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October 14th, 2008

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If you're bald, forget about going to the public library

New campaign sheds light on a dark chapter of Bohemian history

By Adam Daniel Mezei
For The Prague Post
January 31st, 2007 issue

RENÉ JAKL/THE PRAGUE POST

This poster forbids people with freckles from using buses and trams.

It's been a busy day at the office, and you're rushing to squeeze in some shopping before returning home. Prague City Hall has recently passed a new law limiting shopping for all blond-haired persons to the hours of 3?6 p.m. You were born blond, and it's almost 6.

As you reach the entrance to the shop, two burly toughs in leather trench coats block your way. You don't risk pushing your way in, catching sight of the truncheons they wield in their hands.

A bizarre scenario? Yes, in this day and age. But, during the six years of brutal Nazi occupation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, such arbitrary and discriminatory laws were the norm.

This seeming insanity is the focus of a new media campaign run by Prague's Jewish Museum in collaboration with the Prague Municipal Authority and the local office of the McCann Erickson advertising agency. According to Vladimír Hanzel, director of the museum's Education and Culture Center, the campaign is designed to heighten awareness of one of the lesser-known aspects of the occupation through that most delightful of Bohemian devices, humor.

"We Czechs are accustomed to this sort of thing, from Čapek to Kafka to Havel — delivering key information through irony," says Hanzel. "And our campaign employs just such a technique."

Through the middle of next month, some 80 placards will be on display in City Lights advertising frames throughout the city, with a revolving series of eight commands (in Czech) such as:

"Blonds are forbidden from entering the cinema!"

"Bald people are forbidden from visiting public libraries!"

"Left-handed people are forbidden from operating motor vehicles, and must return their driver's licenses within 14 days!"

The idea, says Hanzel, is to get people chatting about the country's past in a way that isn't bookish or forced.

"For a given person to understand the message of this campaign, it's a three-step process," he explains. "First, a typical person will read the sentence, then wonder what it's all about. Next, a subsequent line asks them if they think it's odd, then tells them that such were the sorts of bans in force during the Protectorate period. And in the smallest font we could make available, the final line of the posters tells them that they're welcome to contact the Jewish Museum, where they can discover more about these wartime policies and other matters affecting the Jewish community in particular."

Not an option
The poster campaign was the brainchild of Jan Binar, an ad executive at McCann Erickson who originally proposed it to museum officials last summer. He had a specific goal in mind. "The long-term vision is to make youngsters consider going to a museum as a viable alternative to watching TV or playing Xbox or PlayStation," he says.

As for the shock value, Binar offers no apologies.

"Making a boring ad is not an option," he says. "History stands very low on the everyday agenda of our target group. We need to grab people's attention, surprise and stand out."

Hanzel has another target audience in mind.

"You wouldn't typically think it necessary, but our team seeks to appeal to local police officers — young men and women who might not know enough about our past and who are generally responsible for enforcing the country's anti-racism and anti-discrimination laws," he says. "Given the rise of neo-Nazi gatherings and demonstrations in the Czech Republic since the turn of the millennium, many might agree with us that police officers should be doing a much better job of enforcing our anti-hate laws."

According to Hanzel, the basic technique employed in the posters has proven effective in other settings. He cites a recent British school program in which classes of 6- to 10-year-olds were arbitrarily divided according to eye color, with, for example, blue-eyed students forbidden from performing certain activities like drinking from the public fountain, or raising their hands to ask questions in class. The approach, he says, seemed to get the message across quite effectively.

The poster campaign may go further than Prague. Plans are currently in the works to roll it out in other Czech cities with City Lights advertising, including Brno, Plzeň and Ostrava. There have even been inquiries from Slovakia, with an exploratory committee from Bratislava visiting Prague recently to see the campaign up close.

For now, the focus of the campaign remains the Czech Republic.

"These posters call to attention one of our country's darkest periods," Hanzel says. "We hope to remind people that Jews were once a flourishing part of Prague's day-to-day affairs, and constituted one of our city's more colorful communities. If anything, we hope to get more people talking about just what happened here."

And what of the naysayers? "If people think our approach is totally absurd, then it's important to remind them that the events we're commemorating took place just a short 70 years ago," Hanzel says. "Seventy years ago! Most young Czechs have grandparents older than that."

Adam Daniel Mezei can be reached at tempo@praguepost.com

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