Hubert aneb Návrat do Casablanky (2026)

Sometimes reality is so unbearable that the only way to avoid madness and survive is to surrender to dreaming and return to Casablanca. This historical novel follows Hubert Windisch, born in 1923 and a member of the generation growing up in Nazi Germany. As the son of a high-ranking SS officer, he faces ideological pressure and expectations from childhood, yet he can neither fulfil nor accept them. After experiencing the war and returning to post-war reality, he falls into complete disillusionment. He cannot fit either the role of the “right kind of German” or that of the practical man helping to build a new society. Hubert finds his only consolation in the world of film characters: tough, cynical, often drunken but always fair men, admired by women and watched by other men with fear and respect. He imagines himself as a hero like his idol, the charismatic American actor Humphrey Bogart in the cult film Casablanca. Only in the cinema does his life seem meaningful and shaped according to his own wishes rather than dictated by his father, the war and post-war Germany. The book is a generational testimony about people shaped by the Third Reich, the breakdown of family and moral structures, and the difficulty of finding one’s identity after a historical upheaval. The novel is partly set in Moravia, where the author spent part of his childhood.