The last postcard from Prague

Postcards from Absurdistan is the third in a loose trilogy of books Derek Sayer has written about modern Czech cultural history, following The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998) and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (2013). While The Coasts of Bohemia focused on the development of Czech national culture in the nineteenth century, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century dealt primarily with the Czech surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The third volume widens the scope to the entire twentieth century. Put next to one another, the trilogy’s some 1,700 pages provide a tour de force of Czech cultural history. Postcards from Absurdistanis not, however, a conventional work of history (though it is organized chronologically). Sayer writes that he does “not attempt to impose an artificial coherence on a history that conspicuously lacks it” (p. xvi). While readers should prepare for a good deal of back-and-forth between a large cast of characters, the book’s eleven chapters do not feel disjointed. Indeed, they are “postcards” – sketches of sources and arguments on a variety of topics and people. A great asset of the book are the long quotations from Czech sources that are thus made available to English speakers. The book is based on a wide variety of secondary sources and published editions of primary sources (it uses no archival material).

Sayer goes from a discussion of the brilliant ­– and troubled – journalist Milena Jesenská to a sketch of language relations in Prague in the interwar period. He deals with the globalization of Czech culture through the architect Antonín Raymond (1888–1976), who worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in the United States before moving to Japan, where he spent several decades and did much to popularize modern architecture. These biographical vignettes of actors that will be unknown to most readers are set alongside narratives of historical events much discussed in the historiography and even in popular culture. The book covers, among much else, Operation Anthropoid – the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by two British-trained Czechoslovak soldiers in 1942 – the Prague Spring of 1968 and the role of dissidents like Václav Havel in the demise of socialism in Czechoslovakia in 1989. 

Sayer’s mise-en-scène and his analysis are always erudite, sometimes revisionist and frequently compelling. I found the re-interpretation of Havel’s famous essay The Power of the Powerless that concludes the book particularly poignant. As a utopian alternative to the systemic lie of the communist system, Havel offers the concept of “living in truth”. But this concept, as Sayer writes, “had little to offer as a program for action in post-1969 Czechoslovakia”. Indeed, what did it mean? Non-dissidents like Karel Gott, he suggests, “might very well reply: I am living in truth. It is you who are living in a cloud cuckoo land where truth and love triumph over lies and hatred. I know exactly what I’m doing and why. And yes, it hurts. Just not as much as the alternatives.” (p. 556) Sayer’s book frequently shows the explicit and implicit constraints on the agency of his actors and thus blurs the lines between categories frequently taken for granted – such as dissident and conformist, and victim and perpetrator.

While the book and the trilogy are tremendous achievements, I cannot help but feel uneasy about some of Sayer’s conceptual assumptions. The thread that is supposed to hold Sayer’s postcards together is the concept of the absurd, which, he claims, runs through Czech history. But does it? Many of his examples of a kafkárna (the nice term Czechs and Sayer use for an absurd muddle) turn out to be rather reasonable if one accepts that historical actors do not act according to historians’ ex-post categories. Instead, they have highly complex motivations in what were frequently harrowing political circumstances. Indeed, this is the argument Sayer himself makes, and it undermines his own metaphor. If anything, the concept of the absurd has become a cliché that has limited analytic value. Sayer writes that Czech dissidents gave the name Absurdistan to communist Czechoslovakia (p. 6). It is telling that, as far as I could discern, this name was used rarely, if at all, in samizdat issued before 1989. I found one reference by Jiří Dienstbier in a Philadelphia Inquirer interview in June 1989; most uses of the word to refer to communist Czechoslovakia were by foreign journalists in the early 1990s. In the Czech context, it is now mainly used by right-wing internet trolls to malign their liberal democracy.

Furthermore, one of Sayer’s goals, as he writes in the preface, is to “extend knowledge of modern Czech cultural history among English-speaking readers” (p. xvii). This might be a noble goal for institutions such as the Czech Centers (funded by the Czech foreign ministry to promote Czech culture abroad). But for a work of scholarship, it is curious. It indicates Sayer’s approach: he attempts to get at an essence of Czech history, or, as he writes with reference to Milan Kundera, the “Czech existential situation” (p. 140). This not only runs counter to the argument made by scholars of transnational history that, in East-Central Europe at least, such a thing is made impossible by myriad ethnic, linguistic and cultural entanglements. It also implies that the Czech story was in some way special and thus worthy of the scholarship of the English-speaking world. But what, one could object, of Hungarian history, or Polish, or Ukrainian (not to speak of non-European histories)? It is obviously not Sayer’s fault that the imperial status of English in academia is such that any scholarship not in English is quickly written off as provincial and often simply not read. But this framing facilitates an academic-imperialist view in which everything that is English constitutes a core of knowledge and everything that is not jostles for the core’s attention. As this book and many others show, Czech history is fascinating indeed, but it is plainly not more deserving of English-language academia’s attention than the histories of other “small nations” (another cliché over-used by Czechs). 

The division into an English-language core and the rest is also conveyed by Sayer’s choice of sources. The overwhelming majority are in English and in Czech. By and large, he ignores a vast chunk of literature on Czech affairs: namely, that written in German. While German has lost its status as the main foreign language in Czech studies to English, there is excellent scholarship on East-Central European history in German that scholars writing in English are ill-advised to ignore. Books such as Ines Koeltzsch’s volume on Czech-German-Jewish relations in Prague or Martin Schulze Wessel’s standard history of the Prague Spring – to select two recent titles that made an impression on me – should not be missing from Sayer’s bibliography.¹

But these qualms are related rather to the status of small histories in American and British academia. They do little to diminish the value of this eminently readable book. It is a well-balanced introduction to the Czech twentieth century for students and the wider public, and also offers many insights for expert scholars. Derek Sayer has written a deserving conclusion to his Czech trilogy.