They Were “Heroes”. Conceptual and Narrative Analysis of the Figure of a Free Teacher in a Totalitarian Society

Abstract

Despite the context of contemporary post-heroic indifference, our intention is to re-analyze the concept of heroism, not in the modernist (totalizing and iconic), or in the post-modernist (de-heroizing and ironic) way, but in the optics of hermeneutic re-reading of the specific teachers’ stories from the Stalinist years of the totalitarian regime. In the contribution we bring a conceptual identification of features of the ethical-characterial understanding of “hero without a halo”, by which we want to break the simplistic dichotomy between heroic and everyday – we introduce a third concept – “a hero of everyday life”. We point out how the mythical-idealistic idea of heroism perverted to a collective ideology and how the reality of the communist totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia demanded heroes – heroes of everyday life. The aim of the research is to find the occurrence of the identifying features of the “everyday hero” in particular stories of three teachers from the times of socialist Czechoslovakia, with the help of narrative analysis.