Download or read book The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring written by Vladimir V. Kusin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-18 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the development of reformist ideas among the Czech intelligentsia after 1956.
Download or read book Promises of 1968 written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-10 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a state of the art reassessment of the significance and consequences of the events associated with the year 1968 in Europe and in North America. Since 1998, there hasn't been any collective, comparative and interdisciplinary effort to discuss 1968 in the light of both contemporary headways of scholarship and new evidence on this historical period. A significant departure from earlier approaches lies in the fact that the manuscript is constructed in unitary fashion, as it goes beyond the East–West divide, trying to identify the common features of the sixties. The latter are analyzed as simultaneously global and local developments. The main problems addressed by the contributors of this volume are: the sixties as a generational clash; the redefinition of the political as a consequence of the ideological challenges posed to the status-quo by the sixty-eighters; the role of Utopia and the de-radicalization of intellectuals; the challenges to imperialism (Soviet/American); the cultural revolution of the sixties; the crisis of 'really existing socialism' and the failure of "socialism with a human face"; the gradual departure from the Yalta-system; the development of a culture of human rights and the project of a global civil society; the situation of 1968 within the general evolution of European history (esp. the relationship of 1968 with 1989). In contrast to existing books, it provides a fundamental and unique synthesis of approaches on 1968: first, it contains critical (vs. nostalgic) re-evaluations of the events from the part of significant sixty-eighters; second, it includes historical analyses based on new archival research; third, it gathers important theoretical re-assessments of the intellectual history of the 1968; and fourth, it bridges 1968 with its aftermath and its pre-history, thus avoiding an over-contextualization of the topics in question.
Download or read book Between Prague Spring and French May written by Martin Klimke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abandoning the usual Cold War–oriented narrative of postwar European protest and opposition movements, this volume offers an innovative, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive perspective on two decades of protest and social upheaval in postwar Europe. It examines the mutual influences and interactions among dissenters in Western Europe, the Warsaw Pact countries, and the nonaligned European countries, and shows how ideological and political developments in the East and West were interconnected through official state or party channels as well as a variety of private and clandestine contacts. Focusing on issues arising from the cross-cultural transfer of ideas, the adjustments to institutional and political frameworks, and the role of the media in staging protest, the volume examines the romanticized attitude of Western activists to violent liberation movements in the Third World and the idolization of imprisoned RAF members as martyrs among left-wing circles across Western Europe.
Download or read book The Greengrocer and His TV written by Paulina Bren and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Václav 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.
Download or read book Which Socialism Whose D tente written by Maud Bracke and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The 1968-1969 Czechoslovak crisis was first and foremost a major crisis of European detente. While the Prague Spring was made possible by the immediate and unchecked consequences of early detente in Europe, its crushing sharply brought out the contradictions of detente as understood by the global Cold War protagonists. In a similar way as the Czecho-slovak crisis reflected the ambivalence at the heart of detente, the West European Communist Parties' responses to it revealed the ambivalence of detente as a context for radical social change, either in the East of the West. The scholarly literature on the PCI and PCF has, often in an unproblematic way, understood the shift from Cold War to detente on the European continent in the mid-1960s as a development essentially positive to these parties. The present study argues against this and demonstrates how the shift from the Cold War of the 1950s to detente in Europe reformulated the impasse of revolution or radical change in the West, rather than putting an end to it." Book jacket.
Download or read book Russia and the Idea of the West written by Robert D. English and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most analyses of the Cold War's end the ideological aspects of Gorbachev's "new thinking" are treated largely as incidental to the broader considerations of power. English demonstrates that Gorbachev's foreign policy was the result of an intellectual revolution. He analyzes the rise of a liberal policy-academic elite and its impact on the Cold War's end.
Download or read book Prague written by Richard Burton and published by Signal Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A treasure house of Gothic, baroque and modernist architecture, Prague is also a city of icons and symbols: statues, saints and signs reveal a turbulent history of religious and cultural conflict. As Kafka's nightmare city and home of the Good Soldier Svejk, the Czech capital also produced two of the twentieth century's emblematic writers. Richard Burton explores this metropolis of theatrical allusion, in which politics and drama have always been intertwined. His interpretation of the city's cultural past and present encompasses opera and rock music, puppetry and cinema, surrealism and socialist realism.
Download or read book Eastern Europe written by Sabrina P. Ramet and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eastern Europe addresses the emergence of uncertain pluralism in the region following the disintegration of the communist regimes in 1989. Taking a broad historical approach, the volume considers issues and challenges that have marked Eastern Europe from 1939 through World War II and the era of socialism, up to the present. Eight comprehensive country studies are augmented by detailed assessments of economic developments, security issues, religious currents, cultural policies, and gender relations in the region.
Download or read book The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath written by Kieran Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-09-08 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Prague Spring of 1968 was among the most important episodes in post-war European politics. In this book Kieran Williams analyses the attempt at reform socialism under Alexander Dubcek using materials and sources which have become available in the wake of the 1989 revolution. Drawing on declassified documents from party archives, the author readdresses important questions surrounding the Prague Spring: Why did liberalization occur? What was it intended to achieve? Why did the Soviet Union intervene with force? What was the political outcome of the invasion? What part did the reformers play in ending the experiment in reform socialism? What was the role of the security police under Dubcek? The book will provide new information for specialists as well as introductory analysis and narrative for students of East European politics and history and Soviet foreign policy.
Download or read book Prague Capital of the Twentieth Century written by Derek Sayer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-07 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asserts that Prague could well be seen as the capital of the twentieth century, describing how the city has experienced and suffered more ways of being modern than perhaps any other metropolis.
Download or read book Prague in Black and Gold written by Peter Demetz and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 1998-03-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prague is at the core of everything both wonderful and terrible in Western history, but few people truly understand this city's unique culture. In Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz strips away sentimentalities and distortions and shows how Czechs, Germans, Italians, and Jews have lived and worked together for over a thousand years.
Download or read book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting written by Milan Kundera and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." —Newsweek "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." —New York Times Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
Download or read book The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia 1968 written by M. Mark Stolarik and published by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers. This book was released on 2010 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays and comments presented at an international conference held at University of Ottawa, Oct. 9-10, 2008.
Download or read book Worlds of Dissent written by Jonathan Bolton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-13 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Worlds of Dissent analyzes the myths of Central European resistance popularized by Western journalists and historians, and replaces them with a picture of the struggle against state repression as the dissidents themselves understood, debated, and lived it. In the late 1970s, when Czech intellectuals, writers, and artists drafted Charter 77 and called on their government to respect human rights, they hesitated to name themselves "dissidents." Their personal and political experiences--diverse, uncertain, nameless--have been obscured by victory narratives that portray them as larger-than-life heroes who defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia. Jonathan Bolton draws on diaries, letters, personal essays, and other first-person texts to analyze Czech dissent less as a political philosophy than as an everyday experience. Bolton considers not only Václav Havel but also a range of men and women writers who have received less attention in the West--including Ludvík Vaculík, whose 1980 diary The Czech Dream Book is a compelling portrait of dissident life. Bolton recovers the stories that dissidents told about themselves, and brings their dilemmas and decisions to life for contemporary readers. Dissidents often debated, and even doubted, their own influence as they confronted incommensurable choices and the messiness of real life. Portraying dissent as a human, imperfect phenomenon, Bolton frees the dissidents from the suffocating confines of moral absolutes. Worlds of Dissent offers a rare opportunity tounderstand the texture of dissent in a closed society.
Download or read book Havel written by Michael Zantovsky and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “definitive biography” of the poet and political dissident who became the last president of Czechoslovakia—and first president of the Czech Republic (Walter Isaacson). This portrait of Vaclav Havel, iconoclast and intellectual, renowned playwright turned political dissident, president of a united then divided nation, and dedicated human rights activist, is written by his former press secretary, advisor, and longtime friend—and recounts the turbulent twentieth-century era through which he prevailed. Havel’s lifelong perspective as an outsider began with his privileged childhood in Prague and his family’s blacklisted status following the Communist coup of 1948. This feeling of being outcast fueled his career as an essayist and a dramatist writing absurdist plays as social commentary. His involvement during the Prague Spring and his leadership of Charter 77, his unflagging belief in the power of the powerless, and his galvanizing personality catapulted Havel into a pivotal role as the leader of the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Although Havel was a courageous visionary, he was also a man of great contradictions, wracked with doubt and self-criticism. But he always remained true to himself. This “smart and exciting” biography is “both inspiring and filled with lessons for our time” (Walter Isaacson). “Havel was one of the most important intellectual-troublemaking statesmen of his time—a nonconformist, determined to live in truth, who questioned the system, his countrymen and himself constantly. No one is better suited than Michael Zantovsky to describe, interpret, and analyze this moral giant . . . A brilliantly informed intellectual and political history.” —Madeleine Albright “Entertaining, intimate, and moving . . . Zantovsky’s voice—that of a natural storyteller with an eye for the memorable anecdote, a mischievous wit, an easy intelligence, and keen sense of balance and fairness—is so engaging.” —Paul Wilson, The New York Review of Books
Download or read book Which Socialism Whose Detente written by Maud Bracke and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study analyzes the impact of the Czechoslovak crisis of 1968–1969 on the two major communist parties in the West: the Italian and French ones. Discusses the central strategic and ideological tensions which these parties needed to deal with: domestic belonging versus allegiance to the world communist movement, doctrinal orthodoxy in a context of rapid societal changes, and the question of revolution and reform. These key problems were situated in different contexts: the crisis in the "world communist movement" after 1956 and the Sino-Soviet rift, socio-economic modernization and political radicalization in Western Europe, and the shift from Cold War to early détente on the European continent. The research for this work is based on the study of a large collection of recently released primary sources, particularly, the internal records of various communist parties in Europe.
Download or read book Revising History in Communist Europe written by David A. J. Reynolds and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-31 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Those who define the past control the present. 'Revising History in Communist Europe' shows how the manipulation of history both empowered and weakened the communist regimes of post-World War Two Europe. It demonstrates how seismic events of the recent past reverberate in the understandings of the present, determining perceptions and decisions. With fresh analysis on the imposed communist definition of Hungary's 1956 uprising and its effects on the definition of the Prague Spring, this study will give readers a timely and penetrating insight into both landmark events.
