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Lecture: prof. James Krapfl “Local Histories of the Prague Spring and Its Aftermath”

The Department of Historical Sociology FHS UK is pleased to invite you to the lecture Local Histories of the Prague Spring and Its Aftermath which will be delivered by prof. James Krapfl, McGill University, Canada.

The lecture is part of the lecture series Historical Sociology Confrontations of the Historical Sociology Department.

The lecture will take place at Jinonice, room 2080 (Building A, University Area Jinonice) from 5 p.m. to 7. p.m. on Tuesday, March 19.

Annotation:

The Prague Spring was an important turning point in the development of political culture in Czechoslovakia, both recalling the revolution of 1945-48 and anticipating the revolution of 1989-92. Prof. Krapfl will illuminate the microprocesses of this turning point by comparing evidence from a selection of Czech and Slovak districts (okresy) from the beginning of 1968 to the end of 1969. Sources from the districts show how citizens overcame initial trepidation about the “renewal process,” increasingly making it their own as spring turned to summer. They document the innovative ways in which citizens sought to give new meaning to such concepts as “democracy,” “humanity,” and “socialism” in their localities, and how the August invasion shifted the terms of popular discourse without dampening it. The sources also reveal the discrete compromises that individuals gradually began making in 1969, and how they rationalized these compromises in a process that can best be described as “auto-normalization.”

Photographer: Ľuboš Pilc, Pravda

prof. James Krapfl is a historian of modern European politics and culture, specializing geographically on east central Europe. Thematically he is interested in the cultural history of revolutionary phenomena, the experience of Communist rule in central and eastern Europe, and the transformation of Europe since 1989. These interests come together in his book Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989-1992 (Cornell University Press, 2013), which analyzes grassroots efforts to establish a democratic political culture in Czechoslovakia following the outbreak of revolution in 1989. Based on research in forty Czech and Slovak archives, mostly at the district level, the book explains how popular attempts to reconstitute political, social, and economic institutions “from below” met with the opposition of new elites, setting in motion the chain of events which led to the break-up of the federal state in 1992. Prof. Krapfl is using his sabbatical in 2014-15 to begin research for a second book, on the popular experience of “1968” in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland.