The Way We Applauded: How Popular Culture Stimulates Collective Memory of the Socialist Past in Czechoslovakia - the Case of the Television Serial Vyprávěj and its Viewers
Abstract
The proposed chapter relates to the (by now well-established) strand of research that seeks to illuminate processes of turning the socialist past into an object of a post-socialist memory (Kansteiner 2002). We are mainly concerned with the question of how the concept of cultural trauma can be applied as a theoretical tool to the task of understanding the media-initiated popular recollections of socialism (Sztompka 2004, Eyal 2004).
There are no doubts that media culture (Imre 2009) is important means in the process of a memory production and consumption. One of the most famous antinomies in the field concerns the power over framing the mediated socialist past and active audiences' participation.
A cleavage has been repeatedly inserted between the perspective emphasizing the profit-driven media institutions that abuse the post-socialist nostalgia (Boym 2001, Hutcheon 2000) in a fetishist way and the view focusing on the people's creativity in a process of reclaiming their own past (Sarkisova, Apor 2007; Enns 2007; Boyer 2006; Reifová 2009). Our main attempt is to ascertain whether the discourse of trauma to can be added to the analytical repertoire.
Last but not least, with this research we are also striving to enhance the still underrepresented cultural research in the Central and East European region (Lustyik 2006). The chapter introduces our research on the ways in which contemporary Czech television viewers use the television serial "Tell me how it was" to formulate their current recollections of the so-called "normalization" period in Czechoslovakia (70s and 80s).
Our research is based on in-depth focus-groups interviews with the regular viewers of the serial. The focus-groups will be organized in two clusters: the first will consist of young viewers with no personal, adulthood experience with the state-socialism and the second will include the viewers who have had their own direct experience with the socialist everyday life in the course of their adult age.