The Czech Republic is in this year, the guest country at the Leipzig book fair. 60 Czech authors present from 21. March there their latest novels. We introduce you to four of them.
The Prague castle seems to be firmly in Chinese hands. Tourists from the far East, wherever you look. Here is a group picture in front of the old walls, there is a Selfie with uniformed guards in the Background. Prague, the year’s beautiful a Thousand, a place of desire for tourists from all over the world: Winding streets, countless domes and towers. And the Vltava river, spanned by magnificent bridges. The sadness from the time of socialism is a thing of the past, glossed over the grey of the facades. Tereza Semotamová live here and observed the lively Goings-on in the Czech capital with amused distance: “The city is a halved plum in sugar syrup, the flesh of the fruit is good blood supply and abundant with nutrients. A sweet fruit, to bite”, her novel “In the closet”. “I feel more like a bitter fruit, to Throw away. But I can throw it away yourself. Case fruit.”
Their living Tereza Semotamová earned as a Translator. “In the closet” is your first novel. A story about a young woman who has tried, often in vain, to adapt, hurt, and disappointed, and finally, a radical decision summarizes: pulls you into a closet! In a disused furniture, situated in a backyard. You could stay at the sister, with a friend, but you don’t like, want to deal with others but only with themselves. And so the interim district Cabinet provides a bit of freedom in the temporary. This, in turn, is a result of a lost, perhaps only in the income – and consumption-oriented Western world. A wickedly honest story, told with a casual matter of course.
Of liberties and Freedom
A constant in the life of the young protagonist, is a friendly Vietnamese. You may use the toilet in his Shop, gets a Smile and something to eat. A trivial Detail, you might say. In fact, however, it is more a commitment to Multiculturalism – in a country whose politicians discredit the large Vietnamese minority in the Czech Republic like in a lump sum. Politicians who pushed for 2015, as hundreds of thousands of refugees to Europe, not 200 let into the country.
Tourists in Prague
The issue of refugees, says Tereza Semotamová (geb. 1983) for their Generation is very painful. “When you hear that the Czech Republic had refused… So, I haven’t refused. The government refuses to. I, myself, have helped refugees, I went to Hungary and I’ve looked at everything thoroughly, and my own opinion formed.”
Of course, says Tereza Semotamová, appreciate the people in the Czech Republic, the material side of the freedom to travel the way. Nevertheless, the Thinking for a change many only slowly. Still there are people who have walls in the head and insecure dealing with the freedom. If your concerned about this? By no means. “I think people see the things even if they might choose a bad politician. Then running out of time and the notice: Okay, maybe not so great. And this is also a development. Sometimes you have to try things until you see: Okay, this Apple was rotten. Should I not buy.”
A divided country
The castle hill, is Prague’s landmark and the residence of the state President. The President is Milos Zeman and splits the country. His course is pro-Chinese, and he is convinced that the war in Ukraine is a real civil war. The flow of refugees 2015, he has referred to as an “organized Invasion”.
Milos Zeman was elected directly, Jachym shocked Topol. He has always fought for a truly free, the Czech Republic, before 1989 and thereafter – as a writer, a Journalist and since 2011 as the program Director of the Václav Havel library. The current political Situation in the country before him, “as if the story would be a large pendulum. In the case of Havel, it was on a very extreme side. Now we are at the very bottom. But I hope that we come back to the other side.”
A romantic view: the Vltava river in Prague
Havel’s Legacy
Václav Havel was the last President of Czechoslovakia and first of Czech Republic to the solution of the Slovak Republic in 1993. Havel, the former dissident, a celebrated Poet, a moral instance. He has brought Jachym Topol shortly before his death in December 2011, in which it is named after the library. Topol has remained, curated in the sense of Havel’s open to the world and critical culture program and continues to write the wild, and unusual novels. The latest, “A sensitive man”, starts as a weird road movie, a family of artists – from Western Europe to the Ukraine, a nests, but soon as a Grotesque in the Czech province. There, the sound rough and the poverty is not biting, it is beautiful, but between the Street brothels, scrap yards and pubs, after all, funny. Jachym Topol was scolded for this novel by the former President Václav Klaus to the public, so you should not write about his country, and of “arrogance” and “People far away” was the speech. Shortly thereafter, Topol price received for the novel of the Czech state. The reaction of the liberals in the country?
Current literature from the Czech Republic – by Jáchym Topol, Tereza Semotamová and Jaroslav Rudiš
Prague is booming, and one of the ten richest regions in Europe. That here is the time for a socialism with a human face was fought – hard to imagine. Rather, the writer Franz Kafka is walking through the streets of the city. At the beginning of the 20th century. Century, when Prague is a centre for artists and writers of the Czech and the German language was rates. At that time, when the city still belonged to the Habsburg Empire and the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia.
Layered Story
“It’s everything, everything is so beautiful so beautiful, so picturesque and beautiful!”, the author Jaroslav Rudis says, and rolls his eyes. “But underneath, in these layers, Yes, since some of the graves are, some of the bodies, which lie on top of each other. And also with these bodies, with these ghosts, we live here.”
Jaroslav Rudis has studied history. If you studied as a Czech history, must be a German, he says. Otherwise he would not be able to do research for his wonderful novel “the winter of Berg’s last journey”, a rousing, Cry funny Declaration of love to the rail, and Central Europe written in German. Together with his melancholic nurses Kraus of the 99-year-old of Winterberg, in the past, traveling with a detail-obsessed guide to the year 1913 as a logbook, and always deeper in the story. And he teaches that Kraus sound in the ears is the only way, meanders through the course of time and brings the past to light that there is in all melancholy a glorious pleasure. And in the end he is reconciled even with itself.
Crime and punishment
Good three railway hours from Prague, in Brno, there has been a reconciliation with the past. On the way Tucková brought by Kateřina with her book, “Gerta. The German girl.” In the 19th century. Century was called the Brno still in Brno, and was regarded as the “Moravian Manchester”. 120,000 inhabitants, the city had in 1910, 80.000 gave German as their mother language, the Rest were Czechs. They lived peacefully – until the Nazis marched in. Around 11,000 Brno’s Jews fell victim to them, countless members of the opposition were tortured and executed.
March 1939: the invasion of the Wehrmacht in Brünn (today Brno)
The writer Kateřina Tucková was born in 1980 in the city and knew as a student, nothing about the German past of Brno. On the way to your first own apartment, they came by regularly to a sign on an old facade: “Moravian glass and mirror industry”. What that meant? Kateřina Tucková began to research and stumbled upon a taboo: in 1945 almost all Germans were deported – nearly three million people forcibly from Czechoslovakia, in retaliation for the crimes of the national socialists. In Brno was particularly brutal. In the case of a death March towards the Austrian border, came a variety of sources suggest that between 2000 and more than 5000 people have been killed: the elderly, women, the Sick and the children.
Some of the Survivors Kateřina Tucková could speak. You have to thank for it that you could see the Czech history suddenly from a completely different perspective. “And so, I’ve also found that there were during our school time, and I am talking about the schooling of all children in the Czech Republic, a blind spot that was not discussed, was taboo.” Therefore, they had to write about it. Out a facts came rich, moving novel that has been in the Czech Republic quickly to the media event. Since 1995 is remembered in Brno to the victims of the death March, 2015 public apologies followed. Now Gerta”. The German girl” finally in English. An uncomfortable reading. And worth a read – as so many discoveries from the Czech Republic.
An in-depth Interview with Kateřina Tucková read here: Kateřina Tučková: “I don’t believe in collective guilt”