| Abstract | This article analyzes autobiographical accounts given by members of the oldest generation of ethnic Germans living in the Czech Republic. Czech sociologists are interested in non-expulsed Germans, because they have their own ideas about who the Germans living in the Czech Republic are and who they are not. Participants share and negotiate these ideas among themselves as well as with sociologists during narrative interviews. I deal with the ethno-concepts of "Czech Germans and/or German Czechs" (and "S/sudeten Germans" specifically as emic concepts and/or natural categories). First, I present the self-categorization of participants and the narrative practices shared by this community of memory. I demonstrate how these people, who have remained in the Czech Republic after the expulsion of most ethnic Germans following WWII, re-construct their visions of the past. Despite numerous analogies, there are serious differences between commonly accepted history and the ways in which "Czech Germans or/and German Czechs" conceive it. The collective memory of ethnic Germans in the Czech Republic is different and distant from the "official" historical memory of Czechs themselves. These differences are studied by applying the constructivist approach to collective memory pioneered by M. Halbwachs and M.C. Lavabre. I analyze the narrative forms employed in these autobiographical stories and the weight of the present which rests on the evocations of the past. The final part of the paper provides a more detailed analysis of the collective picture of the First Republic and how it is used by the speakers for depicting, judging and criticizing today's situation (i.e. the situation of the Czech Germans in the Czech Republic after 1989).
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