Jan Reegen, Rita, 1950, tempera, on a protectorate newspaper and a Union of Czech Youth poster, Galerie Ztichlá klíka v Praze.
- Introduction
- Reception of the previous volumes
- Translations
- Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History
- Praise and recognition for Postcards from Absurdistan
Introduction
A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy—with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship
My book Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, published in the United States on 1 November 2022 and in Europe and the UK on January 3, 2023, is the final volume in a loose trilogy of cultural histories that take the city of Prague as an alternative vantage point from which to reexamine “modernity” and provide a critique of the illusions of the epoch. I approach twentieth-century Prague as Walter Benjamin approached nineteenth-century Paris in his Arcades Project, as a site in which to excavate the dreamworlds of the age. All three books are published by Princeton University Press.
I summarized my case for why the modern history of Prague should be of particular interest to students of modernity in the introduction to The Coasts of Bohemia:
For all but twenty years between the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Prague has been an appendage of Vienna, Berlin, or Moscow. But provinciality is in the eye of the beholder. In reality Bohemia has been a frontier zone, over which the armies of competing European modernities—Reformation and Counter-Reformation, empire and nation, fascism and democracy, capitalism and communism—have repeatedly rolled back and forth. All have left their imprint on its society and culture; Prague is a pentimento of different ways of being modern, European, and, fitfully, western. Such a history, I submit, is central to the understanding of anything we might want to call the modern world. From the vantage point of London, or Paris, or New York—or, not so very long ago, Moscow—it is possible to identify history with progress, to ascribe to it providence, directionality, and meaning. It is possible to write modernity in the singular, and to prattle about “the end of history.” Such fables are believable precisely so long as the Bohemias of this world are forgotten. Viewed from Bohemia itself, the modern condition looks somewhat different. It is a chiaroscuro of beauties and terrors, whose colors are invariably more vibrant, and whose depths are very much darker, than our anemic narratives of progress are apt to acknowledge. Modernity was never either singular or simple. It was always a “postmodern” polyphony, in which the fragile stabilities of location and identity rested on the uncertain vicissitudes of power.[1]
While the individual books complement one another, each is also intended to stand alone. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998) took a longue durée approach, using Prague’s historical experience from the mid-18th to the mid-20th centuries to explore questions of national identity and historical memory in relation to shifting constellations of political power. Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (2013) zoomed in on the Bohemian capital during the culturally vibrant first half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the fraught relations between avant-garde art and revolutionary politics. Between the World Wars Prague became the world’s second center of surrealism after Paris, and the interwoven stories of the Paris and Prague surrealist groups and their attempts to reconcile Marx’s “transformer le monde” (transform the world) with Rimbaud’s “changer la vie” (change life) formed the backbone of my narrative. Offering more twisted tales of politics and the arts, Postcards from Absurdistan is a companion and sequel to Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, which concentrates on the tumultuous half-century from 1938 to 1989. It may be seen as an elegy for the age—its hopes, its dreams, its delusions.
These books are aimed at a broad educated readership. While they have been applauded for “extraordinary erudition, encyclopedic knowledge, sure-footed orientation in the scholarly literature, memoirs and correspondence, literature and art,”[3] they are free of jargon, avoid overt theorization, and seldom directly engage with academic debates. Instead, I tell a story—or rather, many stories—much as a novel does, weaving a tapestry out of minutiae, sticking closely to primary sources and as far as possible letting the people who populate my pages speak in their own voices. As I said in Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, I am less interested in the grand narratives that try to discipline the messiness of history than “the details that derail.”
These fragments out of which these books are montaged are intended to function as images in the sense given by the surrealist documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings (in his Pandaemonium). Jennings characterized his images as
quotations from the writings of the period in question … which either in the writing or in the nature of the matter itself or both have revolutionary and symbolic and illuminatory quality. I mean that they contain in little a whole world—they are the knots in a great net of tangled time and space—the moments at which the situation of humanity is clear—even if only for the flash time of the photographer or the lighting.[6]
My aim, in Walter Benjamin’s words, is to let “the rags, the refuse” that are erased or excluded in more conventional academic histories “come into their own,”[4] in the hope that the flash of sudden illumination might help us wake from our dreaming. I am acutely aware that Postcards from Absurdistan appears at a point where democracy is once again under global assault. The dark half-century of Prague’s modernity considered here holds up an unsettling mirror to our own historical crossroads.
Reception of the previous volumes
The Coasts of Bohemia
Continuously in print for 25 years, The Coasts of Bohemia is standard reading on university courses across the world, including in the Czech Republic. It is also widely listed on travel websites and in travel guides (e.g. the Michelin Green Guide to Prague) and is the first item of recommended reading in the Handbook for Fulbright Grantees in the Czech Republic.
On its publication Coasts was extensively reviewed in book trade journals (starred in Kirkus Reviews, listed as an Outstanding Academic Title of the Year by Choice), newspapers (the Financial Times, the Vancouver Sun, the Washington Times, the Czech daily Lidové noviny) and magazines (Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, New Republic, Foreign Affairs) as well as academic journals.
R. J. W. Evans described Coasts in the New York Review of Books as “the most stimulating introduction to [its] subject in English, or … any other language,”[8] while Steven Beller, in a lead review in the Times Literary Supplement, considered it “a masterful essay on the ironies and tragedies of both the cultural history of the Czechs and Czech culture’s history of its own past.”[9] The late Tony Judt, in a lengthy review essay in The New Republic, commended it as “an ambitious, elegantly written, and sympathetic account of the art, the literature and the politics of the Czech people, immune to the usual self-serving national illusions … a delight.”[10]
Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century
Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century won the American Historical Association’s 2014 George L. Mosse Prize for “an outstanding major work of extraordinary scholarly distinction, creativity, and originality in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since the Renaissance,”[11] and received honorable mentions for the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies’ Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for “the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences”[12] and the Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Czech Literature’s F. X. Šalda Prize for “an exceptional contribution to art history and criticism.”[13] This was the first time a foreign language work has been thus honored in 17 years of the Šalda Prize. Prague was also selected as a Financial Times History Book of the Year.[14]
I know of 47 reviews (and 15 other press mentions) of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, including lead reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education, Architectural Review, Financial Times, and The Australian.[15]
Comments include “a wonderful book”[16]; “beautiful and phenomenal”[17]; “written with verve, wit, and a playfulness that matches that of its surrealist subjects”[18]; “rich, dense and entertaining”[19]; “an impressive narrative”[20]; “vivid and engaging … refreshing in its originality and bold in its scale”[21]; “thoroughly researched, highly informative”[22]; “beautiful, erudite, fascinating … a tour-de-force of modern European intellectual history”[23]; “compelling”[24]; “captivating”[25]; an “exciting book … inviting future reflection”[26]; “erudite, comprehensive, well-illustrated and witty”[27]; “thoroughly engrossing”[28]; “continually illuminating”[29]; “remarkable, unusual and fascinating … giving the readers an incredibly rich and diverse picture of modern Prague”[30]; “an intimate and absorbing experience [that] slowly, unobtrusively deconstruct[s] the reader’s understanding of history”[31]; “brilliantly written,”[32]; a “fabulously good read” and a “real page-turner”[33]; “a joy”[34] and “a pleasure” to read (Marci Shore adds, “in a sultry kind of way”).[35]
“Can a research professor ever have written a book quite so triumphantly eccentric and persuaded a major academic press to publish it so splendidly?” asks Nicolas Rothwell in The Australian.[36]
Translations
Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century was translated into Japanese in 2018 and Czech in 2021. It has been widely and favorably reviewed in the press in both Japan and the Czech Republic.
A Czech translation of Postcards from Absurdistan is currently being prepared by the Prague publisher Volvox Globator.
Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History
The entire story of this nation between democracy, fascist subjugation, Stalinism and socialism … contains within it everything essential that has made the twentieth century the twentieth century. This perhaps makes it possible for us to pose more substantial questions, to create perhaps more meaningful myths than those who have not undergone this anabasis. In this century the nation lived through perhaps more than many other nations, and if its mind was alert, perhaps it knows more too.
Milan Kundera, speech at Fourth Congress of Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, Prague, 27 June 1967
“What … makes Prague a fitting capital for the twentieth century,” I argued in Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, “is that this is a place in which modernist dreams have time and again unraveled; a location in which the masks have sooner or later always come off to reveal the grand narratives of progress for the childish fairy tales they are.”[37] From this point of view Postcards from Absurdistan is the capstone of the trilogy. These were the years of peak unraveling.
In these decades Prague saw the end of Tomáš Masaryk’s democratic first Czechoslovak Republic following the Munich Agreement of September 1938, the German invasion of 15 March 1939, six years of Nazi occupation, and the murder of more than a quarter of a million Czechoslovak Jews in the Holocaust; liberation by the Soviet Red Army in May 1945, the ethnic cleansing of three million Bohemian Germans by their expulsion from the country in 1945-1946, Klement Gottwald’s communist coup of Victorious February 1948, and the Stalinist terror of the 1950s; the creative explosion of the 1960s cultural thaw, the reform communism of Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring, the Soviet-led invasion of 21 August 1968, and twenty years of so-called normalization under Gustáv Husák. The period—and an era—ends with the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, which catapulted the dissident playwright Václav Havel into Prague Castle and precipitated the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1992.
During this period Czech history was declared “at an end” no less than three times: by the Nazis, who incorporated Prague in 1939 into a Reich they believed would last a thousand years; by the communists, who proclaimed socialism “achieved” in 1960; and by triumphant western democrats, who thought (in Francis Fukuyama’s words) the 1989 revolutions in eastern Europe heralded “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”[38] All were proved spectacularly wrong.
Far from leading to the end of history, whether in its fascist, communist, or liberal-democratic variants, the dreamworlds explored in this book have repeatedly disintegrated to return us to a state of banal surreality that Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan.
Absurdistan is what modernity looks like once we take the modernist blinkers off. Its features have been unsparingly exposed in Prague’s twentieth-century literature and arts as well as in Czech popular culture, often by way of a rich vein of frequently vulgar comedy that stretches from Franz Kafka’s Castle and Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk to Milan Kundera’s Laughable Loves, Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England, and Václav Havel’s The Memorandum. Such literary works are important sources for this book—as are their visual counterparts, like the photographs of Miroslav Hák, Emila Medková, and Jan Lukas, the collages of Jiří Kolář, the paintings of Mikuláš Medek, the graphic art of Vladimír Boudník, or the films of Alfréd Radok, Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, and Věra Chytilová.
Absurdistan is a place where, as the Czech surrealist poet Petr Král remembered while in exile in Paris in the 1980s, you can turn a corner and stumble across “the Russian steppes between two baroque domes, like an antechamber of the Gulag comfortably situated in the suburbs of Paris or Munich.”[39] Absurdistan is a place where the future is always certain and the past is eternally unpredictable. In Absurdistan, the shop next door doesn’t have any bananas, this is the shop where we don’t have any meat. In Absurdistan, Soviet jazz will not be played. Ivan Ivanovich has fucked his balalaika.
These are all communist era jokes, but as Praguers know the essentials of Absurdistan were here long before communism and will still be here after it. Back in the nineteenth century Karel Sabina, the librettist for the “national opera,” Bedřich Smetana’s beloved Bartered Bride, turned out to be an Austrian spy. And where else but in post-communist Absurdistan would the prime minister have to resign because his chief of staff and lover had been using military intelligence to spy on his estranged wife, as happened to Petr Nečas and Jana Nagyová in 2013?
Absurdistan is the graveyard of modernist illusions, the place where the pipedreams of progress come crashing down to earth. Absurdistan is tailor-made for the surrealists’ black humor that André Breton called “the mortal enemy of sentimentality.”[42] Absurdistan is no place for kitsch. I use the term here as Milan Kundera defined it: “the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection.”[43]
My hope would be that in place of Kundera’s beautifying mirror of kitsch, my book will act as a more unheimlich looking-glass in which we can recognize aspects of ourselves in the other and vice versa—and shudder as well as laugh, caught short by the sudden recognition of Rimbaud’s truth: “Je est un autre.“
Praise and recognition for Postcards from Absurdistan
Awards
Winner, Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship, 2023. The jury citation reads:
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.
Finalist, Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in European History, 2023.
Endorsements
“Brilliant and addictively readable, Postcards from Absurdistan is at once an intimate history of Prague and a lively retelling of the story of the twentieth century.”—Paulina Bren, author of The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring
“Like Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project on nineteenth-century Paris, Derek Sayer’s book on twentieth-century Prague brilliantly mixes an infinity of small worlds that reflect the greater world of an enigmatic and fascinating city.”—Jan Baetens, author of Rebuilding Story Worlds: “The Obscure Cities” by Schuiten and Peeters
“Postcards from Absurdistan is a compelling account of the official and the everyday dramas of twentieth-century Prague. Derek Sayer evokes the farce, satire, tragedy, and absurdity of the fragments that create history, masterfully balancing reality and the myths constructed by visual artists, writers, dramatists, and composers.”—Marta Filipová, author of Modernity, History, and Politics in Czech Art
“An extraordinary entrance ticket to modern Czech culture—erudite, independent, fascinating!”—Jindřich Toman, author of Czech Cubism and the Book
Reviews
“Necessary. It should be in every academic library.”—Library Journal starred review
“Fascinating and capacious, Postcards from Absurdistan surveys Prague’s anguished recent past, raising concerns for its future amid new global conflicts and challenges.”—Foreword Reviews
“Intriguing. . . . Covering literature, the graphic arts, music, philosophy, architecture, and photography, Sayer profiles a staggering cast of artists and intellectuals.”—Publishers Weekly
“The generous English translations of material previously untranslated from Czech sources may be the most valuable parts of the trilogy for English speakers … informative and illuminating.”—Dublin Review of Books
[1] The Coasts of Bohemia, pp. 16-17.
[2] Brendan Driscoll, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Booklist, 18 June 2013.
[3] Lenka Bydžovská, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Umění/Art, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2014, pp. 576-8, at http://ceenewperspectives.iir.cz/2016/01/11/prague-capital-of-the-twentieth-century-a-surrealist-history/ Along with her collaborator Karel Srp, Bydžovská is the world’s leading authority on Czech surrealism.
[4] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 460-64.
[5] Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, p. 7.
[6] Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (London: Icon Books, 2012), p. xiii-xiv
[7] Derek Sayer, Making Trouble: Surrealism and the Human Sciences (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2017). See especially pp. 65-74, where I discuss Benjamin’s Arcades, Jennings’s Pandaemonium, and Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy as exemplars of “surrealist histories”.
[8] R. J. W. Evans, “The Magic of Bohemia,” New York Review of Books, October 21, 1999.
[9] Steven Beller, “The Shadow on the Pavement,” review essay in Times Literary Supplement, 1 January 1999.
[10] Tony Judt, “Freedom and Freedonia,” review essay in New Republic, September 1998, reprinted in his When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 (London: Penguin, 2015), pp. 85-104.
[11] https://www.historians.org/awards-and-grants/past-recipients/george-l-mosse-prize-recipients
[12] http://aseees.org/programs/aseees-prizes/wayne-s-vucinich-book-prize/past-winners-aseees-vucinich-book-prize/2014
[13] http://www.ucl.cas.cz/ceny/?c=13
[14] “Books of the Year,” Financial Times, Weekend Arts + Life section, November 30, 2013.
[15] Marci Shore, “Surreal love in Prague,” Times Literary Supplement, 10 January 2014; Marta Filipová, “Dark pieces in a Modernist puzzle,” Times Higher Education, 30 May 2013; Andrew Mead, “Bohemian rhapsody,” Architectural Review, 12 July 2013, pp. 103-4; Tony Barber, “Artistic capital, revived,” Financial Times, 3 May 2013; and Nicolas Rothwell, “At the crossroads in Prague,” The Australian, 15 June 2013.
[16] Miloš Ondrášek, “Na křížovatce [At the Crossroads],” review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Čechoaustralan [The Czech-Australian], Autumn/Winter 2013, p. 5.
[17] Jessa Crispin (of Bookslut) on Virtual Memories Show, May 8, 2017 (Podcast), at http://fearofasquareplanet.com/fear-of-a-square-planet-12/
[18] Jakub Beneš, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century on Habsburg (H-net), March 2015, at https://networks.h-net.org/node/19384/reviews/65480/benes-sayer-prague-capital-twentieth-century-surrealist-history
[19] James M. Robertson, “The Great Blank Space Beyond the Wall,” review essay, Contemporary European History, Vol. 25, No. 1, February 2016, pp. 177-89.
[20] Karen Ackland, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in ForeWord Reviews, 21 May 2013.
[21] Thomas Ort, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Slavic Review, Vol. 73, No. 2, 2014, pp. 378-381.
[22] Andrea Talabér, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’histoire, Volume 21, Issue 6, 2014, pp. 933-5.
[23] Andrea Orzoff, “A Resolutely Non-linear History,” review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Austrian Studies Newsmagazine, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring 2014.
[24] Filipová, “Dark pieces in a Modernist puzzle.”
[25] (Anonymous) review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Publishers Weekly, 28 January 2013.
[26] Pavel Kolar, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Kunstform, Vol. 17, No. 5, 2016.
[27] Barber, “Artistic capital, revived.”
[28] Jim Burns, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Northern Review of Books, June 2013.
[29] Mead, “Bohemian rhapsody.”
[30] Michael Lowy, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, Vol. 21, issue 1, 2013, pp. 117-20.
[31] Esther Galfalvi, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Gorse, 5 March 2014, at http://gorse.ie/prague-capital-of-the-twentieth-century/
[32] “New Books and Extracts,” Dublin Review of Books, Issue 38, 1 July 2013.
[33] Jan Baetens, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Leonardo, Vol. 47, No. 2, April 2014.
[34] Claire Morelon, review of Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century in Social History, Volume 39, No. 2, 2014, pp. 292-293.
[35] Shore, “Surreal love in Prague.”
[36] Rothwell, “At the Crossroads in Prague.”
[37] Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, pp. 10-11.
[38] Frances Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3-18.
[39] Petr Král, Prague (Seyssel: Editions du Champ Vallon, 1987), pp. 114-15.
[40] Coasts of Bohemia, p. 13.
[41] Jiří Weil, Mendelssohn Is on the Roof (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), p. 8. I told Weil’s amazing life-story, including how he survived Stalin’s purges (and wrote the first novel about them, Moscow—The Border), the gulag (and wrote the first novel about them, The Wooden Spoon), and the Holocaust, in The Coasts of Bohemia, pp. 228-31.
[42] André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997), pp. vi-vii.
[43] Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York: Grove, 1998), p. 135.
[44] Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 32-3.
[45] Antony Giddens, in Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 94, as quoted in Wikipedia, entry titled “Modernity.”
coasts of bohemia 