Abstract
In the 1950s and 1960s, the travellers, explorers, authors, and filmmakers Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund became celebrities both in Czechoslovakia and abroad. the Communist cultural authorities actively supported the transformation of the two men into cultural icons, which could be exploited as a model for the suppression of 'old', 'decadent', and indeed 'popular' culture, and as a tool for recruiting members of the intellectual, cultural, and social elites into its service. Hanzelka and Zikmund's multimedia travelogues, as well as their dashing public personae, blended in a unique way the 'high' and 'low', the accessible and unreachable, the familiar and the exotic, in the officially promoted culture of the time.
But in the later 1960s, as Hanzelka and Zikmund's political loyalties towards some form of reform socialism became more blatant, the two men fell into disfavour, and they found themselves banished from the public sphere following the events of 1968 until the regime fell in 1989. this article investigates how the curious 'command celebrity' of 'H&Z' straddled socialist ideology and capitalist consumerism, political affirmation and cultural critique.