“Where do you see yourselves in ten years’ time?” the course instructor David Gruber asked a group of pupils and students who had gathered near the Czechoslovakian city of Ostrava. The course participants then shared what professional and private success they envisioned for themselves. One young man imagined himself lying in a hammock in Hawaii, enjoying the fruits of his economic ventures. The time seemed ripe for such dreams, for it was 1990, Czechoslovakia had embarked on the path of postsocialist transformation, and the opportunities associated with the shift to a market economy were already being felt by certain segments of the population. The young people were attending a course focused on speed reading and other techniques aimed at increasing their intellectual productivity. Over the next five days, they were to practice how to grasp textual information more quickly, use their time more effectively, and gain clarity regarding their professional priorities. According to their instructor, Gruber, this was the way to make their Hawaiian dreams come true.Footnote 1
David Gruber, born in 1955 in Ostrava, was at the time on his way to becoming a celebrity as a productivity teacher and author of self-help literature. His services were aimed not only at pupils and students, but also at the emerging postsocialist business community. A busy entrepreneur, Gruber founded the company Techniky duševní práce (Techniques of Intellectual Work) in 1990, which sold his advice books and organized his courses.Footnote 2 He belonged to the group of self-help “gurus” that grew rapidly after 1989. This group played a central role in spreading understandings and practices of productivity that became firmly embedded in the lifestyles of certain segments of the aspiring transformation elite.
Gruber’s courses provide a unique insight into the way people worked on themselves to become faster and more effective in order to adapt to the newly emerging market economy. A close look at these courses can therefore help us gain a historical understanding of the emergence of “neoliberal” forms of self-improvement and ideals of productivity that became widespread under postsocialism. Rather than emphasizing the novelty of the post-1989 period, Gruber’s story invites us to explore hitherto understudied continuities between socialism and postsocialism. The example of Gruber—whose evolution into a productivity coach began long before the downfall of communism—suggests that when analyzing the emergence of postsocialist productivity practices, we should see these not only as capitalist innovations of the years after 1989, but also as something that developed as a result of impulses from the socialist era. The intellectual origins of Gruber’s teachings lie in debates that unfolded in Czechoslovakia during the period of reform communism, the Prague Spring, and the two decades that followed. These debates concerned such topics as the productivity of socialist labor and the role of psychology in education and work. His success was based on the willingness of new generations of Czechoslovakian youth (born in the 1960s and 1970s) to experiment with novel forms of self-improvement. Gruber’s productivity doctrine, which fit so well into the capitalist 1990s, was thus strongly rooted in pre-1989 state socialist contexts.
By analyzing the case of Gruber and his courses, this article explores the longer genealogy of postsocialist developments that are often described as “neoliberal.” In particular, this concerns the emergence of a set of attitudes centered around norms of flexibility, productivity, and competition that informed both the post-1989 reforms of the economic system and the “work on the self” through which individuals attempted to adapt to those reforms.Footnote 3 The article draws on contemporary reports from participants in Gruber’s courses as well as from journalists who reported on the courses in the press. To complement the source base, personal interviews conducted by the author between 2020 and 2022 with Gruber and with nine of his students are used.
The case examined here speaks directly to the larger question of how we understand the origins of the ideas and practices that became constitutive of post-1989 neoliberalism. Social scientists addressing this context have often emphasized the salient role of actors from the west (policy advisors such as the American economist Jeffrey Sachs) and institutions commonly seen as representing “western” ideas (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). This has had consequences for how such scholars have periodized transformation history, as it has often led to a focus on the post-1989 period, when such western influences were most prominent. Frequently, these studies imply that the emergence and institutionalization of neoliberal ideas and practices in eastern Europe can be seen as a process that gained momentum only after the fall of communism.Footnote 4
Recent historical research, by contrast, has pointed to continuities from the period of state socialism. These studies highlight the importance of domestic expert elites in state-socialist countries, and show how they contributed, from as early as the 1970s, to the formulation of ideas that were to become central to postsocialist transformation after 1989, particularly in fields such as economics, law, management, and administration. While taking note that such state socialist experts were often in close contact with specialists from western countries, newer historical studies by no means portray them as mere recipients of western knowledge, but rather as actors who played a central role in the formation of postsocialist ideas.Footnote 5 In this context, researchers such as the historian James Mark refer to a “long transformation” that began around 1970 and continued into the postsocialist period.Footnote 6
The present article builds on this newer historical work and argues that such continuities existed not only in the sphere of political and economic ideas, but also with regard to the lifestyles and everyday practices of aspiring postsocialist professional elites. By analyzing the self-improvement efforts of participants in Gruber’s courses, this article explores an important and as-yet understudied aspect of the “long transformation.” It highlights how “work on the self” evolved and shows how professionally ambitious individuals utilized psychology-based self-improvement techniques to increase their intellectual productivity and efficiency as a means of adapting to the post-1989 changes.Footnote 7
David Gruber is at the center of the following account because his life story intersects with intellectual and cultural trends of the socialist era since the 1960s that are crucial to a history of postsocialist practices and ideals of productivity. Section 1 sheds light on these broader contexts, while Section 2 shows how they influenced Gruber’s personal and professional development up to 1989, focusing on the quasi-entrepreneurial strategies that he developed even before the downfall of communism. Section 3 then examines Gruber’s courses and the practices he taught, including the emotional dimension of the course experience. It looks in detail at how Gruber’s classes were conducted and what the participants were (expected to be) doing and feeling. This reveals the extent to which the process of learning to be “productive” was understood as a task for one’s body and emotions.
Productivity Debates in Czechoslovakia, 1950s–1980s
The Prague Spring and its brutal suppression undoubtedly marked a major political break in the history of socialist Czechoslovakia. Beginning in the mid-1960s, party-led reforms had raised high hopes among large sections of the Czechoslovak population. The reformists’ plans to strengthen the rule of law and increase freedom of expression inspired the vision of a freer and more democratic future. These hopes were crushed brutally by the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops on August 21, 1968. What followed was the establishment of a repressive restoration regime that euphemistically described its intentions with the term “normalization.”Footnote 8
Despite the profound impact of the invasion, however, there were developments that outlasted the 1968 caesura. A common feature of the pre- and post-1968 periods were the attempts on the part of the socialist state to increase the productivity of socialist labor. The concern for productivity and the lack thereof was, in many instances, driven by fears of falling behind in the competition with western economies. Beginning in 1956, when de-Stalinization created a more open climate for discussion, problems associated with the planned economy came to be debated in public more frequently. These debates intensified during the liberal period of reform communism and the Prague Spring, when attempts were made to increase industrial efficiency through partial decentralization of the planned economy. From the 1970s onward, the trend was again more toward centralized control. The country increasingly saw itself as lagging behind in the race against an apparently more economically efficient west.Footnote 9
Both before and after 1968, debates about productivity in socialist Czechoslovakia were linked to the expectation that the world of work would soon change dramatically as a result of technological innovations. In this respect, Czechoslovakian discussions followed patterns that were evident on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In east and west, the 1960s and 1970s were a time of heightened expectations of future “progress” brought about by technological development.Footnote 10 It was anticipated that ever higher levels of automation in production would require new approaches to management and work organization. The importance of physical labor, experts argued, would diminish, and the “intellectual worker” would become more important in the future.Footnote 11 The public image of labor was changing accordingly. Whereas, in the 1950s, working people were most often portrayed as muscular, radiant heroes of socialism, positive images of intellectual, “white collar” labor began to appear more frequently beginning in the 1960s. To remain productive, it was commonly argued, the socialist workforce would have to adapt to the changing nature of work.Footnote 12
In line with the expected increase in the importance of intellectual work, psychology began to play a greater role in the workplace. The disciplines of labor and industrial psychology experienced a strong upswing. Many enterprises began to employ their own industrial psychologists, and the media increasingly reported on the benefits of industrial psychology expertise.Footnote 13 Experts from these disciplines emphasized, for example, the importance of finding ways for workers to increase their ability to concentrate and to become more resistant to psychological “stress,” a concept that became increasingly popularized from the 1960s onward. This period saw a boom in psychological advice literature on topics such as mental relaxation, intellectual creativity, and the fatigue-free handling of machines and work equipment.Footnote 14
The ideological catchword used in socialist Czechoslovakia to summarize the anticipated changes in the nature of work was the “Scientific-Technological Revolution.” This term had been introduced into the ideological language of communism by Nikita Khrushchev in 1962 to signal a spirit of optimism in the post-Stalin era.Footnote 15 In Czechoslovakia, the concept of the “Scientific-Technological Revolution” was taken up by the influential communist social scientist and philosopher Radovan Richta, who used it to describe, among other things, a comprehensive transformation of the world of work and life through automation processes. Richta and his associates, who had a strong influence on reform communism, the intellectual climate of the Prague Spring, and the two decades that followed, described Czechoslovakia as a state that in the near future would enter a phase characterized by advanced technologies and a continuous acceleration of knowledge production.Footnote 16 The “transition to intellectual work” they argued, would bring about new challenges: instead of using their own physical strength at work, workers would stand at “control desks” and monitor the increasingly automated production process. Such workers would face “information overload and a heightened sense of responsibility which will result in constant nervous tension.”Footnote 17 Even after the utopian expectations of the Prague Spring period collapsed as a result of the invasion, the “Scientific-Technological Revolution” remained an ideologically central concept in Czechoslovakia that signified the socialist path to a positive future, but also the social challenges associated with technological progress.Footnote 18
David Gruber: Becoming Productive in Socialist Czechoslovakia
David Gruber’s career evolved in a climate largely shaped by the trends described above. The societal concerns for labor efficiency, expectations of future technological progress, and the rise of industrial psychology all set the stage for Gruber to become one of the first business and productivity coaches in his country. Growing up near Ostrava, in a family that placed great value on education, Gruber’s childhood coincided with the liberal 1960s, while his adolescence and early adulthood unfolded in the context of the repressive “normalization” period.
Gruber, a gifted and ambitious student, experienced what he saw as discrimination on his educational path because his father was publicly critical of the invasion that ended the Prague Spring. After several unsuccessful efforts to find a place to study, he was finally admitted to the University of Mining Industry in Ostrava in 1974.Footnote 19 As a student at this university, it was inevitable that Gruber would encounter the issue of productivity. He was trained as a “systems engineer” there, and the curriculum he had to follow closely reflected the productivity debate in Czechoslovakia. According to contemporary terminology, a systems engineer was a senior worker who was expected to perform managerial and administrative tasks in socialist enterprises (especially in technology-based industries). Systems engineers were required to possess not only technical expertise but also knowledge of managerial economics and, importantly, industrial psychology. They were seen as a paradigmatic example of the new type of “intellectual worker.”Footnote 20
The idea of the systems engineer had taken root in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring, when the reform communists were drawing on western management theory in their attempt to organize the planned economy in a more decentralized and flexible manner. The reformers attributed a central role to the systems engineers, who, according to their vision, were to control and monitor production and make decisions independently, within certain limits, in areas where the plan would no longer dictate events in a rigid manner. During the crushing of the Prague Spring and the ensuing consolidation of party rule, the role of the systems engineer changed, and he or she was once again viewed as more of a cog in the wheel of a centrally controlled overall mechanism. While the emphasis on flexibility and independence was scaled back, the industrial psychology focus, which honed in on concentration skills and mental efficiency, remained important in the curriculum throughout the 1970s—the time when Gruber was being trained.Footnote 21
Psychology was gaining importance at the time not only in labor- and industry-related fields such as systems engineering, but also in education and schooling. Pupils and students were being regarded as the intellectual workers of tomorrow, which is why psychological aspects of effective learning were seen as increasingly relevant. From the 1970s, youth magazines increasingly reported on the topic and shared mental relaxation and concentration exercises, for example. The fields of pedagogy and psychology were converging to some extent. This trend, which could also be observed in other countries of the “Eastern Bloc,” reached David Gruber in the guise of an East German guest lecturer who was visiting the University of Mining Industry in Ostrava. The visiting scholar specialized in techniques of effective learning, which included, for example, the question of how learning material can be effectively memorized and how one can successfully prepare for exams.Footnote 22 As a student who was striving to improve his learning skills, Gruber became interested in the subject. He delved into it by reading works by Czechoslovak self-help writers, including Jak sbírat vědomosti (How to Accumulate Knowledge, 1961) by the advice author Jiří Toman and Sebevýchova a duševní zdraví (Self-education and Mental Health, 1976) by the psychologist Libor Míček.Footnote 23 Through his reading, Gruber became increasingly influenced by contemporary intellectual trends that combined expertise in industrial psychology and pedagogy with the idea of self-improvement.
Gruber’s career path was anything but straightforward. After graduating in 1979, he worked, among other things, in the computer center of a mining enterprise and as a tour guide, while also trying his hand at becoming a writer. Frustrated by what he presumed to be politically motivated discrimination in his working life, he again turned to the subject of learning techniques. Drawing inspiration from a West German textbook on speed reading, Gruber developed the idea of offering courses in this technique in Czechoslovakia.Footnote 24 He found an organizational framework for realizing his plans in the Socialistický svaz mládeže (Socialist Youth League) in Ostrava, which, like other youth and educational organizations at the time, showed interest in such forms of self-improvement for students and pupils.Footnote 25
Gruber began offering his courses in the mid-1980s—initially as themed excursions for young people (week-long vacation trips to the Moravian countryside that included a course on speed reading). They became a remarkable success during the final years of socialism. Soon, Gruber looked beyond his initial target group of young people. As various professional institutions began showing an interest in training their employees by the end of the 1980s, Gruber offered courses for doctors, administrative workers, and scientists.Footnote 26 “Intellectual workers” increasingly became an important part of his clientele. In the 1980s, Gruber’s courses thus brought together representatives of an urban, educated, and professionally ambitious milieu, including future entrepreneurs and other aspiring elites who would help build the post-1989 order.
Early on, Gruber developed a narrative with which he promoted his courses. In doing so, he drew as much from his experience of training as a systems engineer as from his reading of both western and state socialist psychological self-help literature. His narrative tied in with central motifs of the ideological and expert debates of the reform communist and late socialist periods. He referred to the concept of the “Scientific-Technological Revolution” and the associated expectations of change in the world of work due to technological advances. Gruber also drew on the notion of “information overload” that was being discussed widely in contemporary Czechoslovak industrial psychology, that is, the idea that contemporary man was in danger of being “flooded” by information due to the growth in scientific knowledge.Footnote 27 In his narrative, Gruber not only outlined how one could learn to read more effectively, but also addressed the overarching question of why it was desirable to speed up the reading process in the first place. He characterized the contemporary situation as a time of “information explosion.” Because, as he argued, knowledge in many areas of life was growing at an ever-faster rate due to “revolutionary” technical and scientific progress, the amount of textual information that modern people had to mentally process was increasing dramatically. The only solution, according to Gruber, was for everyone to consume information “faster” and “more effectively.” Gruber, importantly, required the individual to adapt in the face of changed conditions: everyone, he implied, needed to speed up to keep up with the times.Footnote 28
Gruber’s teachings evolved in a late socialist environment characterized by widespread concerns for productivity, especially regarding intellectual labor, and by the increasing circulation of “psy-knowledge,” which began to play a role as a resource for self-improvement in the spheres of school, university, and work.Footnote 29 As shown with Gruber’s training as a systems engineer, these developments had received decisive impetus during the phase of reform communism in Czechoslovakia and continued to have an effect, albeit in a modified form, during “normalization.” In developing his course program, Gruber drew from an emerging Czechoslovak advice and self-improvement literature as well as from western sources. The topics and ideas he used were often being discussed on both sides of the “Iron Curtain,” and in many cases emerged from expert discussions in psychology and pedagogy that bridged the east-west divide. Not least, he adapted his course offering to fit the widespread expectations of a technological transformation in working life brought about by “progress.”
Becoming a Brand: Gruber as a Late Socialist Media Celebrity
It is not only the intellectual origins of Gruber’s courses that can be traced back to the period before 1989. Late socialism was also the period in which Gruber established his reputation as an expert advisor. His media presence and public self-staging play an important role in this context. Gruber’s case provides an example of a career as a media personality that began well before a free-market media environment emerged after 1989. By shaping himself into a brand, he was acting in a similar way to a quasi-market player, although it was still only the late socialist phase. Gruber’s story, therefore, sheds light on the late-socialist prehistory of self-staging practices that anthropologists such as Trenholme Junghans see as characteristic of postsocialist “marketing selves.”Footnote 30
Both visual and textual media fueled Gruber’s popularity as a proponent of the novel self-improvement technique of speed reading. One example is Mladý Svět (Young World), the most popular youth magazine in socialist Czechoslovakia. Published by the Socialist Youth League, the magazine appealed directly to many young people, not least because it was subject to only limited censorship and ideological control. Mladý Svět provided a mix of fashion, pop culture, and advice on sexual and relationship matters.Footnote 31 The magazine also counseled its young readership on school and university issues, including the topic of techniques for effective learning, which was popular at the time. David Gruber and his method of speed reading were recurring themes in Mladý Svět. In late 1985, the magazine ran a major feature on Gruber, who dominated the issue’s cover in large format.Footnote 32 Viewed as a visual source, this cover picture provides clues to the image Gruber was creating for himself at this time (Figure 1).
David Gruber on the cover of the magazine “Young World”.
The illustration shows the then 30-year-old as a dynamic lecturer posed in front of a blackboard. Sitting backwards on a chair, wearing a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and looking directly into the camera, Gruber personifies a mixture of youthfulness and respectability. The message conveyed by this visual is that he inhabits both the world of the magazine’s young readers and an adult world associated with cultivation and professionalism. Moreover, Gruber’s assertive and focused demeanor on the cover resonates with the contemporary notions of intellectual work and productivity that were to be central to his speed-reading project.
Gruber made a similar appearance on Czechoslovak television, which broadcast a ten-part educational series entitled Kurs rychlého čtení (A Speed-reading Course) that started in October 1986. Being responsible for the idea, script, and hosting of the show, Gruber tailored the format strongly to his personality. He presented the show late in the afternoon, supported by his young assistant Martina, who demonstrated reading exercises. The program was designed for active participation, with reading exercises shown onscreen for viewers to complete.Footnote 33 In 1988, Gruber hosted a follow-up television format that was designed to introduce audiences to the world of the personal computer. Assisted by experts such as computer engineer Ivo Okun, Gruber demonstrated the possibilities that these devices, “which you may already have at home or will soon have,” offered for work, leisure, and personal development. The image Gruber presented in the magazine Mladý Svět was complemented here by that of a person who is in touch with the trends of the future and who stays on top of the seemingly confusing world of tomorrow’s technology.Footnote 34 Taken together, Gruber’s TV programs show him as a representative of an evolving state socialist self-help and advice culture, which, as the historian Stefan Offermann argues with reference to the GDR, increasingly developed through the medium of television.Footnote 35
It is important to note that Gruber presented himself in his multimedia appearances as a personality: a flesh-and-blood human being with a characteristic look and style, as well as emotions. Journalistic texts on Gruber often emphasized this point. For example, the reporter Petr Trojan described Gruber as an original thinker and a passionate teacher who was “addicted” to his subject of speed reading.Footnote 36 In a 1986 interview, he highlighted Gruber’s originality and asked about his personal experiences and feelings: “How does it feel to become a teacher of a subject you developed yourself?” Gruber’s answer also conveyed messages about his emotions: “What more could a teacher wish for than for his subject to attract such interest?”Footnote 37 This personality-centered image set Gruber apart from many experts who wrote self-help books for various areas of life in the late socialist period. The latter, as a rule, remained modestly in the background in their works (they let their expertise speak without presenting themselves as prominent individuals). As historian Martina Winkler notes with regard to the authors of parenting advice books in Czechoslovakia, “a visual and personal depiction of the experts … was unusual.” The authority of such specialists, Winkler shows, was based not on personality but on scientific reputation, which was documented on the book covers with references to academic degrees and activities at relevant research institutions.Footnote 38 Gruber, by contrast, can be seen as an early example of a different type of “expert,” one that only became widespread in the Czechoslovak context after 1989. He was largely self-taught and had no particular academic merit in his field. Instead, he relied on his visually and textually constructed media image of youthful competence. Gruber thus can be considered an example of what Cultural Studies scholar Tania Lewis calls a “lifestyle expert.” This type of expert (Lewis cites celebrity chef Jamie Oliver as a present-day example) represents a form of non-classical expertise that is characteristic for advanced modern societies and legitimizes itself not academically but with reference to personality and life experience.Footnote 39
It was in keeping with Gruber’s media self-invention that, in some respects, he was acting like an independent market player as early as the late socialist period. Even though he was operating within the framework of a centrally planned economy, his actions bore traits of individual entrepreneurship. Gruber worked in a demand-oriented manner, offering a “product” he had developed himself under his own name and which he advertised in the media. While formally operating in the context of the state institutions where he was employed (such as the Socialist Youth League), he sent out customized course offerings to various companies and institutions.Footnote 40 Gruber’s quasi-entrepreneurship, although at odds with planned economy principles, did not involve open criticism of the economic system of state socialism. Rather, given that his courses focused on the productivity of intellectual labor, he was addressing an issue that was a matter of widespread concern among representatives of the regime.
Gruber’s activities represent an example of quasi-entrepreneurial behavior that can be discussed within the context of the research discussion on free-market niches in state socialism. As historian Philipp Ther points out, free-market practices were especially widespread in Poland and Hungary prior to 1989. For example, the “Polonia enterprises,” which were licensed in Poland in 1979, were mostly trading firms that operated with the support of Polish expatriates and other investors from the west and developed into “incubators of capitalism.”Footnote 41 While such entrepreneurs often made their living by importing and exporting material production goods, Gruber traded in an intangible commodity, namely (practical) knowledge. This reveals him as an early representative of an emerging service-oriented “information society.”Footnote 42 Setting aside this difference, the cases are comparable in one important respect. Just as for many of the late socialist traders in Hungary and Poland, Gruber’s entrepreneurial experience before 1989 would become an important asset for economic success after the collapse of communism.Footnote 43
Gruber’s Courses: Working on the Productive Self Before and After 1989
The Velvet Revolution marked the beginning of a new chapter in Czechoslovak history. Members of the urban and educated classes—who made up Gruber’s primary target group—now became important players in the country’s transformation into a liberal democracy and market economy. An atmosphere of expectation was building, which led professionally ambitious individuals to dream of a future characterized by economic success. Gruber himself became one of the many middle-class founders who advanced what has been called a “transformation from below” in Czechoslovakia.Footnote 44 With the books and courses offered through his newly founded company, he was meeting the need for guidance in a new era characterized by a perceived “return to the West” and by neoliberal “shock therapy.” While the radical reform was tempered after a few years by welfare state measures, the 1990s remained a time of staunch neoliberal rhetoric, which Gruber was soon to tune into.Footnote 45 By looking more closely both at Gruber’s rhetorical framing of his courses and at participants’ “work on the self” before and after the Velvet Revolution, we can see that to some degree, “productivity” took on new meanings in the period after 1989.
An analysis of the content and practices that Gruber taught in his courses in the 1980s on the one hand, and in the postsocialist period on the other, however, also shows that, from his perspective, the year 1989 represented a caesura only to a limited extent. Instead, the dominant picture is one of gradual evolution from the socialist 1980s into the postsocialist 1990s. Even before the collapse of communism, Gruber began to expand the spectrum of his services. In addition to speed reading, which remained central to the courses, he also taught concentration techniques and methods of personal time management. In the 1990s, these techniques continued to form the core of his teachings. However, Gruber did enlarge his program to include skills that were tailored to the market economy situation and to the Czech state’s integration into a globalizing capitalist economy (e.g., sales strategies and learning foreign languages, especially English).Footnote 46 Ideologically flexible, Gruber adapted his rhetoric to what he perceived to be the spirit of the postsocialist era, and increasingly used Anglicisms rather than Czech terms: Instead of “techniky duševní práce” (techniques of intellectual work), he adopted the term “soft skills” along with “time management” and manažerské techniký práce (management work techniques). The covers of the exercise books used in his courses featured the English formula “Derive your success.”Footnote 47
Furthermore, the narrative Gruber used to advertise his services was gradually evolving. Explaining why one should learn speed reading and other productivity techniques, Gruber continued to emphasize that people needed to adapt to a rapidly changing world. However, while he advocated adapting to the speed of the “Scientific-Technological Revolution” prior to 1989, he now called for everyone to keep pace with the market-economy transformation. In his advice books, Gruber constantly referred to the challenge of being fast and efficient in order to thrive in the emerging competitive market environment. Gruber’s 1993 self-help book that he dedicated to all who “wrestle with the passing of time,” compared the postsocialist situation to a “race,” in which everyone was competing for economic and personal success. Those who want to stay ahead, Gruber argued, must acquire comprehensive productivity and time management techniques.Footnote 48 In his 1994 publication Šetřme časem! (Let’s save time!), Gruber addressed, among others, “older” people who saw themselves threatened in their professional position by better-trained young university graduates. “In a market society,” Gruber reminded his readers, “you don’t cuddle.”Footnote 49
Success was a central category in Gruber’s universe, and participants in his courses reported an optimistic atmosphere borne of the idea that there is untapped potential in every human being.Footnote 50 What success meant in practice remained relatively vague and, as Gruber suggested, was to be based on the course participants’ personal aspirations for the future.Footnote 51 Gruber encouraged participants to engage in an introspective form of work on the self that was intended to clarify personal goals. Even before 1989, his courses began with the participants reflecting on where they saw themselves “in ten years’ time.” They recorded their visions for the future in a kind of pie chart—the “semicircle of life wishes, needs, and dreams.”Footnote 52 Eva Vaňková, who attended one of Gruber’s training courses in 1986, at the age of around 18, and went on to become a lawyer, recalls that a central part of the course experience was “sorting out one’s priorities and getting clear about them.”Footnote 53 One participant in a course on work techniques for managers in November 1991 recalled that they were able to “look inside myself … and understand myself” during such exercises.Footnote 54
Despite Gruber’s emphasis on the personal wishes and goals of the course participants, he did propagate his own ideas of “success” from the 1990s onwards at the latest. In his view, success was primarily measured in economic terms. One of his self-help books promised in 1993 that anyone could become like the “contented, relaxed, and cheerful multimillionaires” who had been appearing in Czech media on an increasingly frequent basis since 1989. Gruber left little doubt that the contentment and well-being of these role models was closely linked to the fact that they were rich.Footnote 55 In his world, happiness in life, on the one hand, and career and economic success, on the other hand, were inextricably linked. Some of his students adopted this economic concept of happiness, styling themselves as “entrepreneurial selves.”Footnote 56 For example, Roman Slavičínský, who attended the courses in the early 1990s as a student aged around 20, wrote that Gruber taught “exactly what you need for a successful entrepreneurship/life.”Footnote 57 Life success and business success were so close to one another here that only a slash separated them.
Besides “success,” “acceleration” was a central topos in Gruber’s language. The practices Gruber taught were informed by the idea that individuals must speed up their work and daily activities to match what was seen as the accelerated pace of the “Scientific-Technological Revolution” (pre-1989) and postsocialist transformation (post-1989). Looking at the skills he taught, speed reading—where the very name of the activity references the drive to become faster—is particularly instructive on this point. Course participants adopted Gruber’s rhetoric of acceleration. For example, Zbyněk Luňáček, who took part in the courses as a young man in the 1980s and later became a physician, recalls that the aim was to “accelerate the speed” [sic] in reading, as well as to train comprehension and the ability to distill the content of a text more quickly.Footnote 58 High school student Dana Horáčková told a reporter from Mladý Svět in 1985 that she felt Gruber’s methods were “a way of rushing me on each line.”Footnote 59
Overall, the way Gruber adapted the narrative framing of his courses after 1989 reveals his ideological flexibility. In particular, he adapted to the new financial and individualistic meanings that “success” took on under capitalist conditions. At the same time, his case points to important continuities across 1989: both late socialism and capitalism defined increases in productivity as partly the task of the individual, and both systems relied on the idea that individuals had to adapt to an acceleration of “progress.”
“Twitching”—Becoming Productive by Working on the Body
The example of Gruber’s courses makes visible the embodied practices with which people in Czechoslovakia worked on their intellectual productivity both before and after 1989. Learning to read faster meant working with and on one’s own body. It was about optimizing the interaction between the eye and the brain and about creating automatisms. The wide gaze that raced across the lines of text was supposed to become a routine behavior below the threshold of consciousness—a practice guided by what historian Pascal Eitler and anthropologist Monique Scheer call “body knowledge.”Footnote 60 Reading quickly had more to do with riding a bicycle than with reciting a poem. Once learned, it was to become second nature—a skill that does not have to be performed intentionally. This is illustrated by the example of a speed-reading exercise that Gruber called cukaní (twitching). He would have the class work with an exercise book, the pages of which were printed with arbitrary sequences of numbers and letters. The participants were asked to cover these rows of characters with small cards, then make them briefly visible with a quick hand movement—a “twitch”—and immediately cover them up again. In this way, the eye was supposed to become accustomed to a higher speed of capturing characters and to a wider range of vision.Footnote 61
The twitching exercise can be viewed as a practice by which the course participants worked on their eyes and brains to tune them to the fast pace of acceleration that Gruber so often referenced. Practitioners were expected to set their own pace—driven by a desire to keep up with what they perceived to be an increasingly rapid pace in the growth of knowledge and information. Gruber, unsurprisingly, advised his students to “twitch as fast as possible.”Footnote 62 Course attendees described twitching as a physical and emotional experience and as something that, once learned, their bodies “did” on their own. Student Eva Nálevková, for example, wrote to the editors of Mladý Svět in 1987 that her eyes felt all “twitched up,” which she perceived as “wonderful.” Manager and writer Vladimír Olšák, who began practicing the technique as a student in the late 1980s using courses printed in Mladý Svět, emphasized that he soon began using it “quite automatically, without thinking about it.”Footnote 63
Training in speed reading was based in no small part on practices for measuring “success.” Underlying this was the idea that reading performance could be expressed in numbers. The class exercised using a stopwatch and counted words read per minute. Gruber and his students placed great value on reading speed determined in this manner. In the 1980s, Mladý Svět reported in detail about the records set by the best participants.Footnote 64 Vladimír Olšák, the aforementioned student of Gruber, recalled that: “When you start at 150 words per minute and then suddenly … you’re at 500, and the next day you’re at 1200, that’s such progress that you automatically realize that the thing is working… . You see how you improve, hour after hour, because you measure your result… . That’s a great thing when you can measure it… .”Footnote 65 Both before and after 1989, reports of reading records and the underlying quantitative concept of achievement were compatible with dominant ideologies of work performance. In the late socialist phase, they fit well with notions of “socialist competition” and with the ideal of the record-breaking “hero of labor” (even if the latter was celebrated somewhat less frequently in the 1980s compared to its heyday under Stalinism).Footnote 66 In the postsocialist period, “reading records” echoed the widely held notion that, in a competitive labor market, the most capable individuals should be selected through a quantitative assessment of performance. This also shows that Gruber did not have to fundamentally redesign his teachings after 1989. The focus on “reading records” suited both the (late) socialist and the post-socialist eras (each in their own way).
The testimonials by Gruber’s students can be read in large part as the documentation of a “work on the self” based around their teacher’s central concepts of acceleration, prioritization, concentration, and effectiveness. Jaroslav Jakeš, a Communist Party functionary at a paper mill in Větřní, for whose staff Gruber held a course in 1987, reported that he learned “not to be distracted by other thoughts” while reading and thus noticed an “improvement in concentration.” Jaroslav Bláha, head of the paper mill’s computing center, stated that the course enabled him to learn methods for picking out “the essentials” from texts.Footnote 67 The engineering draftsman Milan Vostřel made a similar statement to Mladý Svět in 1985, his words echoing Gruber’s notion of an “information explosion.” The training, he said, taught him an “effective” way of dealing with the “flood of texts and information around us.”Footnote 68 Roman Slavičínský reported that during his participation in Gruber’s courses in the 1990s he learned “to work more efficiently with one’s own time.”Footnote 69
A similar picture to that found in contemporary statements by course participants emerges in the retrospective interviews with former students of Gruber that were conducted for this article. Here, too, “work on the self” is closely reflected. The interviewees frame their biographies as a story of progress in their professional and personal lives that had much to do with internalizing Gruber’s teachings. In describing who they are, they often present a self that wants to become “better” and “perfect itself.”Footnote 70 In doing so, they construct their self by differentiating themselves from a group of “others” who, in their eyes, are unwilling to put in the effort that is required. The publicist Zdeněk Jakl, who took part in Gruber’s courses as a young man in the second half of the 1980s, said about himself and other participants: “That type of course attracts a certain type of person who wants to do something with themselves, who wants to improve themselves in some way. These are not people who go there to rest or for entertainment.”Footnote 71 Similarly, manager Zdeněk Mikulanda, who has attended the courses since the mid-1990s, characterized himself and other students as belonging to the group of people “who want to improve themselves and do it in a nice, clean way.”Footnote 72
Good Mood: Emotions and Self-Improvement
An important feature of both contemporary and retrospective accounts by Gruber’s students concerns the topic of emotion. In their recollections, the course participants often refer to sensory and physical experiences and describe the learning process of the course as being shaped not least by how one felt while practicing. The extensive references to emotions in the sources suggest that feelings and the rules for their expression played an important role in the acquisition of productivity practices in the courses. The passages that describe emotions in the testimonies can be read as indications of the “emotional style” of Gruber’s courses. Based on this concept, historian Benno Gammerl captures how certain socio-spatial settings (church services, sporting events, and waiting rooms) produce specific emotional experiences and norms when it comes to dealing with feelings. “Emotional style” thus also refers to the particular set of emotions that is considered appropriate for a particular context by the people involved.Footnote 73
References to enthusiasm, motivation, and inspiration are recurrent in the accounts, indicating that these were defining elements of the courses’ characteristic emotional repertoire. A journalist who reported on the courses in the early 1990s described the participants as “brimming with curiosity.” His report depicted an animated atmosphere that Gruber created during his lectures, with students excitedly interrupting their teacher because they wanted to understand certain aspects of what was being said in more detail.Footnote 74 Inspired by the “good mood” in the class, one participant left the course with a “new enthusiasm” for her work.Footnote 75 The atmosphere was “informal,” a journalist reported in 1998, and there was a playful approach to trying out new things.Footnote 76 One course participant in 2000 felt Gruber “drew her into the conversation” in a stimulating way, in part because his topics were “taken directly from life.”Footnote 77
Some passages refer to outright euphoria rather than to comparatively more sober states of mind, such as interest and curiosity. Such intense positive feelings are articulated first and foremost when participants are discussing their progress. The experience of “tripling” one’s reading speed is described as an exhilarating high. The journalist Petr Trojan, who attended the courses in the second half of the 1980s, described speed reading in 1987 as a “drug” on which one “becomes hooked.”Footnote 78 A 1998 report mentioned Gruber’s “devotion” to his teachings and suggested that this feeling was passed on to the students.Footnote 79
The course participants used emotional language most often when referring to the instructor and their relationship with him. Gruber is described as both charismatic and down-to-earth. Journalist Zdeněk Jakl said about the courses he attended as a young man in the 1980s: “Half of the course [effect] was based on his personality… . It was a powerful experience.”Footnote 80 Gruber’s manner is described as “amicable”—one goes with him to a bar “for a beer” and addresses him by his first name.Footnote 81 Lawyer Eva Vaňková recalled a 1996 course as “three days of intense concentration with David.”Footnote 82 In his recollections, Martin Vanžura, a sales representative who had been working with Gruber’s self-help books since the mid-1990s and attending his courses since the early 2000s, describes his personal attraction to the course leader as particularly intense. He mentions having an “ideal relationship” with him. “When I think of DG [David Gruber] or read his blog or his books, I am flooded with feelings of understanding and well-being.” Just hearing Gruber’s voice, Vanžura writes, could trigger such feelings in him.Footnote 83
Overall, it is evident that Gruber’s courses taught very different things. First, participants learned to see the period in which they were living as an era of acceleration and (especially after 1989) competition. Second, they learned to understand productivity in particular ways and see performance as quantifiable. Third, they were prompted to work on their own bodies and align their emotions with certain emotional characteristics of the courses—a repertoire of feelings ranging from motivation to devotional admiration for the course instructor.
In their monograph “1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe,” James Mark and his co-authors argue that it is time to stop downplaying “Eastern Europeans’ agency in the history of their own transformation.”Footnote 84 Indeed, a long-standing focus, particularly in the social sciences, on how western actors and institutions influenced the postsocialist transformation has meant that not enough consideration has been given to local actors and their activities in this regard. The present article is a contribution to the search for the arenas in which people in eastern Europe worked on their own transformation before and after 1989. The example of the Czech productivity coach David Gruber and his courses suggest that, in this search, we should not look solely at economic and political experts and their knowledge, which has been the primary focus of previous research. Rather, it is worth looking at everyday microsettings in which “normal” people worked on themselves in order to become competent and competitive members of their societies both before and after the downfall of communism.
Gruber’s productivity courses can be understood as just such a microsetting. It was here that the virtues of efficient and concentrated “intellectual work” were practiced in ways that came to be seen as essential for adapting to the new world of business and labor after 1989. Gruber may be exceptional in that he was an unusually early practitioner of a form of psychologically inspired self-improvement coaching that only became a widespread phenomenon in the 1990s. But his case certainly points to broader patterns that are relevant to understanding the “long transformation” in Czechoslovakia. Gruber’s courses draw attention to social groups that would play a key role in building the postsocialist order. The (partially overlapping) target groups of his courses were ambitious pupils and students, on the one hand, and members of the heterogeneous group of “intellectual workers,” on the other. By examining Gruber’s career since the 1970s, this article has shed light on broader societal and intellectual trends, outlining particular understandings and practices of productivity that were forming well before 1989 and became influential among aspiring professional elites in the postsocialist period. Of particular importance in this respect was a discourse on success in educational and professional life that was disseminated through a growing body of advice literature emerging in the late socialist decades. This literature combined psychological and pedagogical knowledge (of both western and state-socialist origin) into a program of everyday self-improvement.
Further research will be needed to establish whether the continuities between late socialism and postsocialism discussed here can be observed on a broader societal level, as well as in other central and east European countries. Studies venturing in this direction indicate similar patterns beyond the case of Czechoslovakia, which can be explained in part by the transnational networking of the actors involved.Footnote 85 In summary, the case of Gruber and his courses suggests that much of what came to be understood as “productivity” in the postsocialist period emerged long before 1989 in the state socialist context. The productivity culture of the postsocialist business world did not have to be built from scratch after 1989, nor did it have to be imported in its entirety from the west.
Jan Arend is Visiting Professor for the History of Eastern and Southeastern Europe at LMU Munich. His research areas include recent Russian, Czech, and Jewish history. Thematically, his interests encompass the history of science, health, and postsocialist transformation. Arend’s habilitation thesis (completed in February 2023) deals with the history of mental stress in the context of the shift from late socialism to postsocialism in Czechoslovakia/Czechia.
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