Prague: Belonging in the Modern City

A  SSEES Study of Central Europe Seminar with Chad Bryant.

Vojtěch Berger was a carpenter, a member of the interwar Czechoslovak Communist Party, and an obsessive diarist who lived in Prague from 1921 until his death forty years later. For Berger and other party members, including top Communist leaders, Communism was much more than a political ideology or movement. It was world unto itself that offered radical leftists a shared sense of security and place following the horrors of World War I and the emergence of a hostile, yet tolerant, First Czechoslovak Republic. Berger’s self-documented life offers a rare window into Communist practices of belonging between the wars – participation in a wide range of associations, marching on May Day, and joining comrades for a drink at the local pub, to name just a few. Eschewing terms such as “identity,” Bryant argues that pursuing questions about how and where people pursue a sense of belonging offers more than just a fresh perspective on the interwar Czechoslovak Communist Party. They touch on broader themes in modern European history, including the ever-present burden of creating for oneself a sense of home and community in the face of unrelenting change and dislocation.

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This event will take place on UCL campus. Should circumstances change, the event will be delivered online.

Chad Bryant is the author of the recently published Prague: Belonging and the Modern City as well as Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism, winner of the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize. Bryant is Associate Professor of History at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Center. He is, with Kateřina Čapková and Diana Dumitru, embarking on a study of the Stalinist-era show trials in Communist Czechoslovakia.