Authors

Veronika Pehe¹;  ¹ Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy o, Czech Republic

Discussion

After 1989, talk of social class was deemed an anachronistic relic of the socialist era by many policy and opinion-makers in Eastern Europe. Yet one particular social class did feature prominently in the ideological project of market and liberal democratic reform. The middle class functioned in period discourse not only as an economic and social category, but also as a cultural goal: a symbol of prosperity-to-come, a central aspiration and promise of a return to “normality”. This paper argues that public television in the late 1980s and 1990s became a powerful cultural medium for the didactic project of explaining to viewers central concepts of the market economy. On the example of Czechoslovak, and later Czech and Slovak public television, it shows how educational programmes fostered a middle-class imagination through “normalizing” market mechanisms and privileging the figure of the entrepreneur as a role model of the new era. These programmes, the paper suggests, can thus be read as putting into practice the “liberal pedagogy” of the transformation project. But were audiences receptive to these normative messages? This question will be examined on a collection of viewers’ letters and audience surveys from the television archives.