A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between
fascism, communism, and democracy-with lessons for a world again
threatened by dictatorship 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. 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. 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.
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. This is the territory of the
ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the
dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee-not to
mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way
and Vaclav Havel's greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the
show to go on. Over and over, Prague exposes modernity's
dreamworlds of progress as confections of kitsch. In a time when
democracy is once again under global assault, Postcards from
Absurdistan is an unforgettable portrait of a city that illuminates
the predicaments of the modern world.
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