Praha, hlavní město 20. století - Surrealistická historie – Sayer Derek (2021)

Derek Sayer, in his monumental book Prague, the Capital of the Twentieth Century, pieces together fragments of the cultural history of Prague and Czechoslovakia between the two world wars to show how they fit into the mosaic of European history. The author notes the connections between Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Paul Éluard, and other world surrealists with Vítězslav Nezval, Karel Teige, Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, and Prague in general. In one fragment of art history, the entire interwar situation is often reflected. Events in Sayer's Prague appear as excerpts from prophetic dreams foreshadowing events of European or global significance. The dreams of the avant-garde easily flip into the worst nightmares of the twentieth century in this space, and vice versa, the cruel jokes of history seem, from a distance, to be examples of black humor accompanied by liberating laughter. In Sayer's book, the reader traverses the fabric of interwar Prague, just as a sleeper moves through a nocturnal landscape in which fragments of their own history, disappointments, and desires emerge. Prague witnessed revolutions and invasions, national liberation and ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, trials, and dreams of 'socialism with a human face' in the twentieth century, at a time when Prague was...