摘要:National identity and memory are created and sustained through various representations
in a society, also museum exhibitions are among these. Nation states use the museums to
display their present and past realities, to glorify their culture and to mobilize and discipline
their national subjects. With the help of discursive analytical methods, based on
textual and semiotic analyses, and with the help of fieldwork research, the study examines
how two museum exhibitions in Austrian and Slovenian Carinthia represent the same
historical event from 1920s Carinthia, how they create glorious and opposing national
histories in order to produce obedient Slovenian or Austrian national subjects who remember
the same past events in two differing ways and how these representations organize
the lives of the Carinthian people. The author concludes that the analyzed museums
have important roles in the shaping of the uniform national memories and identities, but
Carinthian Slovenians, who live at the border between both museum representations are
constantly subjugated to two different interpretations of the same past event and they
continually negotiate between two different national knowledges about the past and
constitute their identity in relation to both national memories and perceptions of the past.