“Normalizing” Czechoslovak Cultural Production: 1968-1989

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The Warsaw Pact’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia ended Prague Spring reforms aimed at developing ‘socialism with a human face’. Instead, it ushered in two decades of Soviet military presence and control, and the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s suppression of opposition. By early 1970 Prague Spring legislation had been reversed and party progressives purged, leading President Gustav Husák to report to the party’s Fourteenth Congress that normalization was complete. Investment in manufacture of consumer goods rose to silence the population with economic prosperity. For Czechs and Slovaks the entire two-decade period from 1968 to 1989 became known as ‘Normalization.’

Half a century later, with resurgent European and North American political and cultural conservatism, this panel examines how Normalization impacted cultural production ranging from theatre, television and radio to architectural education, conceptual art and photography. Based largely on recent archival research and interviews, the panel examines how male and female cultural producers—sometimes living double lives—navigated between muteness and eloquence, consent and refusal, anxiety and rebellion.

Kieran Williams discusses a revived ŠtB that in the early 1970s purged reformers and re-established operational capabilities, including surveillance of cabaret artist Ján Kalina and his wife Agneša Kalinová, a journalist at Kultúrny život. Paula Gortázar explores the utopian and dystopian projections of political and cultural reality through the unique properties of photography by conceptual artists Július Koller, Rudolf Sikora and Ľubomír Ďurček. Igor Marjanović and Katerina Ruedi Ray examine the impact of Normalization on architectural education, including the contributions of women architecture educators and students.

Sub Unit

• Arts: Art History, Architecture, Dance, Museum, Music, Photography, Theatre 

Chair

• Christina Elizabeth Crawford, Emory U

Papers

• The Revival of StB Surveillance of Culture in Early Normalization: A Case Study from Bratislava - Kieran David Williams, Drake U

• Cosmos, Fiction, and Transcendence: Photography and Conceptual Art in Communist Bratislava - Paula Gortázar, U of Westminster (UK)

• Czechoslovak Architectural Education and Normalization - Igor Marjanović, Washington U in St. Louis; Katerina Ruedi Ray, Bowling Green State U

Discussant

• Veronika Tuckerova, Harvard U

Session Manager

• Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Iowa State U