses on three analytic schemes – the paradoxes of “authenticity” in current reconstructions of medieval combat, the circumstances of negotiating authenticity, and the concept of Reinhart Koselleck’s “multiple temporalities” that is used here to explain the experiential “mental travelling” of the reenactors between the present and the past.
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