Suchergebnisse

Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked "nostalgia" to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a "retro" fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. This innovative study locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation's memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory

This article analyses how economic change after 1989 was perceived and rooted in society through cultural representations, specifically in the film production of Poland and Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic and Slovakia). The starting premise of this investigation is that popular commercial films, alongside the media and discourse of politicians and other key actors of the systemic transformation, also informed ideas about the free market circulating in the public sphere. Filmmakers, faced with the new realities brought about initially by the gradual liberalization of the economy in the late 1980s and later the systemic change of the economic transformation in both countries, immediately turned to capturing and fictionalizing the changes surrounding them. They presented audiences with role models of what it means to be a capitalist, but also tales of warning. This article investigates the "transformation cinema" of the 1990s, focusing on the figure of the entrepreneur and private enterprise. It examines how filmmakers searched for a visual language to critique or affirm the new social order, but also continued to work with inherited modes from the late socialist era. The article asserts that while the economic expectations conveyed through cinema focused largely on structuring the imagination of a new middle class in Poland, Czech(oslovak) cinema adopted a more sceptical outlook, suggesting that the promises of the free market were not available to "ordinary" working people.

This article analyses how economic change after 1989 was perceived and rooted in society through cultural representations, specifically in the film production of Poland and Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic and Slovakia). The starting premise of this investigation is that popular commercial films, alongside the media and discourse of politicians and other key actors of the systemic transformation, also informed ideas about the free market circulating in the public sphere. Filmmakers, faced with the new realities brought about initially by the gradual liberalization of the economy in the late 1980s and later the systemic change of the economic transformation in both countries, immediately turned to capturing and fictionalizing the changes surrounding them. They presented audiences with role models of what it means to be a capitalist, but also tales of warning. This article investigates the "transformation cinema" of the 1990s, focusing on the figure of the entrepreneur and private enterprise. It examines how filmmakers searched for a visual language to critique or affirm the new social order, but also continued to work with inherited modes from the late socialist era. The article asserts that while the economic expectations conveyed through cinema focused largely on structuring the imagination of a new middle class in Poland, Czech(oslovak) cinema adopted a more sceptical outlook, suggesting that the promises of the free market were not available to "ordinary" working people.

Based on an oral history project that interviewed one hundred former Czech students active during the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989, this study investigates a motif that emerged particularly strongly among respondents. Many evinced positive memories of the perceived unrestrained freedom of the 1990s, here termed "transformation nostalgia." The study traces the object of positive memories expressed by narrators in the context of their awareness of the increasingly critical public reception of the post-socialist democratic transformation in the Czech Republic and argues they employ two main narrative strategies: extricating their personal experience from wider political developments and performing a form of "self-criticism" in relation to false hopes placed in the political solutions of the time. The article thus aims to contribute to the ongoing process of the historicization of the 1990s and the democratic transformations in the former Eastern Bloc by examining the memories of this decade expressed by members of the generation that came of age and entered adulthood just as the socialist regime collapsed.

The first post-1989 rerun of the 1970s television series Třicet případů majora Zemana ('The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman,' or in short 'Major Zeman') in the Czech Republic generated a heated controversy in the media. This article will examine why Major Zeman became such a contested topic and presents an analysis of responses to the series. The paper suggests that the rescreening consolidated a particular 'retro' reception of the series, which reappropriates socialist popular culture and ascribes it with an ostensibly apolitical, postmodern, ironic sensibility. The paper will consider how such a response can be reconciled with more explicitly political approaches to the series, arguing that retro has a political agenda of its own.

The first post-1989 rerun of the 1970s television series Třicet případů majora Zemana ('The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman,' or in short 'Major Zeman') in the Czech Republic generated a heated controversy in the media. This article will examine why Major Zeman became such a contested topic and presents an analysis of responses to the series. The paper suggests that the rescreening consolidated a particular 'retro' reception of the series, which reappropriates socialist popular culture and ascribes it with an ostensibly apolitical, postmodern, ironic sensibility. The paper will consider how such a response can be reconciled with more explicitly political approaches to the series, arguing that retro has a political agenda of its own.

"This book discusses how societies, groups and individuals remember and make sense of global neoliberal change in Eastern Europe. Such an investigation is all the more timely as the 1990s are increasingly looked to for answers explaining the populist and nationalist turn across the globe. The volume shows how the key processes that impacted many lives across the social spectrum in Eastern Europe, such as deindustrialization, privatization, restitution and abrupt social reorganization, are collectively remembered across society today and how memory narratives of the 1990s contribute to current identities and political climate. This volume establishes the memory of economic transformation as a research focus in its own right. It investigates different levels of memory, from the national through the local to the cultural, analysing key myths of the transformation, giving special recognition to the social space and vernacular memories of the transformation period, and reflecting on how the changes of the 1990s are mediated in cultural representations. Given the book's interdisciplinary scope that covers several fields, it will prove of interest to those working in memory studies, contemporary history, sociology, East European area studies, and literary and film studies. It will also serve as a significant point of reference for those researching the interdisciplinary and rapidly expanding field of transformation studies and thus is an invaluable source across different fields of study"--