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Parasites, Prostitution, and Everyday 
Vigilance in Socialist Czechoslovakia 
An Interview with Dr. Christiane Brenner 
 
 
Victoria Skelton 
Auburn University 
 
 
I had the pleasure to sit down virtually with Dr. Christiane Brenner this summer and ask a 
few questions about her new project on prostitution in socialist Czechoslovakia. Dr. 
Brenner is affiliated with Collegium Carolinum, a German research institute devoted to the 
study of the Czech and Slovak Republics. She is also the editor of the journal Bohemia, 
which publishes work on the history and culture of Central Europe. With her current 
project she is part of a Collaborative Research Center at Ludwig Maximilian University of 
Munich with nearly fifty scientists from different disciplines. The aim of this project is to 
analyze the historical and cultural foundations of vigilance.1 The interview has been edited 
for length and clarity. 
 
Victoria Skelton (VS): You began your career studying nationalism. How do you see those 
early career interests playing out in your current work? 
 
Dr. Christiane Brenner (CB): When I began studying Central European history, I was 
mostly interested in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At Freie Universität in 
Berlin I had a wonderful professor, Bedřich Loewenstein, who encouraged us to read the 
works of nineteenth-century historians. Loewenstein asked us not only to understand how 
modern nations were “invented” by those intellectuals. It was also important to him that 
we discuss the impact of those narratives on actual people’s lives. 
 
There are many reasons why studying nationalism as ideology and everyday practice can 
be important to understanding socialism. After 1945, the so-called “People’s Democracies” 
in East-Central Europe were established with the argument of creating social and national 
justice. Considering the experience of German occupation and the war, it is not surprising 
that this promise of nationalism was attractive to many people. 
 
 VS: In what ways have these experiences informed this new project’s emphasis on 
Czechoslovakian national public health measures?  
 
CB: As a historian, I’m always curious about continuity and change. I want to know how 
ideologies transform over time. With regard to Czechoslovakia during the socialist period, 

 
1 For more information, see the Cultures of Vigilance website: https://www.en.sfb1369.uni-
muenchen.de/index.html. 



53 
 

I’m fascinated with the paradoxes in gender and family policies. On the one side, there was 
a strong conservative orientation towards the family, rooted in a nineteenth-century 
understanding of the nation, the dangers it faces, and women’s duties in this struggle. On 
the other side, Czechoslovakia did a lot for women’s emancipation—because in the 
Communists’ view, equal rights for women were part and parcel of the better republic that 
they were building. By the late 1940s, the Czechoslovak government passed a new 
progressive family law. A huge number of women entered the job market and higher 
education. Thus, many demands from the women's movement of the interwar period were 
fulfilled—and this did, indeed, change society. This duality between gender-conservatism 
and modernization efforts can be observed throughout the entire socialist period. 
 
VS: This interest in lived experiences during this socialist nation-building in 
Czechoslovakia certainly shines through in your current project. What can your work on 
prostitution in socialist Czechoslovakia tell us about socialism as both a political system 
and a lived experience?  
 
CB:  The motivation behind my project is to find out how the socialist state tried to 
establish what was called the “socialist way of life.” I’m interested in how social rules were 
implemented after the Communist takeover in 1948 in Czechoslovakia and how those who 
did not stick to these rules were treated. I assume that the state needed the cooperation of 
the citizens and that this cooperation worked best where socialist norms and traditional 
norms coincided. “Vigilance” was a key term for socialist societies, but it was mostly 
understood in political way. Prostitution, however, was not classified as directed against 
the regime, but as a something that contradicted socialist as well as bourgeois morality. At 
first glance, choosing to report your neighbor who (you think) is a prostitute, who doesn’t 
regularly work within the socialist labor system, has nothing to do with politics. You don’t 
have to agree with a particular program of a political party or be a party member to tell the 
police your neighbor is a prostitute. Instead, we see a recurring sentiment that prostitution 
is bad because people should go to work every day, and prostitution does not conform to 
the socialist labor regime.  
 
VS: You have specifically looked into local, municipal archives for many of your sources. 
Can you elaborate on why these archives are so important to your work and for 
understanding an everyday-life perspective on state control? 
 
CB: Finding archival sources for my work turns out to be more difficult than I had 
imagined. But I am beginning to understand that these difficulties are related to how 
prostitution was treated under socialism. According to Marxist-Leninist theory, 
prostitution was characteristic of capitalist societies. Thus, it was expected to disappear in 
socialism and although it was not completely taboo, it was not considered a question to be 
seriously dealt with. I found several traces of prostitution in the chronicles of police 
departments, and I have seen many court records with women accused of prostitution. 
Where the local is concerned, there is lots of evidence of prostitution. On the state level—in 
the government, including ministries—prostitution for the longest time was a non-topic, 
and it was not clear who from the state authorities was concerned with it. Only in short 
periods like the late 1960s, in the context of the general liberalization, or early 1980s, when 



54 
 

AIDS became an important issue, was it something that played a role in committee 
discussions.  
 
VS: Discussions of both prostitution and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s specifically seem to 
highlight disparities between government efforts to control already-vulnerable populations 
and their premise of providing help. Are you drawing similar conclusions from your 
research so far? 
 
CB: I am still in the process of finding sources for my project, and therefore it is too early 
for far-reaching conclusions. But there are some things I am beginning to see more clearly. 
For one thing, I can see in the sources how the socialist state dealt with people who did not 
fit into the system or violated norms and how this changed over time. From violence and 
open repression in the 1950s to a discourse treating “difficult people” with the help of 
experts in the 1960s, we see an ongoing attempt to establish a complex network of control. 
What strikes me most is the huge gap between this discourse of helping, curing, and 
integration and the reality of the stigmatization and exclusion of people who would—or 
could—not adapt.  
 
VS: That sounds incredibly difficult, tracking down people who weren’t supposed to exist in 
socialist society—the process of rendering invisible members of society visible. In the 
midst of a global pandemic when increasing numbers of men and women are working from 
home, we have seen a number of conversations about who performs domestic labor, a 
historically invisible form of labor. Sex work, also often under the purview of women, has 
been written off as separate from traditional “work.” How does this speak to the gendered 
understanding of work and labor, even in a supposedly equitable system like that of 
socialist Czechoslovakia? 
 
CB: I think it’s a crucial question for the project. A topic like sex work didn’t make sense in 
the socialist world. The socialist understanding of work centered on productive labor, and 
productive labor was given and assigned by the state. The state organized the whole world 
of labor, so there was no legal work outside the state. But prostitution belonged to the 
world outside the state, meaning that it was regarded as a dishonest way of making one’s 
living or making money. This put those women who earned part or all of their living by 
selling sex at the margins of society.  
 
When the revolution came in the late-1980s, nearly everybody knew that prostitution 
existed. After all, one could see prostitutes in the center of Prague, at the railway station. 
So, it really wasn’t a secret. Since then, there has been an ongoing discussion of whether to 
regulate or legalize prostitution. To date no prostitution law has been passed in the Czech 
Republic. However, municipalities can decide on how to deal with prostitution individually. 
Especially in the region that borders Germany, many towns have imposed rather strict 
rules for regulating prostitution. Of course, these restrictions do not put an end to 
prostitution, and they make it even more unsafe or dangerous for the people to engage in.  
 
VS: The stigmatization of prostitution as a danger to society—this moralizing attitude— 
seems to be a theme regardless of political circumstances.  



55 
 

 
CB: The approach of socialist states to prostitution was strongly moralizing. There is 
nothing especially “socialist” about this view. What was indeed characteristic for socialist 
states was the practice connected with this discourse—the partial tabooing, or “hiding,” of 
the existence of prostitution behind other crimes, especially the crime of not working. This 
tabooing drove and kept people in prostitution in the margins of society.  
 
VS: We still have these debates about prostitution today, and the arguments seem to have 
remained the same: that prostitutes or poor people or marginalized people don’t 
contribute to society and the economy. And although socialism ended in the Czech 
Republic, the attitudes, it seems, did not.  
 
CB: Talking about the approach to prostitution in the Czech Republic today, we consider 
not only the experience of the socialist period but also about the years following the 
collapse of communism. After 1989, there was this enormous “sex boom” seen by a part of 
society as a chance to catch up with the West and experienced by others as liberalization 
with shocking consequences. Perhaps this explains, at least partly, why the differences in 
the debate about a prostitution law are so sharp. At the same time, there is a huge lack of 
empathy for women in prostitution in this debate. They are not seen as valuable members 
of society but as threats to society and its health. Interest in guaranteeing their rights and 
making their life and work safer is scarce. 
 
VS: Speaking of empathy, I noticed that you did not name the women you use as examples. 
Were their names redacted, or are you trying to shield them from any potential impact on 
their current lives?  
 
CB: For one thing, this is really, really sensitive material, and I always had to provide 
assurances that I will treat the material with respect and discretion. For sure, it’s exactly as 
you say. Most of these people are still alive. They have family, kids, and as I said before, 
they cannot count on support from today’s Czech society. 
 
I’m not sure what I will do with naming these women. I do not want to sound like the 
police, nor do I want to suggest an inappropriate familiarity and talk about the women as if 
they were my friends or sisters.  
 
VS: How do you handle naming the police officers and other officials who were enacting 
this sort of state surveillance on women accused of prostitution? 
 
CB: I could identify one of the judges who presided over numerous processes with women 
accused of prostitution because she was also involved in a scandalous trial with a member 
of Charter 77. So, I can reconstruct her professional career with published material on her. 
She is a public person, so I don’t see a problem using her name.  
 
VS: Over and over again, there seems to be a theme of almost social or class distinction in 
socialist Czechoslovakia—between this judge and the women accused of prostitution, for 
example—the women who are marginalized and those who are not. This is fairly common 



56 
 

in most conversations about prostitution, but the socialist political context complicates our 
understanding of that disparity. To what degree does your current project deal with how 
the state managed inequality in Czechoslovakian society? 
 
CB: That’s a very important question. Czechoslovakia was, at least, since the 1960s, a 
society with a high degree of social equality. This was largely because of the enormous 
shifts caused by social policies after the communist take-over in 1948. While the vast 
majority of society was rather homogenous, the percentage of really poor people was small. 
Likewise, the milieu of so called “asocial people” was not numerous, but it was 
exceptionally burdened with difficult living. 
 
When looking at the life stories I can reconstruct from my sources, the one thing I can say is 
that it was not easy to make a fresh start after being sentenced for prostitution. Once you 
were part of this non-society at the margins, you were put on a register, and it was very 
hard to find a way out.  
 
After the Stalinist period, the socialist state gave up the utopian idea of turning all people 
into “new socialist men” and accepted that deviant behavior would continue to exist. But it 
is important to see that the policies toward criminals and so-called parasites—forgiving on 
the discourse level, repressive in practice—also served to discipline and integrate the 
majority society.  
 
VS: This project sounds exciting and multifaceted. Where do you see yourself going from 
here?  
 
CB: If I could, I would go back to the archive tomorrow. Among the things I want to do next 
is visiting the archives of “spa towns” like Karlovy Vary and places where events like huge 
fairs attracted an international public to understand how prostitution was monitored or 
silently tolerated in those contexts. I am also in the very beginning of researching the files 
of the secret police, who probably not only tolerated prostitution but also used it for their 
own purposes. But I think the most important thing now, after a year of working mainly 
with sources of control and correction, is talking to witnesses. I’m thinking of experts in 
law, psychiatry, and sexology, but first, I want to do interviews with former prostitutes. Of 
course, the court records provide basic information about their lives, but they give very 
limited insight into their experiences, emotions, their individual agendas. Their perspective 
should play an important role in my book.  
 
 
The editors of the Central European Yearbook are grateful to Dr. Christiane Brenner and Ms. 
Victoria Skelton for taking the time to provide our readers with this fascinating interview 
about new research. We wish both of them much success with their ongoing and future 
projects. 
 
 



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Christiane Brenner earned her Ph.D. at the Freie Universität in Berlin and has studied 
modern Central European History in Lyon, Munich, Berlin, and Prague. Since 1998 she has 
been a researcher at the Collegium Carolinum Research Institute for the History of the 
Czech Lands and Slovakia and the editor of Bohemia: Journal of History and Civilization in 
East Central Europe. Most of her research is dedicated to the history of post-1945 
Czechoslovakia. In recent years, she has focused on youth, gender, and sexuality in socialist 
societies. In July 2019 she became part of the SFB (Collaborative Research Center), 
“Cultures of Vigilance,” at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with her project 
“Guardians of Socialist Morality: Prostitution and Vigilance Practices in Czechoslovakia 
(1945/48–1989).” Her publications to date on the history of sexuality in socialist 
Czechoslovakia include: “Doing it the Right Way. Pronatalism and Sexuality in Socialist 
Czechoslovakia (1948-1989),” in Odvaha nesouhlasit. Feministické myšlení Hany Havelkové 
a jeho reflexe, eds. Věra Sokolová and L’ubica Kobová (Prague: Fakulta humanitních studií 
Univerzity Karlovy, 2019), 426-439; and “Nová společnost – nová láska? Partnerství a 
sexualita v osvětových knihách pro mládež,” in Mezi pionýrským šátkem a mopedem. Děti, 
mládež a socialismus v českých zemích 1948-1970, eds. Jiří Knapík and Martin Franc 
(Prague: Academia, 2018), 513-521. 
 



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Victoria Skelton is a doctoral candidate in the History Department of Auburn University 
where she is writing a dissertation on international women’s organizing in the context of 
sisterhood, nationalism, and. She earned her B.A. in history at Texas A&M University. Her 
dissertation, “Women in a Changing World: The International Council of Women, Global 
Power, and the Boundaries of Sisterhood, 1888-1966,” explores the relationship between 
feminist, national, and imperial identities in the international arena of the first 
multipurpose feminist organization, the International Council of Women. She has 
presented papers on her work at the National Women’s Studies Association and the 
Western Association of Women’s Historians, among others. She teaches courses on 
twentieth-century Europe, women in media, and world history. She has received a number 
of honors, including a Margaret Scharnagel Award, an award from the Donna J. Bohanan 
Endowed Fund for Excellence and a Graduate Instructor Fellowship. Her leadership roles 
have included Graduate Teaching Assistant Captain and President of the Phi Alpha Theta 
Honor Society. 

 

 
 


