ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the memory politics surrounding the unrealised memorial to Opava’s expelled German-speaking population. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and personal narratives, it explores the Silesian German Association’s struggle for recognition of the forced post-war expulsions. Municipal resistance reflects efforts to uphold a dominant Czech national narrative by marginalising difficult German histories, unlike the smoother acceptance of a Jewish memorial. Framed by Michael Rothberg’s concept of implicated subjects and Paul Connerton’s theory of collective forgetting, the chapter shows how remembering and forgetting shape collective identity. It highlights generational shifts, political motives, and emotional tensions that complicate reconciliation with the past in Silesia, where memory remains deeply contested in the wake of displacement, violence, and unresolved identity politics.
