Back to Blog
Absurdistan book6/22/2023 ![]() In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers-poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians-caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion. Situated in the eye of the storms that shaped the modern world, Prague holds up an unsettling mirror to the absurdities and dangers of our own times. Derek Sayer shows that Prague’s twentieth century, far from being a story of inexorable progress toward some “end of history,” whether fascist, communist, or democratic, was a tragicomedy of recurring nightmares played out in a land Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan. Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia’s artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country’s socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist dictatorship. ![]() ![]() ![]() A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy-with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |