Oral history perspectives on Cold War 1945-1989 - YMO257

• Title: Oral history perspectives on Cold War 1945-1989
• Guaranteed by: Programme Oral History and Contemporary History (24-KOHSD)
• Faculty: Faculty of Humanities
• Actual: from 2024
• Semester: winter
• E-Credits: 4
• Examination process: winter s.:written
• Hours per week, examination: winter s.:2/0, Ex [HT]
• Capacity: unknown / unknown (20)
• Min. number of students: unlimited
• 4EU+: no
• Virtual mobility / capacity: no
• State of the course: not taught
• Language: English
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Note: course can be enrolled in outside the study plan; enabled for web enrollment
• Guarantor: PhDr. Mgr. Petr Wohlmuth, Ph.D.
• Incompatibility : YBAJ048
• Is incompatible with: YBAJ266

Annotation

English

This course aims to provide an introduction to oral history using the historical phenomena of the Cold War with special emphasis at ex-communist countries such as Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany, Soviet Union, and China and also actors of Western leftist groupings. Most histories emphasize major political events or structures of economic development. Professor Donald A. Ritchie, the author of the influential book Doing Oral History, once explained the core of the discipline in these telling words: we do not do oral history to confirm what we already know, but rather to question what we consider to be supposedly clear. So, our main goal will be entirely different from the usual perspectives on Cold War: we will avoid major narratives and attempt to understand the structures and meaning of the historical subjectivity of so-called „ordinary people“, living under these oppressive regimes. How was life beyond the Iron Curtain for them? In which terms they had conceptualized their life experience? How did they relate to people, ideas, and material objects from the West? Oral history understands „ordinary people“ to be much more than just „onlookers“ to the actions of major historical actors.

Last update: Baláž Picková Monika, Mgr. (27.08.2023)

Course completion requirements

- at least 75% of attendance

- active participation in seminary reading and discussion.

- an oral presentation (15–20 mins) or written paper (5-10 standard pages, deadline for delivering 31 Jan 2023), covering one of our seminary topics, using the prescribed literature.

- written semestral test with four open questions, covering the topics discussed. Each answer can be awarded 0-3 points.

Test grading: 12-11 points = excellent ("1"), 10-9 points = very good ("2"), 8-7 points = good "3", less than 7 points = fail ("neprospěl/a")

 

Grade composition

- attendance 10%

- active participation in seminary debates 20%

- written semestral test 70%

Last update: Baláž Picková Monika, Mgr. (27.08.2023)

Literature

Obligatory:

• Thompson, Alistair. Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History. In The Oral History Review. 1 (2006): 49-70.

Last update: Baláž Picková Monika, Mgr. (27.08.2023)

Syllabus

1) Introduction: Oral history between subjectivity, memory, and narrative.

2) USSR: The Gulag: survival and exile - a lecture and common seminary reading

• Gheith, Gulag Voices, Chapter 8 - Enumerated Units, p. 133-150.
  
  

3) USSR: The cynical generation: Brezhnev years and détente

• Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers, Introduction, p. 3-15, Chapter 3 - Unconscious agents of change - Soviet Childhood Creates the Cynical Generation, p. 120-168.
  
  

4) USSR: „How thirty people can share an apartment?“ - everyday communal living

• Messana, Soviet Communal Living, Introduction, p. 1-5. Chapters 1, 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 23, 25, 26, 27.
  
  

5) USSR: Notebooks of Evgeniia Kiseleva

• Irina Paperno, "The Notebooks of the Peasant Evgeniia Kiseleva: The War Separated Us Forever", in  Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience - Memories, Diaries, Dreams (Cornell UP: Ithaca and London, 2009): II/2 – 118–158.
  
  

6) Uchronic dreams – the post-WWII experience of communist militants in Italy

• Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, chapters 1, 3, and 6.
  
  

7) China: one girl's experience of the Cultural Revolution

• Ye Weili and Ma Xiaodong, Growing Up in The People’s Republic, Foreword, Chronology of major events, Introduction, Chapters 3, 4, and 5.
  
  

8) China: Tiananmen massacre and life in exile

• Rowena Xiaoqing He, Tiananmen Exiles. Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 3.
  
  

9) Czechoslovakia I - the short-lived dream of the Prague Spring of 1968 and its aftermath

• Zounek et al. “You have betrayed us for a little dirty money!” The Prague Spring as seen by primary school teachers
  
  

10) Czechoslovakia II - Post-1968 malaise

• Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent. Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe and Czech Culture under Communism, Chapters 2 and 3 (The Stages of Demobilization, The Shadow World)
  
  

11) Czechoslovakia III - Problems of the Czechoslovak dissident movement

• Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent. Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe and Czech Culture under Communism. Chapters 4 and 5 (Legends of the underground, Everything changed with the Charter).
  
  

12) Czechoslovakia IV - family life under the "normalization" regime during the 1970/80s

• Vaněk, Mücke, Velvet Revolutions, Introduction, and Chapters 2 and 6.
  
  

13) Written semestral test

Last update: Baláž Picková Monika, Mgr. (05.09.2023)