Month: September 2023

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I am delighted, as well as greatly honored, to learn that my book Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History has won the 2023 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship. The jury citation is as follows:

Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History (Princeton University Press), by Derek Sayer, is a kaleidoscopic romp across five decades of intellectual, artistic, cultural, and political foment and creativity in Prague, from the Nazi Anschluss to the collapse of communism. Brilliant and addictively readable, Postcards from Absurdistan highlights the influences and contributions of Czech Jews on cultural and sociopolitical Prague. Franz Kafka, one of the best-known Jewish denizens of Prague, sets the tone through the often surreal world he depicts. The book offers a magnificent and expansive collection of close readings, insightful narratives, obscure gems, and sometimes-funny, sometimes-wrenching reflections on Prague’s cultural elites, even as the geographic boundaries of the city itself cannot contain them. The Jewishness of these currents is steadily woven and subtly explored throughout the book. Postcards from Absurdistan represents the crowning achievement of Professor Sayer’s prodigious scholarship on Czech modernity.

A press release containing more information about the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, detailing the composition of the jury and this year’s winners in other categories (which include the distinguished architect Moshe Safdie’s autobiography If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture), can be found here.

Aleš Veselý, Gate of the Hereafter (Brána nenávratna, literally Gate of No Return). Holocaust memorial outside Bubny Station, Prague, installed 2015. Photo Derek Sayer.

It was from Bubny station that 50,000 Czech Jews were transported to concentration camps during the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. The memorial was intended “to remember not only the victims of deportation, but to also focus on the stigma of those who organized the Final Solution and to remember the role of the passive silent majority that did nothing to stop them” as well as to “call attention to the face of prejudice, xenophobia, racial emnity, and discrimination on the basis of ‘otherness’ in the world today” (Memorial of Silence website, as quoted in Postcards from Absurdistan, p. 193).

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I was recently invited to contribute to a collection of “hundreds” (100-word texts) for Anthropology and Humanism in honor of the UT Austin anthropologist Kathleen Stewart. Here—in its entirety—is my text. It is Open Access. Link here.

Hundreds and hundreds

Columbine, West Nickel Mines School, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois U, Collier Township women’s aerobics class, U Alabama Huntsville, Chardon HS, Oikos U, Oak Creek Sikh temple, Sandy Hook ES, Isla Vista sorority house, Marysville Pilchuck HS, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Umpqua Community College, Pulse nightclub Orlando, Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church, Stoneman Douglas HS, Santa Fe HS, Tree of Life synagogue, Borderline Bar Thousand Oaks, UNC Charlotte, Walmart El Paso, Texas A & M Greensville, Atlanta spas, Oxford HS, Top supermarket Buffalo, Robb ES Uvalde, U Virginia Charlottesville, Arts HS St Louis, Club Q Colorado Springs, Michigan State U …

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Over the last 25 years I have accumulated a large library of books relating to modern Czech cultural and political history and the city of Prague. These include works of literature (novels, plays, poems); anthologies of primary documents in art, architecture, film, etc.; biographies, memoirs and correspondence; art exhibition catalogues of various dates, covering many of the most significant 20th– and 21st–century exhibitions in Prague; works of reference; guidebooks and street directories; bound volumes of popular magazines; albums of historic photographs; and secondary works on history, politics, art, architecture, music, theater, film, and the city itself.

The photographs accompanying this post give an indication of the range of the collection, though not every individual item is included. There are around 1050 items in all. I have grouped them in galleries, each of which contains six photos. Click on the individual images to enlarge.

This archive formed the basis for the second and third volumes of my “Prague Trilogy“—Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (2013) and Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History (2022). Now that I have finished the trilogy that began with The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998) and need to downsize, I would like to donate (rather than sell) this collection in its entirety to a suitable institutional library where it can help other researchers.

If you can be of help or have an interest in acquiring this collection please contact me directly at dsayer@ualberta.ca