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 and political 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 dictatorship. 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.
Author(s): Derek Sayer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 751
City: Princeton
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Prelude: 17 November
Act 1. Recto 1918–1945
1. Kafkárna
Love Letters
Ratcatcher’s Beauties
Language Games
German Prague!
A Little Bit of Sulfur, a Little Bit of Hell
2. A Modern Woman
Am I, above All, a Czech?
Enriching the Old, Domestic Repertoire
Moscow—The Border
The Refuse of the Past
Hundreds of Thousands Seeking No-Man’s-Land
Youthful Calves in White Kneesocks
3. Love and Theft
Poldi Kladno
From Taliesin to Tokyo
The Sorrows of Poor Fricek
An Ashram in Pondicherry
Dugway Proving Ground, Utah
The Atomic Bomb Dome
4. But Miss, We Can’t Help It
The Last Train Out
15 March 1939
Smetanesque
The Age of the Concentration Camp
5. The Void at the Core of Things
Mendelssohn Is on the Roof
Hitler’s Hangman
But Lidice Is in Europe
Monumental Details
6. Avant-garde and Kitsch
The He and the She of It
A Used Bookstore of Dead Styles
Manon the Sinner
The Strongholds of Sleep
The World in which We Live
Act 2. Verso 1938–1989
7. As Time Goes By
A Citizen of the World
The Usual Suspects
Transit
The Strip Street
Here’s Looking at You, Kid!
A Première in Terezín
8. The Cleansing of the Homeland
Why Should We Not Rejoice?
This Sweet Apocalypse
Forward, Backward Not a Step!
Victorious February
Sentence First, Verdict Afterwards
9. The Lyrical Age
A Dream of Meissen Breasts
Torn Dolls
Danse Macabre in Smíchov
Country Music
The Tender Barbarians
A Pearl at the Bottom of a Chasm
10. Midcentury Modern
National Artists
An Age-Old Checkerboard of Modernity
Art of Another Kind
The Brussels Style
The Magician’s Lantern
If a Thousand Clarinets
11. The Prague Spring
The King of May
We Want Light, We Want More Light!
It Starts with the Arts
The Odium of Treason
The First Torch
12. Normalization and Its Discontents
Our Věra
Liquidation of a Person
Splinters of Dreams
Home and Away
Notes from Underground
Largo Desolato
Coda: Living in Truth
Notes
Sources
Index
A Note on the Type
