Closely Watched Screens: Reflections on Late Socialism in Czechoslovakia May 10, 2010

According to Václav Havel, Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s was as quiet as a morgue. Gone was the élan of the postwar 1940s, the brutality of the Stalinist 1950s, and the “socialism with a human face” of the 1960s. So what was late socialism? While the literature on the Prague Spring is expansive, and that on Stalinism as well as the Velvet Revolution is growing, for the 1970s and 1980s there is surprisingly little—despite the opening up of archives, and the benefit of twenty years of hindsight. Bren’s talk, based on her forthcoming book, will focus on rethinking late socialism not as a set of binaries (that is, official culture vs. unofficial culture, Party apparatchiks vs. political dissidents, a politicized public sphere vs. a de-politicized private sphere) but as a distinct culture that shaped a generation. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which television mediated between state and citizens after 1968, and how television serials posited the parameters of everyday life.

Paulina Bren is an adjunct assistant professor at Vassar College (New York). For 2009-2010, she is a Senior Fellow at the Budapest Collegium Institute for Advanced Study. She has published numerous articles on the postwar period in Czechoslovakia and the Eastern Bloc. Her book, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring, will be published by Cornell University Press in April 2010. She is now working on a co-edited volume entitled Consuming Communism: Consumption in Postwar Eastern Europe. Her other two current research projects focus on the anomalous Slušovice Agricultural Cooperative and on a new history of Noel Field.

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Official Website: http://www.ceu.hu/events/2010-05-11/closely-watched-screens-reflections-on-late-socialism-in-czechoslovakia