Power, Memory, Toluene. The Urban Underclass in Czechoslovak Normalisation, the Underground and Not-Remembering

Abstract

The present contribution addresses not so much a social subject as a social-historical absence: the largely effaced memory of the "marginal" people within late-socialist Czechoslovakia whose path of refusing the social order did not turn towards political resistance and active dissent, but instead towards personal self-destruction, most frequently to solvent abuse.

Keywords

• Power
• Memory
• Toluene
• Urban
• Underclass
• Czechoslovak
• Normalisation
• Underground
• Not-Remembering