When the Communists took over power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, they confidently proclaimed they would make prostitution redundant. The lecture presents the key findings of the forthcoming book Sexarbeit im Arbeiterstaat (Sex Work in the Workers’ State), published by De Gruyter/Brill. Christiane Brenner reveals how socialist Czechoslovakia dealt with the issue of commercial sex between 1948 and 1989, examining the ways in which prostitution was silenced and scandalized, and tracing where it could be seen, and where it was made nearly invisible. Brenner argues that the Czechoslovak prostitution policy not only marginalised and stigmatised people in prostitution but also stabilised social, gender and ethnic hierarchies. This raises the question what was actually socialist about socialist prostitution policy, and whether this policy was really as unsuccessful as the persistent presence of prostitution might imply.

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Dr. Christiane Brenner is a member of the scientific staff at Collegium Carolinum (Munich) and editor of its journal Bohemia. Her studies focus on the contemporary history of Czechoslovakia. From 2019 to 2023, she worked at the Collaborative Research Centre 1369 Cultures of Vigilance at LMU Munich with a project on sex work in socialist Czechoslovakia. This project generated the collective volume The Watchful Society: Gender, Sexuality, and the Body in Eastern European Socialism (Göttingen 2026), edited together with Martin Schulze Wessel, as well as the monograph Sexarbeit im Sozialismus: Sozialistische Ordnung, Geschlechterverhältnisse und ‘Prostitution’ in der Tschechoslowakei [Sex Work in Socialism: Socialist Order, Gender Relations, and ‘Prostitution’ in Czechoslovakia] (Berlin 2026), the first comprehensive study to be published on this topic.