Jindřich Čeladín (Vytautas the Great War Museum)
“I think we must apologise to the Germans who were evicted after World War II. Because it was a very cruel eviction of several million people from their homes and it was really an evil that was in revenge for an earlier evil. And I think that if we respond to evil with evil, we will only prolong evil.” With these words, spoken in a television broadcast on 23 December 1989, before his election as President, Vaclav Havel shocked the Czechoslovak public. Despite Havel’s popularity at the time, there was very little understanding of his words. In the following decades, the restoration of monuments to Czech rulers, especially the Habsburg dynasty, began in the Czech Republic. These monuments, mainly statues of Emperor Joseph II, were restored in the Sudeten region, or in towns where a large German minority lived before the Second World War. At the same time, in the late 1980s, a debate began in Lithuania about the restoration of some of the monuments to Lithuanian rulers that had been destroyed by the Soviet regime. This was in particular Grand Duke Vytautas, who was unacceptable to the Soviet regime because he was the greatest symbol of the inter-war Lithuanian Republic. With the start of perestroika and the gradual independence of Lithuania, the debate on the restoration of monuments became very political for the whole nation. The restoration of the statue of Grand Duke Vytautas in Kaunas, in the centre of the city, was a symbol of resistance to the Soviet regime. In this article, we will try to explain how these restored monuments have become a means of collective identity with one’s own nation in a democratic society. How the dominant nations in Lithuania and the Czech Republic were able to come to terms with their history, and what position they took towards minorities who were either evicted, like the Germans in Czechoslovakia, or no longer privileged, like the Poles and Russians in Lithuania.