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In the 1960s the communist-controlled Czechoslovakia strongly ideologically opposed the Western countries both in terms of public promotional activities as well as in the internal materials of the Czechoslovak state authorities. Their anti-Western rhetoric was also focused on the system of government and economic situation. It is also the focus of this contribution which uses France as an example. It is based on contents and linguistic analysis of the materials of the Czechoslovak diplomatic service and the newspaper Rudé právo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the important research topics of Czech musicology is the issue of the clash of free-thinking composers with the ideologically distorted cultural policy of the Czechoslovak communist regime (1948-1989). Czech composers in exile were destined to be erased from the collective historical memory. Reconstruction of their work, life and significance in the context of contemporaries is therefore one of the basic tasks of caring for the heritage of musical culture. Seen from Czechoslovakia, composers in exile could be perceived by their colleagues as cowards, or their foreign career could become a subject of envy. Seen from the other side, the external view of the politically deformed Czech music culture is very valuable for the objective reconstruction of the local situation. The study of exile music culture often tells far more about our own history than about the fates of exile composers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communist Czechoslovakia was looking for opportunities for ideological action in western countries at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. It should have the widest possible range, at the same time it had to be however so inconspicuous so that it did not prompt a negative reaction of local authorities. Purpose-built updating of selected anniversaries of historical events was an interesting tool of Czechoslovak propaganda. In the case of France, particularly events related to Germany were remembered. Actually, the aim of that propaganda was – first of all – to point out the alleged danger arising from the cooperation of western countries with the Federal Republic of Germany, which resulted for example in the Élysée Treaty in 1963. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study deals with the influence of so-called normalisation on Czech medievalist research in the 1970s and 1980s, examining the consequences of isolation imposed on research in Czechoslovakia with respect to new trends in its Western European counterparts, as well as stereotypical thinking, non-participation in medievalist debates in the broader context, and the decline of topics that dominated Czech medievalism in the 1960s. The article also considers how feelings of resignation influence conceptual thinking, linking it with the growth of subtopics during the period of normalisation. While medievalist research did gradually begin once more to thrive in the Czech environment of the 1980s, many problems - in the author's opinion - were carried over in various ways to the post-1989 context, namely the insufficiency of methodological reflection, limitations with respect to theme, the marked absence of socio-historical research, and a blind faith in the preservation of original sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pravnik is the property of Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of State & Law and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study, written within the framework of a project aiming to reconstruct and digitise the original films and prepare a public presentation of the works of Ivan Tatíček from the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, focuses on introducing and contextualising the amateur films and video art of this half-forgotten artist. Ivan Tatíček completed five films in the 1980s: Kruh D (D Circle, 1982), Vojáci (Soldiers, 1982), O ničem jiném (On Something Else, 1983), Metrofilm (1984), and Všude doma dobře nejlíp (East or West, Home's Best, 1986). Most of them were warmly received at amateur film festivals and elicited positive reactions from the press. During his employment in the video studio of the PR department of Armabeton, a state-run construction company for which he mostly filmed tutorial videos and construction processes, he had unlimited access to a Video 2000 camera (later VHS) and a linear editing unit. He could thus create his idiosyncratic attempt at a musical, Miss Rock'n'Roll, and make recordings of concerts. In 1988, he began working as a freelance documentary and events cameraman. Thanks to a loosening of the legislation, he established his own studio: DADA. He joined the community around Radek Pilař and Obor video (Video Department) before 1989; with them, he helped realise the first-ever video art exhibition in Czechoslovakia, Den videa (Video Day), which infiltrated the traditional Salon of Applied Art in the Julius Fučík Park of Culture and Leisure several months before the Velvet Revolution. In the first half of the 1990s, he maintained a close relationship with Obor video, which later transformed into the Asociace pro video a intermédia attached to the Unie výtvarných umělců (Union of Visual Artists). In the second half of the decade, it was documentary work that dominated -- mostly commissioned by Czech Television and private subjects. For most artists of Tatíček's generation, the transformation of Czech culture meant an abandonment of old aesthetic positions and a search for new ones, a partial professionalisation, and a dependence on current television formats. For some artists, this was also a period of detachment from the independent film community and the art scene in general, which led to their work being forgotten; only in recent years has their work been assessed historically and stored by experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys the posters by Czech graphic designer Blažej Juřena for HaDivadlo (or Hanácké divadlo, ie. "Hanakian Theatre"), an alternative Czechoslovak scene established by Svatopluk Vála and Josef Kovalčuk in 1974 in the Moravian city of Prostějov, and still alive in Brno. It advocates for posters to have a research value in Theatre Studies beyond their role as a mere source of documentary meta-information. The posters work as a part of the general theatrical communication, they have a quality of a paratheatrical activity, and contribute to understanding theatrical semiotic complexity. Using four posters as an example, this study will reflect on several principles that are typical for the visual communication of the 70s and 80s studio theatres of communist Czechoslovakia as a whole: Strategies by which theatre through of posters, relates reflexively to its "behind the scenes" conditions; that is in accordance with searching for authenticity, and finally, how posters and playbills constitute parallel semantic narratives and quasi-scenographic realities. In particular, the study clarifies the organisational, institutional, but also political background that determined the function, themes, form and artistic quality of the given graphic design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Historica Brunensia is the property of Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents and describes the evolution of discussions about reform of the electoral system regarding representative bodies in communist Czechoslovakia in the late eighties; in addition, it also deals with specific proposed versions of electoral reform at that time and their potential consequences for the political system. The article starts with a brief overview of the special role of uncompetitive and undemocratic elections and their mechanisms in Central and Eastern Europe during the Communist era. Then, the origins of the proposed electoral reform in Czechoslovakia are described. Next, two alternative proposals from the time, and their possible consequences are introduced. In the last part, the paper analyzes the parliamentary by-elections of 1989 in Czechoslovakia that were held in new conditions of electoral competition (plurality of candidates), wherein one of the proposed versions of the electoral reform was used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the parliamentary debates and explanatory reports from the Czechoslovak National Assembly during the passing of the "Law on Traveling Gypsies" in 1927. The primary goal of the paper is to find out if the term "gypsy" was understood as a biological category (race) or a social one (mode of life characterized by traveling). At the same time, the analyzed texts are studied from the perspective of a thesis based on Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust. Were the ideas expressed in legislators' statements closer to the normalization power and discipline (Foucault) in which "gypsiness" was seen as a social fact, or to the gardening culture and categorical murder (Bauman) in which "gypsiness" was seen as a racial category? Finally, the paper analyzes the Czech and Slovak wartime decrees concerning Gypsies that were induced by Nazi racial theories. The article comes to the conclusion that both in the law and in decrees issued at the beginning of the war Gypsies were identified mainly through social indicators, not racial ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the historical variation of secondary school tracking in formerly socialist Czechoslovakia. Despite the importance of the transition from primary to secondary school in the Czechoslovak educational system, its previous analyses have been fatally flawed. Using multinomial logistic regression, I focus on the effects of family background on the odds of making the transition to vocational, technical, or academic secondary schools. I also test various hypotheses regarding trends in educational reproduction, socioeconomic inequality in access to secondary education, and the effects of the political status of parents on access to secondary education. Educational expansion, unlike 'communist affirmative action', dramatically reduced educational reproduction at the secondary level. Positive and negative discrimination on the basis of parental occupation, on the other hand, considerably diminished the advantage of higher status children in the transition to vocational and technical schools in the early 1950s and early 1970s, but never affected access to academic secondary schools. The consequences of the political status of parents for their children's education display remarkable variation, which is unmistakably responsive to historical events. The multinomial transition model also reveals the cross-temporal dynamics of tracking in Czechoslovakia. The post-war expansion of the educational system brought about double benefits. While larger numbers of lower class, rural and female students enrolled in secondary schools, their higher enrollments were confined to vocational schools. Though a large number of higher status children were enrolled throughout the 1948-89 period, their enrollments in vocational schools dropped as they began to fill positions in the growing technical and academic schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the study was to validate the quality of Czech adaptation of Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination (ACE). ACE is a neuropsychological screening test battery serving for dementia detection and differentiation between dementia in Alzheimer disease and the frontotemporal dementia. The research sample consisted of 60 patients with diagnosis of probably dementia of Alzheimer type according DSM IV and NINCDS-ADRDA criteria. All patients passed neurological, basic biochemical, and morphological examinations. Psychological tests and scales including ACE were also administrated. The most expressive cognitive deficits in ACE were found in memory and verbal fluency subtests. The statistic procedures assessed good sensitivity of Czech adaptation of ACE: cut-off score 88 showed 100% sensitivity and that of 83 showed 96.6% sensitivity for dementia detection. The item test reliability assessed by Cronbach's alpha was 0.8. It can be stated that the Czech adaptation of Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination represents not only a new useful test for cognitive deficits assessment but is also a sufficiently quality and sensitive test for dementia detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]