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

In this provocative book, Paulina Bren brings to life the "stagnant" decades of "nothingness" (4) that followed the 1968 Prague Spring and the failure of a Communist reform movement in Czechoslovakia. Officially called the period of "normalization," when life was meant to return to "normal" after the upheaval of the reform period and the resulting invasion of the country by Warsaw Pact troops, scholars have not devoted much attention to topics other than dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s. 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-1968 ideological reorientation. Chapters three and four examine the rewriting of an official collective memory of the 1960s through cultural erasure and placing blame on intellectuals, Jews, and western imperialists for fomenting a "mass hysteria" that led to the Prague Spring (72). Through detailed plot summaries, Bren also describes how state-supported popular television serials, such as the thirty-episode detective serial, The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, became shared cultural experiences that helped to construct a normalization-era national identity (an astounding 90% of the population watched this show from 1974 to 1979).

These middle chapters are particularly strong as Bren shows how dissident discourse, including the work of Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, reflected reactionary, and often elitist, positions put forward by intellectuals purged from the Party in the late 1960s. 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. In the face of this pressure to conform, dissidents called for authenticity, "living in truth," a phrase made famous in Havel's essay, "The Power of the Powerless," featuring the compliant greengrocer of the book's title.

The second half of the book delves more deeply into television culture itself, considering particular serials and the era's most popular television writer, Jaroslav Dietl. The discussion is multifaceted as Bren brings together information from archives, newspapers, and visual media to not only recount the plots of the serials and place them within the cultural context of normalization, but also to consider the public's reception of the shows through viewer letters and internal reports. Chapter five discusses changes at Czechoslovak state television that made...