The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion.
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The Greengrocer and His TV

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Book review: The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring

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.


  • The Greengrocer and his TV: the Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring, by Paulina Bren?
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  • The Greengrocer and His TV, The Culture of Communism after the Prague Spring!

The Socialist Family and Its Caretakers 8. The Greengrocer and His TV. This innovative, lively study of mass media encourages rethinking about commonalities across East and West in the postwar world.

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But thanks to its wit and insight, Paulina Bren's Greengrocer is one of those rare academic monographs that repays reading from cover to cover, making it a pleasure for readers beyond the university classroom. Bren's analysis of normalization-era television serials as a lens through which to understand late Socialism helps her move quickly beyond the standard dualisms that have dominated scholarship on the Cold War for so long.

06 - Occupation - Prague Spring

Then, in a particularly revealing step, she examines the awkward response to reruns of some of the most popular of these serials in the aftermath of what she calls Czechoslovakia's 'late communism. The leaders of post Czechoslovakia were obsessed by 'normalization': Paulina Bren has succeeded in overcoming the impossible: The Greengrocer and His TV helps in understanding why the extraordinary events of were so much underdetermined, but the book reminds us that careful historical research succeeds in uncovering under the seemingly uneventful surface the process that might lead to completely surprising outcomes.


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Bren attributes this gap to the immense challenge of writing a history without notable events or transformative conflicts, although by the end of the book, with its bold rereading of the standard history of the period, this characterization seems less apt. Readers will be struck by how uneventful and dreary everyday life appears in the text. Yet the book's cumulative effect is not to simply interrogate this boredom, but rather to emphasize how much more fraught, complex, and laden with cultural meaning these decades were than previously thought.

The book's success in making this case derives not only from lively prose and clear argumentation, but also from Bren's ingenious decision to turn to television serials shows in which a continuous plot unfolds through a series of episodes as a frame through which to critically examine the period when official sources proved unsatisfactory. She portrays this choice as a necessity, but she deserves praise for boldly conceptualizing this potential detour as the basis for an analysis of high politics, dissident culture, and national identity, rather than just as the material for an institutional history of Czechoslovak state television.

The result is a paradigm-shifting book that all scholars of postwar Europe should read. Divided into eight compact chapters, the book uses television to explore issues of high politics, social movements, intellectual history, popular culture, gender, and media studies with impressive depth and breadth. Chapters one and two chronicle the role of media in the events of the Prague Spring and the purge of reformers from the Communist Party—and the ranks of Czechoslovak state television—during a post ideological reorientation.

Chapters three and four examine the rewriting of an official collective memory of the s through cultural erasure and placing blame on intellectuals, Jews, and western imperialists for fomenting a "mass hysteria" that led to the Prague Spring These dissidents, many of whom would be leaders of the Charter 77 movement, were frustrated by the almost universal embrace of the "quiet life" made possible by government policies that increased production of housing and consumer goods, and which was idealized in television serials.