| Abstract | For a long time, culture has been a neglected dimension in the studies of post-socialism. Following Kennedy's pioneering analysis of post-communist cultural formations, the article elaborates on the difference between transition culture and intellectual cultural formation in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, respectively. These concepts are transposed on the plane of collective memory. Transition culture is associated with the administration of justice and the forgetting of the past which this implies. In contrast, intellectual formation is identified as a carrier group in the construction of cultural trauma. Czech national cinema is a privileged forum for such an endeavour. The trauma process is explored in a case study of four Czech bitter comedies made after 1989 with story-lines set in the so-called Normalization era, the last decades of the state-socialist regime. The analysis uses Fredric Jameson's appropriation of the method of semiotic reduction and attempts to map out the core political oppositions in the space of a semiotic rectangle. Despite being in the genre of comedy, the filmic narratives produce a complex view of the state-socialist past in political terms. However, the narratives accentuate especially the moral background of the opposition between communism and anti-communism. A utopian solution to this contrariety is denied, while the issues of action in the condition of powerlessness and responsibility to family assume primacy. It is argued that the presence of such types of commemoration in the plurality of public memory has in fact been important for achieving the goals of transition by expressing concerns over collective memory that are not addressed in the official discourse of the state.
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