When the World Went Colour: Emotions, Senses and Spaces in Contemporary Accounts of the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution

Abstract

Two decades after the dramatic conclusion of socialist rule in Czechoslovakia, Czechs’ personal recollections of the 1989 Velvet Revolution offer a counter-point to official histories of this period by downplaying the revolution’s role as a catalyst for political and economic modernization to focus on its affective, sensory and other bodily dimensions. In this paper I argue that Czechs’ personal memories of 1989 convey the feeling of having (in local terminology) “really lived” through the revolution by highlighting its emotional and sensorial impact and by locating the physical self within local, public spaces that were invested with novel political and personal meanings. Crucial here is the situating of not just memory, but also emotion, affect, and sensation, in sites that are culturally coded as “public” in distinction to the “private” realms of domesticity, the family, and the body, suggesting how the revolution instigated a significant experiential rupture between these two domains. In doing so, these accounts illuminate how local sites can become the nexus of not only personal and collective historical memories but also of emotional and sensorial anchorages of self to event.