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Prague consists of many layers of symbolic sites and buildings which chart the ever-evolving historical relationship between Germans, Jews, Czechs and the imprints left by their many rulers and conquerors, as Demetz reveals in this history of the city.
A dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's great capital during the Nazi Protectorate With this successor book to Prague in Black and Gold, his account of more than a thousand years of Central European history, the great scholar Peter Demetz focuses on just six short years—a tormented, tragic, and unforgettable time. He was living in Prague then—a "first-degree half-Jew," according to the Nazis' terrible categories—and here he joins his objective chronicle of the city under German occupation with his personal memories of that period: from the bitter morning of March 15, 1939, when Hitler arrived from Berlin to set his seal on the Nazi takeover of the Czechoslovak government, until the liberation of Bohemia in April 1945, after long seasons of unimaginable suffering and pain. Demetz expertly interweaves a superb account of the German authorities' diplomatic, financial, and military machinations with a brilliant description of Prague's evolving resistance and underground opposition. Along with his private experiences, he offers the heretofore untold history of an effervescent, unstoppable Prague whose urbane heart went on beating despite the deportations, murders, cruelties, and violence: a Prague that kept its German- and Czech-language theaters open, its fabled film studios functioning, its young people in school and at work, and its newspapers on press. This complex, continually surprising book is filled with rare human detail and warmth, the gripping story of a great city meeting the dual challenge of occupation and of war.
Author : Peter Demetz Publisher : Hill and Wang Page : 352 pages File Size : 44,9 Mb Release : 1998-03-18 Category : Social Science ISBN : 9781429930642
Prague is at the core of everything both wonderful and terrible in Western history, but few people truly understand this city's unique culture. In Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz strips away sentimentalities and distortions and shows how Czechs, Germans, Italians, and Jews have lived and worked together for over a thousand years.
In September 1938, the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany. Six months later, Hitler’s troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—the first non-German territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Chad Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its consequences for the region. To make the Protectorate German, half the Czech population (and all Jews) would be expelled or killed, with the other half assimilated into a German national community with the correct racial and cultural composition. With the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich, Germanization measures accelerated. People faced mounting pressure from all sides. The Nazis required their subjects to act (and speak) German, while Czech patriots, and exiled leaders, pressed their countrymen to act as “good Czechs.” By destroying democratic institutions, harnessing the economy, redefining citizenship, murdering the Jews, and creating a climate of terror, the Nazi occupation set the stage for the postwar expulsion of Czechoslovakia’s three million Germans and for the Communists’ rise to power in 1948. The region, Bryant shows, became entirely Czech, but not before Nazi rulers and their postwar successors had changed forever what it meant to be Czech, or German.
“A riveting tale of her family’s experience in Europe during World War II [and] a well-wrought political history of the region, told with great authority. . . . More than a memoir, this is a book of facts and action, a chronicle of a war in progress from a partisan faithful to the idea of Czechoslovakian democracy.” -- Los Angeles Times Drawn from her own memory, her parents’ written reflections, and interviews with contemporaries, the former US Secretary of State and New York Times bestselling author Madeleine Albright's tale that is by turns harrowing and inspiring Before she turned twelve, Madeleine Albright’s life was shaken by some of the most cataclysmic events of the 20th century: the Nazi invasion of her native Prague, the Battle of Britain, the attempted genocide of European Jewry, the allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War. In Prague Winter, Albright reflects on her discovery of her family’s Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland’s tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation. Often relying on eyewitness descriptions, she tells the story of how millions of ordinary citizens were ripped from familiar surroundings and forced into new roles as exile leaders and freedom fighters, resistance organizers and collaborators, victims and killers. These events of enormous complexity are shaped by concepts familiar to any growing child: fear, trust, adaptation, the search for identity, the pressure to conform, the quest for independence, and the difference between right and wrong. Prague Winter is an exploration of the past with timeless dilemmas in mind, a journey with universal lessons that is simultaneously a deeply personal memoir and an incisive work of history. It serves as a guide to the future through the lessons of the past, as seen through the eyes of one of the international community’s most respected and fascinating figures in history. Albright and her family’s experiences provide an intensely human lens through which to view the most political and tumultuous years in modern history.
This is a collection of Jan Neruda's intimate, wry, bittersweet stories of life among the inhabitants of the Little Quarter of nineteenth-century Prague. These finely tuned and varied vignettes established Neruda as the quintessential Czech nineteenth-century realist, the Charles Dickens of a Prague becoming ever more aware of itself as a Czech rather than an Austrian city. Prague Tales is a classic by a writer whose influence has been acknowledged by generations of Czech writers, including Ivan Klíma, who contributes an introduction to this new translation.
For more than eight centuries, the Jews of Prague lived in the Prague ghetto. During that time, Jewish Prague had always been a place of much mystery to outsiders, even to the closest Christian neighbors. Uncover the secrets of this long forgotten world. Learn about how the famous Old-New Synagogue received its name; about the four words that saved the Prague Jews in the Middle Ages; about Rabbi Loew and his Golem who could be brought to life by inserting a magic card into his mouth; about the Candelabra of Jerusalem finding its way to Prague; about hard-working Maisel and his inheritance; about how the faith of Pinkas was tried; about learned Rabbi Rashi's grave; and about much more.
Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century by Derek Sayer Pdf
Asserts that Prague could well be seen as the capital of the twentieth century, describing how the city has experienced and suffered more ways of being modern than perhaps any other metropolis.
Author : Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.) Publisher : Metropolitan Museum of Art Page : 390 pages File Size : 49,6 Mb Release : 2005 Category : Art, Gothic ISBN : 9781588391612
Prague by Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.) Pdf
This catalogue accompanies the Fall 2005 exhibition that celebrates the flowering of art in medieval Prague, when the city became not only an imperial but also an intellectual and artistic capital of Europe. Scholars trace the distinctly Bohemian art that developed during the reigns of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and his sons; the artistic achievements of master craftsmen; and the rebuilding of Prague Castle and of Saint Vitus' Cathedral. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.
Winner of the Europe Book Prize One of Europe’s most preeminent investigative journalists travels to the Czech Republic—the Czech half of the former Czechoslovakia, the land that brought us Kafka—to explore the surreal fictions and the extraordinary reality of its twentieth century. For example, there’s the story of the small businessman who adopted Henry Ford’s ideas on productivity to create the world’s largest shoe company—and hired modernist giants such as Le Corbusier to design his company towns (which were also the birthplaces of Ivana Trump and Tom Stoppard). Or the story of Kafka’s niece, who loaned her name to writers blacklisted under the Communist regime so they could keep publishing. Or the story of the singer Karel Gott, winner of the country’s Best Male Vocalist Award thirty-six years in a row, whose summer home, Gottland, is the Czech Dollywood. Based on meticulous research and hundreds of interviews with everyone from filmmakers to writers to pop stars to ordinary citizens, Gottland is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a resilient people living through difficult and often bizarre times—equally funny, disturbing, stirring and absurd . . . in a word, Kafkaesque. From the Hardcover edition.
The first book in the New York Times bestselling epic fantasy trilogy by award-winning author Laini Taylor Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky. In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low. And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war. Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out. When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?
Author : Richard Burton,Richard D. E. Burton Publisher : Signal Books Page : 264 pages File Size : 47,6 Mb Release : 2003 Category : Social Science ISBN : 1902669630
A treasure house of Gothic, baroque and modernist architecture, Prague is also a city of icons and symbols: statues, saints and signs reveal a turbulent history of religious and cultural conflict. As Kafka's nightmare city and home of the Good Soldier Svejk, the Czech capital also produced two of the twentieth century's emblematic writers. Richard Burton explores this metropolis of theatrical allusion, in which politics and drama have always been intertwined. His interpretation of the city's cultural past and present encompasses opera and rock music, puppetry and cinema, surrealism and socialist realism.
The daughter of prosperous Jews, Heda Kovály found her world turned upside down with the German annexation of Czechoslovakia. Deported to Lodz Ghetto in 1941 and then to Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered, in 1944, Kovály made a miraculous escape from a column of prisoners being marched to Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. On reuniting with her husband in Prague after the war, things started to look more hopeful. Rudolf Margolius became a deputy minister of foreign trade. But in 1952 he and 13 other government officials were tried and 11 of those hanged in one of the era's most notorious show trials. Heda Kovály and her four year old son were hounded by the state and shunned by society. In this powerful and moving memoir, Kovály describes her imprisonment by the Nazis during WWII and her persecution by the Communists in the 1950s - a classic account of life under totalitarianism. 'Given thirty seconds to recommend a book to start a student on the road to u8nderstanding the political tragedies of the 20th century... I would choose this one.' - Clive James 'One does not 'review' a book like this. One weeps, and prays... Beautiful evocation of lovely Prague.' - The Sunday Times 'Once in a while we read a book that puts the urgencies of our times and ourselves in perspective, making us confront the darker realities of human nature' - Anthony Lewis, The New York Times 'This is an extraordinary memoir, so heartbreaking that I have reread it for months, unable to rise to the business of 'reviewing' less a book than a life repeatedly outraged by the worst totalitarians in Europe. Yet it is written with so much quiet respect for the minutiae of justice and truth that one does not know where and how to specify Heda Kovály's splendidness as a human being.' - Alfred Kazin
Thirty years ago, Prague was a closed book to most travelers. Today, it is Europe’s fifth-most-visited city, surpassed only by London, Paris, Istanbul, and Rome. With a stunning natural setting on the Vltava river and featuring a spectacular architectural potpourri of everything from Romanesque rotundas to gothic towers, Renaissance palaces, Baroque churches, art nouveau cafés, and cubist apartment buildings, Prague may well be Europe’s most beautiful capital city. But behind this beauty lies a turbulent and often violent history, and in this book, Derek Sayer explores both. Located at the uneasy center of the continent, Prague has been a crossroads of cultures for more than a millennium. From the religious wars of the middle ages and the nationalist struggles of the nineteenth century to the modern conflicts of fascism, communism, and democracy, Prague’s history is the history of the forces that have shaped Europe. Sayer also goes beyond the complexities of Prague’s colorful past: his expert, very readable, and exquisitely illustrated guide helps us to see what Prague is today. He not only provides listings of what to see, hear, and do and where to eat, drink, and shop, but also offers deep personal reflection on the sides of Prague tourists seldom see, from a model interwar modernist villa colony to Europe’s biggest Vietnamese market.
