The Wild 1990s: “Transformation Nostalgia” Among the Czech Student Generation of 1989

Based on an oral history project that interviewed one hundred former Czech students active during the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989, this study investigates a motif that emerged particularly strongly among respondents. Many evinced positive memories of the perceived unrestrained freedom of the 1990s, here termed “transformation nostalgia.” The study traces the object of positive memories expressed by narrators in the context of their awareness of the increasingly critical public reception of the post-socialist democratic transformation in the Czech Republic and argues they employ two main narrative strategies: extricating their personal experience from wider political developments and performing a form of “self-criticism” in relation to false hopes placed in the political solutions of the time. The article thus aims to contribute to the ongoing process of the historicization of the 1990s and the democratic transformations in the former Eastern Bloc by examining the memories of this decade expressed by members of the generation that came of age and entered adulthood just as the socialist regime collapsed.