“To articulate the past historically … means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger … In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Theses on the Philosophy of History—Walter Benjamin’s last text

Hope Obscured. Photo taken at Tate Modern, London, December 2019. Copyright Derek Sayer 2023.

I was one of those writers who were honored at the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards ceremony in Toronto last Sunday. What should have been a joyous celebratory occasion was inevitably overshadowed by the horrific events unleashed by Hamas’s brutal assault on Israeli civilians on October 7—which, let me be clear, I utterly and unreservedly condemn. After much soul-searching the organizers decided the ceremony should go ahead, as a gesture of affirmation of faith in the redemptive power of culture. I think this decision was the correct one even if the audience was much smaller than usual and there was a heavy security presence at the door.

Among those I talked with, there was no politicking but just profound sorrow, grief, and apprehension—above all fear for the fate of civilians, especially the children, who were already paying the price of politicians’ belligerence and intransigence on both sides. Fear, also, for the future, both immediate and longterm.

The proceedings began with a recitation of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. It put me in mind of two other recitations of the same prayer, which I had recounted in the book for which I received the award, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History.

The first recitation took place in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp following one of the most infamous Nazi reprisals of World War II. In retaliation for the Prague assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (and architect of the Final Solution), by Czechoslovak paratroopers based in Britain, on 10 June 1942 German security forces sealed off the little village of Lidice, where they shot 173 adult males and deported 205 women to concentration camps. Ninety-eight children were taken to be “appropriately raised,” of whom 81 were subsequently murdered in the gas vans at Chelmno. None of the victims had played any part whatsoever in Heydrich’s assassination, though some had relatives fighting for the Czechoslovak resistance abroad. It was a collective punishment, of the sort the 1949 Geneva Convention (4) specifically outlawed (article 33) in the hope of preventing such atrocities ever happening again.

Following the shootings,

The troops doused the buildings with gasoline and set them on fire. Thirty Jewish prisoners were trucked in from Terezín. When they arrived in the burning village at 4:00 in the afternoon they were given pickaxes, shovels, 350 grams of bread, and 30 grams of margarine; taken to the place where the men’s bodies were heaped up; and told to dig a mass grave twelve meters long, nine meters wide, and three meters deep by six the next morning “or else they can quietly lay down with the others.” One of them, the journalist and broadcaster František R. Kraus, wrote a powerful account of his experience soon after the war ended. It was a Czech Jew who sang a requiem over the bodies of Lidice’s Christian dead:

“Suddenly the church breaks apart: a new metallic thundering breaks up the walls, the ringing of the bells resounds clearly, there is a thumping in the tower, flames roar up again, then suddenly the ringing stops, torn away from the roof the bell hurtles down, breaks through the wooden floor and ends with huge clattering on the stone floor, white smoke rolls out of the fallen nave. . . . Next to me stands Karl Langendorf, young, beautiful, the composer, he stands there like a marble statue, his mouth wide open, he raises and lowers his fists. . . . Then low singing sounds from his lips, it is Antonín Dvořák’s Requiem . . . Requiem aeternam dona eis domine et lux perpetua luceat eis [Eternal rest grant them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them] . . . Dies irae, dies illa [Day of wrath, that day] . . . a windy morning rises from the blood-drenched east and Karl Langendorf sings Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus . . . Dominus Deus Sabaoth [Holy, holy, holy . . . Lord God of the Sabbath] . . . bricks drop onto the empty church benches, jump high again and dance to and fro as if it were a festive church holiday, then the beams clatter down and break the roof, walls and vaultings shake, pictures of saints in gold frames fall from the old walls, and thunder to the ground . . . mass is being celebrated for the last time here.”

The grave diggers arrived back in Terezín to find candles burning at the heads of their bunks, “just as at that time, when the first of our comrades were hanged. Comrades are singing the monotonous melody of the Kadish [sic], stop, smother their joy.” “I sink back. My eyes pass over the barred windows. Outside the night is of the deepest black. And beneath me, on the lower bunk, Karl Langendorf sings quietly: ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. . . .’ Then he adds in a low voice: ‘But Lidice is in Europe!’ Kraus survived the war to write one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs, titled Plyn, plyn . . . , pak oheň: vězeň č. B 11632 (Gas, gas . . . , then fire: Prisoner #B 11632), published in Havlíčkův Brod in 1945. Karel Langendorf, as he is named in Czech sources, was transported to Auschwitz on 18 May 1944. He did not survive.

Postcards from Absurdistan, pp. 180–2

The second recitation of the Kaddish was by the great Prague Jewish reporter Egon Erwin Kisch, who spent most of World War II as a refugee in Mexico. It was in Mexico City that he learned of the murder of two of his brothers in the Holocaust.

“In Mexico Kisch suffered horribly from the fact that Prague was occupied,” Lenka [Reinerová, another Prague Jewish writer and Kisch’s fellow refugee in Mexico City] told a Czech TV interviewer in 2001. “When we were alone, Egon spoke in Czech with me in Mexico—out of nostalgia and homesickness.”

Nostalgia and homesickness did not blunt the raging reporter’s insatiable curiosity. Egon’s Entdeckungen in Mexiko (Discoveries in Mexico, 1945) contained twenty-four essays on a wide range of topics, including sports among the ancient Maya, how to make tortillas, the hallucinogenic properties of peyote, and the cultural history of the cactus. He attends a Sabbath service in the village of Venta Prieta, whose thirty-seven Jewish inhabitants, “in no way distinguishable from other Indians or Mestizos,” were descended from Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition in the sixteenth century.

“My father and mother were born in Prague, lived there, and are buried there. It never could have occurred to them that one day one of their sons would be reciting the prayer for the dead for them amid a group of Indians, in the shadow of the silver-laden mountains of Pachuca. My parents, who lived their entire lives in the Bear House of Prague’s Old Town, never dreamt that their sons would sometime be driven out of the Bear House, one of them to Mexico, another to India, and the two who were unable to escape the Hitler terror, to unknown places of unimaginable horror. My thoughts roamed farther—to relatives, friends, acquaintances, and enemies, sacrifices of Hitler, all entitled to be remembered in the prayer for the dead.”

quoted in Postcards from Absurdistan, pp. 279–80.

Here, for the record, is the speech I gave at the Canadian Jewish Awards ceremony on Sunday. I shortened it a little in the delivery—this is the fuller text I had prepared in advance. Its resonances will, I hope, be obvious.

I am greatly honored to receive the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship, and would like to thank all those involved—especially the jury, upon whom I inflicted a very much longer book than I sat down to write in the fall of 2018.  I am particularly gratified for my work to be recognized in this way when I am not Jewish and Postcards from Absurdistan does not pretend to be a work of Jewish history.  But one cannot write the history of Prague without foregrounding the part played by Jews in that history—for over a thousand years—and it means a lot to me that the jury thinks I have done them justice. 

Postcards from Absurdistan is the final volume in a trilogy of books which take Prague as an alternative vantage-point on modernity.  In his unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, the great German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin nominated Paris, the so-called “city of lights,” as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” and set out to discover “the prehistory of modernity” in the “dreamworlds” incarnated in its material fabric and cultural products.  I thought Prague might be treated analogously, as a site in which to excavate the dreamworlds of the very much darker twentieth century.  

My subtitle  “Prague at the End of History“ is deliberately ironic, because history was declared at an end no fewer than three times during Bohemia’s turbulent twentieth century: by the Nazis, when they incorporated Prague into their ‘thousand-year Reich’ in March 1939; by the communists, who proclaimed socialism ‘achieved’ in 1960; and by many Western commentators, who were confident that the 1989 revolutions in Europe heralded (in Francis Fukuyama’s words) ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’  

Each was the illusion of its epoch. Each proved spectacularly wrong.  Prague is a place where modernist phantasmagoria of history-as-progress have repeatedly unraveled.  The period covered in Postcards, from the Munich Agreement to the fall of communism, were the years of peak unraveling.

At a time in which democracy is once again under global assault, the dark half-century of Prague’s modernity considered in Postcards holds up a disturbing mirror to our own historical crossroads.

Postcards from Absurdistan is not a conventional academic history book, but a tapestry woven out of a multitude of fragments—a “collection of close readings, insightful narratives, obscure gems, and sometimes-funny, sometimes-wrenching reflections,” as the jury generously describes them.  Like Benjamin, “I want to allow “the rags, the refuse” that gets lost in the grander narratives of modernity, to “come into their own.”   These fragments are intended to function as dialectical images, to use Benjamin’s term, in which “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”

As well as providing a model (The Arcades Project) and a method (literary montage), Walter Benjamin makes a brief appearance in the book.  This particular passage takes off from the First International Exhibition of Caricatures and Humor, a deliberate antifascist provocation that took place at the Prague gallery of the Mánes Artists’ Society in the spring of 1934,. The exhibition was organized by one of the main characters in my story, the cartoonist, writer, avant-garde artist, anti-fascist activist and sometime Czechoslovak ambassador to France, Adolf Hoffmeister.

At this point I read the following extract from Postcards from Absurdistan:

The exhibition drew protests from the German, Austrian, Italian, and Polish governments, not to mention that eternal censor of social morality the Vatican. The Czechoslovak government ordered several works to be removed; the ensuing brouhaha ensured that the show had sixty thousand visitors by the time it closed. All the leading Czech caricaturists of the time were represented. The most eminent foreign participants were George Grosz, Otto Dix, John Heartfield, Thomas Theodor Heine, and Erich Godal. By then, Grosz was already in America, and Dix had been fired from his position at the Dresden Academy (he would later be forbidden to paint anything but landscapes). Heartfield, Heine, and Godal had arrived in Prague as refugees in 1933.

Heartfield and Heine moved on again in 1938—Heartfield to England (where he was soon interned on the Isle of Man) and Heine to Oslo and then (in 1942) Stockholm. Godal made it to the United States, where he became a political cartoonist for Ken magazine and the New York newspaper PM. His widowed mother Anna Marien-Goldbaum, whom Godal had been forced to leave behind, was less fortunate. Finally given an exit visa from Germany in 1939, she was one of more than nine hundred Jewish passengers on the MS St. Louis, which sailed from Hamburg to Havana on 13 May. The ship was turned away from Cuba and was then refused permission to dock in the United States (by president Franklin D. Roosevelt) and Canada (by prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King). A US State Department telegram sent while the ship was close enough to the coast to see the lights of Miami stated that the passengers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.”  The New York Daily Mirror published two letters “from an aged mother on the wandering steamship to her son, an artist, in New York” on 6 June 1939. “It is so strange how near, and yet how much cut off we really are,” Mrs. Goldbaum wrote. The St. Louis turned back to Europe the same day. Anna Goldbaum was marooned in Belgium. She was deported to the death camps within a year.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. As the Western world faced another “refugee crisis” in 2015, the Nigerian American writer and photographer Teju Cole remembered Walter Benjamin—“not so much Benjamin the scholar of surrealism as Benjamin the despairing refugee. The Benjamin who fled, like millions of others, for fear of his life”—who committed suicide in 1940 in the little town of Port Bou on the Franco-Spanish border rather than be sent back to occupied France. “The receipt made out to the dead man, the difunto Benjamin Walter, by the Hotel de Francia, for the four-day stay . . . include[d] five sodas with lemon, four telephone calls, dressing of the corpse, plus disinfection of his room and the washing and whitening of the mattress.” “The itemization reminds me of two things,” writes Cole. “Less, of the usual little list of what I drank or ate (mineral water, Toblerone), what I spent, when I check out of these frequent hotels of my life. More, of the little plastic bags I saw at the public morgue in Tucson, containing the last few personal effects of unknown travelers recovered from the Sonora desert in Arizona. A few dollars, a few pesos, photograph of a family, a mother’s passport to remember her by.” These are the rags and the refuse, the dialectical images that condense the terrible recurrences of the past in the present, blowing Benjamin’s “phantasmagoria of history” to smithereens. 

“Every refugee is alike, but each generation fails refugees in its own special way,” explains Teju Cole.

Right now the world is drowning in ancient memories—pogroms, expulsions, the Holocaust, the Nakba—whose contemporary mobilization is fueling hatred on both sides. I do not suggest that we can or should forget—any of the injustices, on either side. Those who have committed atrocities should be brought to account. But the one thing that needs to be remembered amid the fog and fury of war, and not just in the Middle East, is our common humanity. Otherwise what hope is there for any of us?

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.

from the Kaddish, as translated at myjewishlearning.com