Greengrocer and His TV

Paulina Bren

Description

The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve "normalization," pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times. The Greengrocer and His TV offers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small screen, Paulina Bren looks to the "normal" of normalization, to the everyday experience of late communism. The figure central to this book is the greengrocer who, in a seminal essay by Vaclav Havel, symbolized the ordinary citizen who acquiesced to the communist regime out of fear. Bren challenges simplistic dichotomies of fearful acquiescence and courageous dissent to dramatically reconfigure what we know, or think we know, about everyday life under communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Deftly moving between the small screen, the street, and the Central Committee (and imaginatively drawing on a wide range of sources that include television shows, TV viewers' letters, newspapers, radio programs, the underground press, and the Communist Party archives), Bren shows how Havel's greengrocer actually experienced "normalization" and the ways in which popular television serials framed this experience. Now back by popular demand, socialist-era serials, such as The Woman Behind the Counter and The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, provide, Bren contends, a way of seeing-literally and figuratively-Czechoslovakia's normalization and Eastern Europe's real socialism.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Eastern Europe
• Television
• History of Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780801462153
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE GREENGROCER AND HIS TV

THE GREENGROCER AND HIS TV The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring

Paulina Bren

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2010 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2010

Printed in the United States of America

Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 9780801447679 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9780801476426 (pbk. : alk. paper)

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Cloth printing Paperback printing

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For my mother, Halina, and my daughter, Zsofi

That’s right. That’s right. That’s what matters. It’s the tube. Richard Nixon speaking to his television set as President Carter addressed the nation from the Oval Office (from an interview with David Frost in theNew York Times Sunday Magazine,February 12, 2006)

I know: it’s nothing new. Every power has tried to protect itself against its critics. And each time it has proved futile because life’s truths sooner or later rise to the surface. . . . But the pity is in the years that are lost, the works that are written for the drawer. . . . The years race ahead and in the meantime aesthetic values disap pear. . . . It is because the decision of what will be on view is made by people who, without having the qualifications for it, decide whether to publish that book or this one; moreover, they run amok in books already written, crossing out the names of the living, making them as good as dead. And all of this only so that they can hold on to their power. I know that these things are not written about in the press, but do not imagine that people are not informed down to the very last detail about each of your decisions, about the living standards of the elite, about their private lives. . . . And you, my dear comrade, share a part in the grand lies: lies about this being the best democracy, lies about this being the “rule of the workers,” lies about you having a genuine love for our state. From an anonymous letter sent to Czechoslovak Television’s Prague headquarters on March 7, 1977

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.  “A Criminal Comedy but of a Revivalist Spirit”: The Beginning and the End of the Prague Spring 2.  Purge and the Remaking of a Socialist Citizenry 3.  Intellectuals, Hysterics, and “Real Men”: The Prague Spring Officially Remembered 4.  The Quiet Life versus a Life in Truth: Writing the Script for Normalization 5.  Broadcasting in the Age of Late Communism 6.  Jaroslav Dietl: Normalization’s Narrator 7.  The Socialist Family and Its Caretakers 8.  SelfRealization and the Socialist Way of Life

Conclusion

Notes Bibliography Index

xi

1

11

35

61

85

112

130

159

177

201

209 239 247