Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History
Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History
Sayer, Derek
product information
Condition: New, UPC: 9780691185453, Publication Date: Tue, November 1, 2022, Type: Hardcover ,
join & start selling
description
4

A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy--with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship

Postcards 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 "end of history," 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 Václav 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.

reviews

Be the first to write a review

member goods

No member items were found under this heading.

notems store

Miss Julia Paints the Town

by Ross, Ann B.

Paperback /Paperback

$12.00

Puppies in Pjs Sticker Activity ...

by Hoerner, Linda

Hardcover /Hardcover

$1.89

Five Books of Moses: The ...

by Fox, Everett

Paperback /Hardcover

$34.00

El Efecto Empatia

by Riess, Helen

Paperback /Paperback

$16.46

listens & views

PLATTDEUTSCHE LIEDER

by WADER,HANNES

COMPACT DISC

out of stock

$12.99

ARE YOU SERIOUS

by MEAN JEANS

COMPACT DISC

out of stock

$15.25

TEMPLE

by BALKANSKY

COMPACT DISC

out of stock

$9.49

Return Policy

All sales are final

Shipping

No special shipping considerations available.
Shipping fees determined at checkout.