Postcards from Absurdistan
Prague at the End of History
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- 37,99 €
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- 37,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy—with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship
Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia’s artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country’s socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist party rule. Derek Sayer shows that Prague’s twentieth century, far from being a story of inexorable progress toward some “end of history,” whether fascist, communist, or democratic, was a tragicomedy of recurring nightmares played out in a land Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan. Situated in the eye of the storms that shaped the modern world, Prague holds up an unsettling mirror to the absurdities and dangers of our own times.
In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers—poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion. This is the territory of the ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee—not to mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way and Václav Havel’s greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Over and over, Prague exposes modernity’s dreamworlds of progress as confections of kitsch.
In a time when democracy is once again under global assault, Postcards from Absurdistan is an unforgettable portrait of a city that illuminates the predicaments of the modern world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sayer (Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century), a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Alberta, concludes his trilogy of cultural histories about 20th-century Prague with this intriguing if overstuffed survey of the period between the Nazi takeover in 1938 and the fall of communism in 1989. Covering literature, the graphic arts, music, philosophy, architecture, and photography, Sayer profiles a staggering cast of artists and intellectuals, including architect Antonín Raymond, who spent much of his professional life in Japan, and Austrian Czech journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, who fiercely opposed Adolf Hitler and fled to Mexico after the Nazi invasion. One of the book's longest and most immersive sections is on Milena Jasenská, who translated Franz Kafka's stories into Czech and had an intense but "short-lived, mostly epistolary" love affair with him before establishing herself as journalist, joining the Czech resistance during WWII, and dying in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. The book is littered with memorable vignettes, including Kisch learning in Mexico City that his brothers back in Prague have been killed, but Sayer inundates readers with names, dates, and obscure events, and he has a tendency to digress into trivial matters. This is best suited to those with a deep background in the subject. Photos.
