Sbírky a politika / Collections and Politics

What is the significance of the collections of the defunct Czech party museums and why should they be dealt with today? We do not aim to cover a comprehensive history of these institutions and their collections, but rather to broaden the common discourse on defunct ideological museums. These are insights into contemporary thinking about museum strategies, where the individual thematic and methodological approaches of each author collide along two lines. First, the main part deals with the topic of the institutional level of the museum, as well as in character, specific quality, by changing roles and applying his collection, burdened by ideology, fundus. The second part of the book is devoted to three case studies on the use of museum collections. Surely we can all agree that it would be a mistake to liquidate the collections of former party museums as a tangible trace of historical memory. We focused on the questions, how to grasp and how to exploit the richness of the material range of objects, photos, films, documents, books or archival materials from these collections as a testimony to our past, reflecting on the present and the future.