Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Worlds of ordinariness: Oral histories of everyday life in communist Czechoslovakia

Worlds of ordinariness: Oral histories of everyday life in communist Czechoslovakia Just how ordinary was everyday life during normalization in Czechoslovakia? In their discussions of the lives of “ordinary people,” historians have underplayed the fear and secrecy present in the daily experiences of Czechs and Slovaks in the late communist period. In linking writings by dissidents to Czech and Slovak oral histories in the collections of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, I seek to problematize the dissident/ordinary person dichotomy used in recent historiography, and argue that the chasm between these two apparently opposite groups has been exaggerated. Through an analysis of the themes of family, education and mobility, I will show that domestic life was not an escape from politics, but was in itself politicized. From audiovisual interviews, I will glean normalization-era memories of the need for what Václav Havel called “silence” and “mystification”-in the classroom, in the pub and in the home. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Human Affairs Springer Journals

Worlds of ordinariness: Oral histories of everyday life in communist Czechoslovakia

Johnston, Rosie
Human Affairs , Volume 23 (3) – Jun 28, 2013
Download PDF
15 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/worlds-of-ordinariness-oral-histories-of-everyday-life-in-communist-pvivisskLE

References (15)

Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Versita Warsaw and Springer-Verlag Wien
Subject
Social Sciences, general; Sociology, general; Quality of Life Research; Humanities, general
ISSN
1210-3055
eISSN
1337-401X
DOI
10.2478/s13374-013-0137-1
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Just how ordinary was everyday life during normalization in Czechoslovakia? In their discussions of the lives of “ordinary people,” historians have underplayed the fear and secrecy present in the daily experiences of Czechs and Slovaks in the late communist period. In linking writings by dissidents to Czech and Slovak oral histories in the collections of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, I seek to problematize the dissident/ordinary person dichotomy used in recent historiography, and argue that the chasm between these two apparently opposite groups has been exaggerated. Through an analysis of the themes of family, education and mobility, I will show that domestic life was not an escape from politics, but was in itself politicized. From audiovisual interviews, I will glean normalization-era memories of the need for what Václav Havel called “silence” and “mystification”-in the classroom, in the pub and in the home.

Journal

Human Affairs – Springer Journals

Published: Jun 28, 2013

There are no references for this article.