Month: December 2022

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Adolf Hoffmeister on terrace of Les deux magots café, Paris, 1969. Photo by Václav Chochola, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I have recently published a short essay on the eventful life of the “Czech writer, publicist, dramatist, painter, illustrator, scenographer, caricaturist, translator, diplomat, lawyer, professor, and traveler” (as he is described in the Czech Wikipedia; French Wikipedia adds “and radio commentator”) Adolf Hoffmeister (1902–1973), known to his friends as Ada.

A central character in my book Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, Hoffmeister wrote the libretto for Hans Krása’s children’s opera Brundibár, which was staged 55 times in the notorious Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto during 1943-4 before the composer, the set designer František Zelenka, and most of the children in the cast were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.

I end the essay:

Hoffmeister died of a heart attack on July 24, 1973. His life was extraordinary, and yet it was thoroughly representative of Czechoslovakia’s twentieth century. Like countless other men and women—writers and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—his story shows why Czech dissidents sardonically baptized their country Absurdistan. Biographies like Ada’s are why Prague provides a more revealing vantage point on the modern condition than the western capitals from which we are accustomed to look out, naively equating history with progress. Things look different when viewed from Central Europe. Prague’s modernity undermines easy distinctions between east and west, good and evil, right and wrong. Here, all choices come with costs, and the lines dividing collaboration and resistance, consent and dissent, dissolve into a blur of moral uncertainties. This is a landscape painted in infinite shades of gray. When authoritarianism is in the ascendant and democracy under global assault, we cannot afford to dismiss twentieth-century Czechoslovakia as a faraway country. Prague’s modern history should sound a warning to us all.

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I have recently published an article in Britské listy in a series in which historians reflect on the pros and cons of researching on the history of a country that is not their own. Its organizer Muriel Blaive described the aim of the series as follows:

In May 2021, Jill Massino and I organized a roundtable at the annual congress of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in New York. It was entitled The Benefits and Burdens of the “Invisible Suitcase”: Writing Contemporary History as an Outsider.

Some of the greatest historians of the contemporary period are “outsiders” to their country of study, for instance Robert Paxton and Christopher Browning in the case of France and Germany during the Second World War. Outsider perspectives enhance, complement, and complicate existing narratives, and, as such, help to produce a more nuanced and complex portrait of the past. Yet our collective experience is that Western historians of communism in Central Europe struggle to establish their legitimacy among societies that remain attached to an ethnonationalist definition of identity. Also, many people believe that only contemporary witnesses are entitled to speak about contemporary history. This roundtable offered the cumulated experience of four scholars: Marci Shore, Jill Massino, Jan Čulík, and Muriel Blaive. We reflected on the way in which our status has affected our research, our writing, and our reception. As a result, our roundtable also offered insight into the societies we are studying and into the stakes involved in the production of history.

Britské listy has kindly offered us to publish our texts, as well as a few others on the part of colleagues who attended the panel and participated in a very lively discussion. 

My contribution began with reflections on a conversation in a Prague pub with a Czech colleague thirty years ago on a 1949 set of Czechoslovak postage stamps that he found absolutely unremarkable and I found utterly surreal. I titled the article “The Density of Unexpected Encounters.”

English text here.

Czech text here.

Earlier contributions were Marci Shore’s “Ostranenie, or the Epistemological Advantages—and Disadvantages—of Marginality,” and Anna Müller and Jadwiga Biskupska’s “Objectivity and the Polish Question: Two Answers.”

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Christian Michelides, Stolperstein für Milena Jesenska, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The Guardian did not think the following letter, responding to a column by the self-proclaimed feminist Zoe Williams, worth publishing. The “terrible gift” to which Williams refers was a book that she identifies as Kafka’s Milena: Life of Milena Jesenská. No such book exists: she might be referring to Jesenská’s daughter Jana Černá’s Kafka’s Milena (which has no subtitle) or Mary Hockaday’s biography Kafka, Love and Courage: The Life of Milena Jesenská. It probably doesn’t matter, since Williams considered her father’s gift an insult and didn’t bother to read the book.

19 December 2022

Dear Editor,

I take issue with Zoe Williams’s article “I unwrapped Dad’s terrible gift …” (December 19).  Humour is humour, but Milena Jesenská deserves better than to be ridiculed as “KAFKA’S FUCKING MUSE” (sic). Jesenská was a pioneering advocate of women’s emancipation, who as an independent journalist and translator practiced what she preached.

For the record: “Metamorphosis” was published in 1915, five years before Franz and Milena first corresponded in connection with her translating his work into Czech.  Their love affair was almost entirely epistolary, lasted less than a year, and was likely not consummated.  Jesenská was then in her early twenties.  She had a life before, after, and beyond Kafka. 

She went on to became one of Czechoslovakia’s most distinguished journalists, whose reportage on events in Central Europe in the 1930s (the rise of Nazism, the Vienna Anschluss, persecution of Jews, the Munich Agreement, the invasion of Czechoslovakia) is of lasting value to historians.  Her writings on refugees are especially moving and have lost none of their pertinence today.  

Milena was arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities in November 1939 and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in May 1944.  In 1995 the World Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem listed her as Righteous among the Nations—that is, “non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.”

Perhaps Williams should open that “terrible gift.”  Better yet, she could dip into Kathleen Hayes’s excellent selections in The Journalism of Milena Jesenská: A Critical Voice in Interwar Central Europe.  Zoe’s Dad was doing her a favour. What better role model could a young, female Guardian journalist ask for?

Sincerely,

Derek Sayer

Professor Emeritus

University of Alberta

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Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Record of the Year

Ryuichi Sakamoto   Playing the piano 12122020

Having received the news that his cancer was stage 4 in June 2020, Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote:  

“I have just turned 70, but how many more times will I be able to see the full moon?  But even thinking that, since I have been granted life, I am praying that I will be able to make music until my last moments, just like my beloved Bach and Debussy.”

He is doing just that.  My Record of the Year was recorded piecemeal, song by song—by that time Sakamoto was too weak to perform continuously for an hour to an hour-and-a-half—and streamed from a vast empty studio in Tokyo, simulating a concert, on 12 December 2020.

Tied for 2nd Place

Binker and Moses   Feeding the Machine

Sun Ra Arkestra   Living Sky

Binker Golding and Moses Boyd’s album creates an astonishing soundscape, taking us well beyond the horizons of what jazz used to be. One reviewer characterizes it as “a kind of exquisite madness. The music feels as if it could tear itself apart even while mournful at its core.”  

The Sun Ra Arkestra, led by Marshall Allen on alto sax, is the most joyous sound I’ve heard this year.  Allen is 98 and has played with the Arkestra for over sixty years.  

Rest of Top 10 (in alphabetical order)

Beach House   Once Twice Melody

S. G. Goodman   Teeth Marks

Hurray for the Riff Raff   Life on Earth

Jockstrap   I Love You Jennifer B

Angel Olsen   Big Time

Plains   I Walked with You a Ways

Sharon Van Etten   We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong

Beach House got listened to a lot this year, the sound of spaced-out, endless summer: just the thing for these Endtimes. 

Goodman chronicles the slow decay of the American heartland in a suite of sharp and melodic songs.  “It’s about the way we leave marks on each other, and empathy or the lack thereof,” she says.  Plains’ album, a collaboration between Katie Crutchfield (of Waxahatchee) and Jess Williamson, has a similar quirky country vibe, with exquisite vocal harmonies (that make songs like “Abilene” all the more chilling). 

Hurray for the Riff Raff is Alynda Segarra, who hails from the Bronx but is now based in New Orleans.  She’s been around a while but her previous albums are more folk/Americana. I like this reboot better. Among the “nature punk” songs on Life on Earth is “Precious Cargo,” which “shares the story of a man swimming across a river with his children, of a border crossed, a family torn apart; of shivering on a cold jail floor with a foil blanket and calling out to Allah.”  

I discovered the young British duo Jockstrap (Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye) only this month from Metacritic’s Records of the Year.  What a fabulously original and creative album! Even if it is sometimes a tad pretentious.

Olsen and Van Etten are both singers whose previous albums had some great individual songs (like Van Etten’s “Seventeen“) but didn’t grab me as a whole.  Not so this year.  These are masterpieces of skilled songwriting and vocal expression.  

Alternate rest of Top 10 (in alphabetical order)

The Bad Plus   The Bad Plus

Keith Jarrett   Bordeaux Concert

Makaya McCraven   In These Times

Caitlin Rose   Cazimi

Marta Sánchez   SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum)

Stormzy   This Is What I Mean

Sudan Archives Natural Brown Prom Queen

The Bad Plus, whom we saw a few years back at the Village Vanguard when they were a piano trio, have replaced the piano with an electric guitar and a tenor sax. It works. The Jarrett concert may turn out to be his last recording, since he’s suffered a massive stroke since that left him unable to play. If so, it’s a fine way to sign off.

Following up on Where We Come From and Universal Beings (both in my previous Albums of the Year lists), Makaya McCraven takes the looping wizardry Teo Macero started with Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew to unheard-of heights. New York-based Spanish pianist and composer Marta Sánchez (whom I hadn’t heard before) shows that the future of jazz is in good hands.

It’s great to see Caitlin Rose back after all these years (nine) with some characteristically catchy, bitter-sweet songs that get under your skin and stay there. As with her previous album The Stand-In, I love the retro-pop arrangements. And that inimitable voice, clear as a bell.

I listened to Stormzy’s record only when I read it was challenging Cliff Richard (aged 82 and saccharine as ever) for #1 in the UK album charts, which I saw as a metaphor for the culture wars dividing the country. It surprised me by its poetry and its quiet lyricism. The second album by vocalist and violinist Sudan Archives (Brittney Parks) is a joyful, sexy, exuberant blast. Both give reason to hope in the darkness.

Songs of the Year

the #1

Caroline Shaw/Attacca Quartet    Other Song 

and some other great songs of 2022 (in no particular order)

Rihanna Lift Me Up

Sudan Archives Selfish Soul

Plains   Abilene

S. G. Goodman   Work Until I Die

Hurray for the Riff Raff   Rhododendron

Margo Price   Lydia

Caitlin Rose   Only Lies

Jockstrap   Glasgow

Allison Russell + Brandi Carlile + Sista Strings   You’re Not Alone

Sharon Van Etten   Darkness Fades

Angel Olsen   Chasing the Sun

(Yes, I do like female vocals.)