1968, West and East
I. What happened in 1968?
II. The postwar social and cultural revolutions
III. Students and workers in Paris, May 1968
IV. The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invastion, August 1968
V. Václav Havel's Power of the Powerless

the culture of the sixties as both a rebellion against the world of reconstruction and a product of it
technocracy
functionalism
social planning
alienation
the "new left"
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man

"the children of Marx and Coca-Cola" (French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard)

postwar expansion of universities
"new universities"
Nanterre
Sorbonne | Paris | Latin Quarter
in Germany: reckoning with the parents' generation
Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, 1963-1965

Dany Cohn-Bendit
"The university has in fact become a sausage factory which turns out people without any real culture, and incapable of thinking for themselves, but trained to fit into the economic system of a highly industrialized economy."

Alexander Dubcek: "socialism with a human face"
"Prague Spring"
economic reform
Slovak autonomy
abolition of censorship (March 1968)

Brezhnev doctrine (intervention to prevent the fall of Communist regimes)

Václav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978)
playwright | "dissident" (notice that he rejects the label--why?)
absurdist theater
first president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia
détente: here, relaxation in Cold War confronation during 1970s
(détente is a diplomatic term, originally French, meaning an easing of hostility or strained relations between countries)
Helsinki accords: "Final Act" 1975, agreement on human rights
Plastic People of the Universe
Charter 77:  petition in Czechoslovakia to stop violations of human rights, based on Helsinki accords

Havel's "Power of the Powerless" (on electronic reserve)
1. as an analysis of “what he calls "post-totalitarian society":
     everyday life in Communist societies by the 1970s
     the power of the system is both all-pervasive and fragile
     the power of appearances | "automatism" and ritual
2. as a proposal for the power of “"living in truth":
     pre-political action
     spontaneous acts of dignity
     the self-organization of society
     Q: relationship of this approach to more traditional forms of political opposition?
3. as an expression of its moment:
     the culture of dissidents
     postwar existential philosophy
     1960s cultural radicalism
     critique of consumer society, east and west
4. as a proposal for spontaneous democracy from below, an alternative to East and West