Dissertation "The Origins of the Mass Consumption Society in Czechoslovakia 1945-1970. Trade, Consumption and Advertising" deals with the process of establishing consumption as a new category of human life in the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. Through the analysis of the discourse the author shows how a network of specialized institutions and professionals producing thinking about consumption emerged in the milieu of the Ministry of Internal Trade. This network manifested itself in the planning of the trade infrastructure and in the adoption of a more subtle approach to the problem of consumption in an effort to maintain the legitimacy of the communist rule. The commerce as a sphere of economy was in the communist discourse initially reduced to the transmission lever between production and the consumer. This perception was accompanied by the pursuit of the social justice through the transformation of the consumer's experience, underpinned by a strong moral appeal. The key tools used in this process were the democratization of the access to the goods, the attempts to adapt the services to broad sections of the society, the chance given to the consumers to raise their own demands and also the "new language" of the trade practices. Political thaw after Stalin's death led to the...

of the thesis Una casa vacía, The Empty House, is a novel written by chilean writer Carlos Cerda. It is set in an empty house where married couple moves in in attempt to save their marriage from crisis. This thesis would like to be an introduction to the motifs which appear here with consideration of historical context and political situacion in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The purpose of this thesis is to put an emphasis on the issue of human rights, freedom and also considerably important autobiographical element - exile. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Argentina can be defined as a country with a long turbulent history. However, at the turn of the 70's and 80's when the country was under the rule of the military junta clearly stands out from this frame. Under the pretext of fight against subversive elements, the army, the police and the intelligence services committed severe human rights violations against citizens who did not approve of the regime or expressed their dissatisfaction with it. The final outcome of this terror were more than 30 000 disappeared people, commonly called desaparecidos, around 500 illegally adopted children and entire families living in the shadow of their sad past until today. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the extent of knowledge of specific actors of the international community (USA and Chile) about the situation in Argentina and to identify their attitude towards the information coming from a country where human rights violations happened on a daily basis. The conclusion aims to assess whether the governments of these three countries operated in some sort of a trilateral relationship, or whether these crimes were a specific internal issue of Argentina.

The aim of this diploma thesis is an analytical comparison and deconstruction of views of social historians on labouring men. The object of my interest will be views of Czech and East German historians from the period of the socialist dictatorship, and the views of Czech and German historians from the period of post-socialism. Using the methods of poststructuralist approaches, I will place the comparison and deconstructions in the contextual analysis of ideological determinations. At the same time, I will pay special attention to the changes in the determinations and epistemological breaks, with the help of which I will analyze the changes in the position of workes's research in relation to science and society. Key words: labouring men, comparison, deconstruction, historiography, ideology, epistemological break, science, socialist dictatorship, post-socialism

To the Economic and Political Development of the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s (Pavel Szobi) Abstract The thesis deals with the economic development of the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s. It characterizes the basic elements of real socialism and implementation of the main SED strategy for the studied period - the so called Unity of Economic and Social Policy. It evaluates single aspects and the impact on the political stability of the regime. The thesis determines effects of energetic policy, external debt and lack of foreign currency on the national economy. The author does not consider the economic failures, but the dictatorship itself to be the main reason for the regime decay. Restriction of human and civil rights, together with comparing the standard of living with the Federal Republic of Germany led to the rise of social policy expenses and an extensive subvention of the so called consumer socialism. These courses of action enabled to stabilize the GDR temporarily; however, it also made the main defects of central planning more visible. Not only a modern consumer society failed to form, but even supplying population with random goods remained an issue which is well documented in the thesis on the example of the so called coffee crisis. The author comes to the conclusion that these...

Using the concepts of social imaginary (C. Castoriadis), social representations (S. Moscovici), Eigen-Sinn (A. Lüdtke) and tactics (M. de Certeau), this thesis answers the question of whether in people's democratic Czechoslovakia (1945-1960) came into existence, or was coming into existence, what could be called a "socialist night." The problem is addressed as in the domain of imagination and narrative as well as in the domain of everyday experience of night at the time when Czechoslovakia had ambition to establish a new economic, political and social order after the end of the World War Two. The first symbolical step in the process of creation of new Czechoslovakia was the end of the war and was proclaimed to be completed in July 1960, when the Socialist Constitution was adopted. The question is addressed with the use of analysis of audiovisual sources, media, administrative, legislative, technical-statistical and police sources. Other applied theories are also the concept of governamentality (M. Foucault), the mass culture (W. Benjamin, T. Adorno, M. Horkheimer) and the legitimate dominion (M. Weber).

Dissertation: Abstract Jakub Rákosník: Changes of Czechoslovak Social Law in Years 1945 - 1956 The postwar popular democratic regime in Czechoslovakia was based on a strong social consensus which provided opportunity for leading political parties to realize extensive economic and social reforms. It was not only the nationalization of the economy (this task, in the case of large enterprises controlling two thirds of the Czechoslovak labor force, had already been finished before the communist coup d'état in February 1948), but also generous reform of social insurance towards the universal welfare state protecting all citizens and not only those insured. This program was inspired on the one hand by the long domestic tradition of social policy and also by the new postwar British reform made by the program of William Beveridge on the other hand. The dissertation is concerned especially with the analysis of continuity of social law. The structure of the welfare state in particular countries is a considerably lasting matter of fact. Even though the governments of various ideological orientation permanently carry out partial reforms of individual fields of welfare policy, the general range of expenses and the system of relations in between particular branches of the welfare policy embody a great extent of...

The construction of the Czechoslovakian socialist state was accompanied by numerous social projects, through which the communist dictatorship strived to influence even the most ordinary aspects of everyday lives of its citizens. The mass production of the off-the-peg clothes, which was subject to the state scientific research, was characteristic of the clothing industry after the year 1948. As a result, extensive somatometric projects were run on the Czechoslovakian territory (ADAGO, GOLIÁŠ, DEKOLT I-III). Their purpose was to map the population sizes, create a unified clothes size scale and develop a new methodology for cut structure. Simultaneously with this research, discussions about the ideal fashion canon, which would reflect the socialist ideology, also took place. The thesis analyses the clothing expert discourse of the period in a broader context and takes into account its informative value with regard to the period's conceptions of clothing, corporality, and fashion. Key words socialist dictatorship, socialist ideology, clothing industry, off-the-peg clothes, somatometry, clothing research, anthropometry, expert discourse

(in English): This diploma thesis deals with the coup of General Miguel Primo de Rivera and his subsequent government from the point of view of Czechoslovak diplomacy. The work is divided into five chapters and a conclusion. The main source of work was the telegrams of Czechoslovak diplomats working in Madrid at the time. The individual chapters deal with the reasons for the coup and other important events during the reign of Primo de Rivera. The aim of the work was to find out how Czechoslovak diplomats perceived the coup and other events in Spain. This reflection of Czechoslovak diplomatic dispatches was compared with historical research.

This thesis focuses on the work of the Čapeks Brothers and monitors their premonition of a coming destruction, the World War II. It consists of two parts theoretical and practical. The practical part presents poster set freely interpreting a Hugo Haas film The White Disease.