Cool Course Dispatch: Collective Identity in a Totalitarian Regime

NYU Prague students hike in the forest outside Jáchymov, where political prisoners were held under the Communist regime.

Students disembark from the warm bus into the misty forest and are immediately greeted by a staircase reaching high up a steep hill. They start climbing, take a break when they're out of breath, and continue, thinking the entire time about how much harder it would be if they were carrying heavy buckets, or were barely clothed, or malnourished.

The climb up the forest ridge is the beginning of a hike in the woods outside Jáchymov, Czechia (or the Czech Republic), where the students and professor Vanda Thorne have come to learn about the plight of political prisoners and other captives who were forced to labor in uranium mines. From the stairs, which the prisoners would have taken back to their camp, the students walk miles to a former mine shaft, where they handle the tools used to extract the dangerous mineral for the former Soviet bloc. They view the remains of the destroyed prison buildings, and finish with a stop at the town's museum.

"It's incredibly transformative," Thorne says about the trip, which she offers as part of her "Collective Identity in a Totalitarian Regime" course at NYU Prague. The syllabus traces the country's communist period under Soviet Union rule from 1948-1989. "We talk about specific people and their families and what happened to them. The punishment of the political prisoners didn't stop with them. Their families carried the stigma, their children were not allowed to attend the university, and their wives lost their jobs.

"This is a forgotten chapter in Czech history. People don't want to talk about it," Thorne adds. "It's too fresh, too uncomfortable."

The overnight field trip to Jáchymov, near the German border about 90 miles west of Prague, is one of the highlights of the course that explores the history of the 20th century in this European country. Hundreds of years before Communist rule, Jáchymov was a prosperous silver mining town; more recently it has transformed itself into a spa town. Throughout the semester, Thorne uncovers the layers of the country's political, social, and geographic change, emphasizing the complexity of the people and their culture.

The hike begins with a steep climb up one a long staircase.

"In many countries like the United States, history is very linear, but in Europe and especially central Europe, it's all over the place," Thorne says.

The rigorous course examines totalitarian oppression from the point of view of ordinary citizens by introducing students to the construction of the Soviet Union's "collective" mentality and its legacy on the country's social fabric.

"The collective mentality was built to numb people," she says. "There were all these fake public rituals but there was no real public engagement."

Thorne shows films of public mass gymnastic exercise programs that were popular before communism and then appropriated by the totalitarian regime. They discuss the role of parades and public festivals, and the divide that existed between citizens' private and public lives.