Postcards from Absurdistan

A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracywith lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakias artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the countrys socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist party rule. Derek Sayer shows that Pragues 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 Praguerspoets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedianscaught 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 refugeenot to mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way and Vclav Havels greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Over and over, Prague exposes modernitys 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.