Postcards from Absurdistan (e-bog) af Sayer, Derek
Sayer, Derek (forfatter)

Postcards from Absurdistan e-bog

317,82 DKK (inkl. moms 397,28 DKK)
A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy-with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorshipPostcards 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 de...
E-bog 317,82 DKK
Forfattere Sayer, Derek (forfatter)
Udgivet 1 november 2022
Længde 752 sider
Genrer 1DTJ
Sprog English
Format pdf
Beskyttelse LCP
ISBN 9780691239514
A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy-with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorshipPostcards 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 "e;end of history,"e; 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.