The title of this book, Velvet Retro, brings together two discrete concepts, the first is political (alluding to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that witnessed the end of forty years of communist rule in Czechoslovakia), the second is usually defined as postmodern and aesthetic. This combination provides the context for the book's complexity. The author cites the American TV drama Mad Men (2007–15) as exemplary of retro's focus on stylistic and aesthetic components of nostalgia: in this case, nostalgia not only for chic midcentury décor and dress, but also for the forbidden pleasures of the period (smoking, daytime consumption of alcohol, and the absence of political correctness in public discourse). Mad Men is perhaps characteristically American in its elision of politics as a source of nostalgia. The reason for its apolitical focus can be explained in terms of the continuity provided by the American liberal democratic consensus that has begun to fall apart only in recent years. By contrast, Czech history of the twentieth century has been marked by frequent political discontinuity and constant regime change.

As Veronika Pehe demonstrates in this tightly argued and well written book, retro and politics sometimes overlap in post-1989 Czech culture (film, TV, and fashion), but they also clash precisely because Czechs (unlike Americans or Brits) have never had the luxury of enjoying political stability and democratic continuity. Czech reactions to the socialist past have elicited an obsession with memory, which, as Pehe shows, takes a complicated and even contradictory form. The early chapters of the book highlight a tension between an official anticommunist posture and a nostalgia for certain everyday aspects of socialism such as the popular singer Karel Gott, a communist sympathizer who retained his cult-like status among ordinary Czechs long after the fall of communism. This tension between nostalgia for aspects of the socialist past and an official anticommunist policy is exemplified by films like Kolya (1996) directed by Jan Šverák, and Pelíšky (Cosy Dens, 1999), directed by Jan Hřebejk, in which a child's perspective serves to mitigate and underplay the oppressive aspects of the communist regime.

In the second half of her book, Pehe delineates a shift away from this nostalgic approach toward a more critical vision of communism based on the plot device of the discovered letter and the newly opened archive. Examples of this new trend are the films Kawasakiho růže (Kawasaki's Rose, 2009), also directed by Hřebejk, and In the Shadow (2012, directed by David Ondříček). These films are characterized by a neo-noir vision of the socialist past as morally compromised and even sinister: the protagonist of Kawasaki's Rose removes a personal threat to his marriage by denouncing his wife's former boyfriend as a western spy. Pehe explains this turn from sentimental nostalgia to moral condemnation in terms of the passing of time: whereas in the 1990s audiences could still remember the socialist period, in the current century memory of that era is necessarily receding. But this shift might also be explained in terms of a dialectical tension between the need to remember and the desire to forget traumatic periods of history.

Related to this change from sentimental comedy to tragic drama is the distinction between what Pehe terms “petty heroism”—the small-scale acts of defiance that characterized everyday life under socialism—and the search for true heroism. A good example of this later trend is Agnieszka Holland's Burning Bush (2013), which deals with the aftermath of the suicide by immolation of the student Jan Palach in 1968. Holland's dramatization of these tragic events is directly antithetical to Czech comedic portrayals of socialism and closer to a Polish tendency to heroize victims of totalitarianism. Moreover, this heroizing mode runs counter to a long Czech tradition of anti-heroism that predates the socialist era. Well known examples are Jaroslav Hašek's “good soldier” Švejk and Josef Škvorecký's novel Zbabělci (The Cowards, 1958), a jaundiced, ironic depiction of the “uprising” against Nazism in the final days and weeks of World War II. The quest for legitimate heroism that Pehe discerns in more recent portrayals of the socialist era “forgets” this anti-heroic Czech tradition. Conversely, the recent search for true heroes “remembers” the Czech martyr complex tradition from Jan Hus and Karel Havlíček-Borovský to Jan Palach. Here we can discern a dialectical interplay between memory and forgetting—a desire to memorialize and the opposite urge to efface the painful trauma (and humiliations) of twentieth-century Czech history.