Literární reportáže – Wagnerová Alena (2022)

Alena Wagnerová has been dedicated to the significant genre of literary reportage, which is receiving increasing attention, for more than fifty years. The book collection Literary Reportage offers the best of her texts from 1965 to 2018. Its first part includes articles published in the second half of the 1960s in the magazine Plamen, which address both the then socio-political situation and Czech history of the 20th century. Here, particularly notable are the texts capturing the immensely moving accounts of widows whose husbands and sons fell during the Prague Uprising, or those mapping the ideological refinement and inner lives of young Czech intellectuals who founded the resistance organization Předvoj during the occupation. Another of her themes is the dramatic vicissitudes of Czech-German coexistence in the Sudetenland or collectivization and its social and cultural consequences, for example, in the story of the South Bohemian villages of so-called peasant baroque. The second part includes reports published later, in which the author maps places and specific human fates. She confronts the present with the past, for instance, in reports about Slovak Košice, Ravensbrück, the Tugendhat villa, or Belgian Ypres. She also pays attention to how Germany dealt with the so-called...