Repressed Utopias vs. Utopian Repressions: Czech Countercultural Communal Living Arrangements in the ‘Normalization’ Era (1970–1989)

Abstract

The present contribution aims to examine this specific historic ‘Second World’ phenomenon — the communal living arrangements attempted by counterculturally minded, predominantly working-class youth in post-1968 Czechoslovakia, often (though not exclusively) in the former German Sudetenland — as an instance of the potentials and limitations associated with an attempt at a ‘mobile commons’ in 20th-century state socialism. Not only is the legacy of the Czech communes (baráky) an insufficiently researched historical topic, but even further, the placement of this phenomenon between its reflection of the American communal-utopian tradition in its 1960s forms, the emerging critique of industrial modernity, the growth of 20th-century ‘civil-society’ concepts, and the ‘Cold War’ mobilities across the Iron Curtain (intellectual-cultural autarky versus forced political emigration) forms a highly fruitful starting point for wider considerations. Examination of the Czech countercultural communal-living attempts within the social framework of the ‘normalization’ order of the 1970s and 1980s — state repression, socialist modernity, anti-public familialism — finds that their character as communities of refuge, rather than as deliberate planned experiments, places them at a particularly unique angle to the utopian vs. antiutopian debates, indeed even calling into question the very premises of this opposition.