Is there any Sociological Tradition of Social Memory Research? The Polish and the Czech Case

The paper deals with social memory research done by Polish and Czech sociologists. In Poland it started in the 1960s when an outline of a historical consciousness study was sketched byNinaAssorodobraj- Kula. Although her original concept was soon left out, a series of surveys was conducted. Recently memory has become a popular research field and numerous studies have been employing various research methods. In Czechoslovakia opinion polls on historical consciousness were conducted as early as in the 1940s, and recently a study has started in the Czech Republic that resembles and was probably influenced by earlier Polish survey research. In my paper I try to map out the research done in the two countries in order to identify typical features of the local studies. It seems that in spite of a large quantity of studies published, the character of most of Polish and Czech works on memory were purely descriptive, and any sociologically relevant problems started to be posed only recently. Therefore it may be suggested that although a certain common Polish and Czech tradition of memory research exists, it cannot be called sociological in any strict sense.