Syllabus
Students are required to follow the instructions and requirements specified in the course sylabus available at https://upces.cerge-ei.cz/academic-life/upces-courses-a-z Scroll for the UPCES Course List and click on the particular course for course description and syllabus.
Reading materials: the coordinators of the UPCES programme will inform the enrolled students where to get them.
Annotation
For a contemporary young Czech, let alone a young American, it is exceedingly hard to comprehend what life was like under the communist rule in the Soviet-dominated part of
Europe. It is not only that they miss the direct experience of the place and times. Their parents' experience cannot be of much help either because it differed so radically from that of their contemporaries on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. History books cannot fully convey the totalitarian experience which was unlike anything people in the West encountered in their everyday lives. What made the totalitarian system unique was its holistic nature. It was not a world that was in some respects different from the normal world; it was a world that was different in practically every respect. And yet it was a world in which people managed to have lives, families, friendships and loves like in any other world. Thanks to the ordinary people it was a world that kept refusing to become what it was intended to be. In its later incarnations it was called the world of “real socialism” and there was really something real in its dreary ugliness. At the same time it was a world of total fiction, absurdity and make believe. The proposed course is designed to reflect this contrast.