Postcards from Absurdistan : Prague at the end of history / Derek Sayer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sayer, Derek, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prague (Czech Republic)--Civilization--20th century.

Prague (Czech Republic).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (752 p.) : 79 b/w illus.

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

"This book is the third in a trilogy that looks at the cultural history of Prague in order to tell the larger story of competing notions of European modernity-Reformation and Counter-Reformation, empire and nation, fascism and democracy-as they all played out on a single stage. This volume begins in 1938, when Czechoslovakia was dismembered by the Munich agreement and shortly before the invasion of the Third Reich, and it runs until the present day, when liberal democracy appears to be giving way to right-wing populism (as in much of the world). Like the previous volumes in the series, it sees Prague as a palimpsest of the cultures that overtook it-cultures that aimed to impose their own visions of modernity on the city. In this book, Sayer charts three major "modernities:" the Third Reich's brutal totalitarianism, the shifting face of Soviet communism, and the supposed freedoms of Western capitalist democracy. In Sayer's reading, the Nazis, Soviets, and Western democrats each believed that Prague had reached the end of history, that it had achieved "the final form of human government" (in Fukuyama's words). All were proved spectacularly wrong. As these political movements disintegrated, they returned the city to a state of banal surreality that Czech dissidents in the 1960s dubbed Absurdistan. Putting the notion of Absurdistan at the center of his story, Sayer engages with artists, creators and the things they produced, which unsparingly revealed the absurdity of the "modern" world and its notions of progress. He explores the work of Milan Kundera, Miloš Forman, Václav Havel, and many others lesser known in the Anglophone world. He examines the tradition of vulgar absurdist comedy beginning with Kafka, and he shows how Prague's cultural products have been marked by persistent moral ambiguity, or in Kundera's words, "the intoxicating relativity of human things," since the mid-century. The overarching argument of this book is that, by looking to Prague's cultural history, we can see that modernity has never been a single or stable notion, and as different ideologies of modernity have come head-to-head, they have produced a rich culture of ambiguity and absurdity. We published the first two books in the trilogy, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998), which spanned the 18th to the turn of the 20th century, and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century (2013), which looked at modernism and revolutionary thinking in Prague in the first half of the 20th century. Both books did well, and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century won the prestigious George L. Mosse Prize for European cultural and intellectual history from the American Historical Association"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Prelude: 17 November

Act 1 Recto 1918–1945

1 Kafkárna

2 A Modern Woman

3 Love and Theft

4 But Miss, We Can’t Help It

5 The Void at the Core of Things

6 Avant-garde and Kitsch

Act 2 Verso 1938–1989

7 As Time Goes By

8 The Cleansing of the Homeland

9 The Lyrical Age

10 Midcentury Modern

11 The Prague Spring

12 Normalization and Its Discontents

Coda Living in Truth

Notes

Sources

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780691239514

0691239517

OCLC:

1338837100