Letter from Bratislava
Letter from Bratislava
Author(s): Martin M. ŠimečkaSubject(s): Political history, Government/Political systems, Politics and communication, Politics and society, Crowd Psychology: Mass phenomena and political interactions, Transformation Period (1990 - 2010), Post-Communist Transformation, Sociology of Politics
Published by: SAGE Publications Ltd
Keywords: Letter from Bratislava; 1989; democracy; political campaigns; political communication; postcommunist transformation;
Summary/Abstract: When I traveled to the West for the first time in my life-sometime in December 1989-I was captivated, apart from the cleanliness of Austrian villages, by the huge billboards that accompanied me like a caravan of pilgrims. Each featured a face, most familiar to me from Austrian television, and beneath the face, there was a sentence to address me. It was very strange: until then, I had known only one kind of billboard, displaying the retouched photographs of communist leaders on the rostrums, built for May 1. Blank faces of dead Marx, Lenin, and Gottwald next to the faces of living Husak and Strougal impersonated the immortality of communist ideology, its constancy, its superiority over life and human fate, over each human being and his or her misery. [...]
Journal: East European Politics and Societies
- Issue Year: 14/2000
- Issue No: 03
- Page Range: 661-664
- Page Count: 4
- Language: English
- Content File-PDF