Creating an Exhibition, a Political Narrative, or Both? Reflections on the Redesign of a Museum and Memorial Space at the Nazi Execution Site in Pardubice

Abstract

From 1998 to 2009, the Czech Republic implemented the programme "Rehabilitation of Memorials of the Struggle for Freedom, Independence and Democracy". The financial expenditure was intended for the rehabilitation and historical-political reorientation of memorials that, until 1989, had been appropriated to promote the communist regime. The programme included seven major memorials (including the Nazi ghetto and Gestapo detention centre Theresienstadt, and the village of Lidice, which was destroyed in 1942 and its inhabitants murdered as a ‘reprisal’ for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich).