The current issue of Osteuropa highlights voices from Czechia, the guest of honour at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair. All of the contributions are conversations between a Czech and a German writer, scholar or professional.
Books and readers
Author Martin Vopěnka and editor Katharina Raabe and explore the changes in the publishing industries and reading habits in their respective countries. Both regret the concentration of publishing houses, distributors and bookshops in the hands of a few large conglomerates, which has meant a decline in independent publishing and bookselling and thus fewer books pushing the margins of literature.
But Raabe also emphasises the ways in which German literature has been enriched since the 1990s by the contributions of migrant writers, with their acquired, indirect relationship to the German language. The trend toward identity-oriented, autofictional writing has also made a significant impact on the kinds of stories being published.
Raabe notes that the rise of online book platforms and the role of influencers in book promotion has weakened the authority of the traditional literary critic and increased the availability of more – and in some cases better – writing about literature. At the same time, there are ever fewer readers: last year, two thirds of the German population age ten and up did not purchase a single book.
Vopěnka points out that social media in Czechia has served to strengthen the national book market by connecting writers to readers in a relatively small linguistic community, where readers find narratives in their own language about the world they inhabit. He finds other reasons for optimism, too, noting the continued interest in printed books and children's ongoing fascination with good stories. ‘Reading,' he comments, ‘is very intimate and fragile'. This is echoed by Raabe's observation that solitude is necessary for reading – something ever more rare in a digitally interconnected world.
Broadcasting in crisis
Television presenter Václav Moravec and the director of Deutschlandradio Stefan Raue discuss the challenges posed to public service broadcasting by AI, political meddling and the competition with private media and social media. Moravec in particular paints a bleak picture of Czech broadcasting, with successive governments undermining the system and intervening into programming, oligarchs buying up outlets, and PSB attempting to compete by dumbing down.
Czechia and Germany are two of the few European countries that finance their public broadcasting exclusively with licence fees. Meant to ensure political independence, the system is under attack by rightwing parties in both countries. Both Moravec and Raue observe that the mandate to represent a diversity of opinions and address a broadest possible audience has been distorted into a ‘bothsidesism' neglecting facts and objectivity.
Both see the loss of trust in public news outlets and the turn toward social media and AI for information as a threat to democracy, although Raue expresses cautious hope that greater opportunities for the public to produce content, together with the use of AI as a data processing and research tool, can contribute to a healthy media landscape.
Tasks of public history
Historians Kamil Činátl and Ute Frevert debate the role of historiography in social and private memory. Činátl believes it to be the historian's responsibility to diagnose the present, in order to be able to communicate the past in ways people can understand and respond to. Most urgent, in his view, is to articulate the complexity of causes leading up to historical events. By demonstrating that historical developments are never inevitable and can be steered by human intervention, it is possible to counteract fatalistic attitudes towards current crises.
Frevert, however, is sceptical of diagnoses of the present put forward by sociologists and historians claiming to have identified new eras or trends. In her opinion, the historian's role is precisely to question the novelty of current phenomena by finding patterns or precursors in the past.
Both scholars note the increasingly emotional treatment of historical themes in public memory. Frevert criticises simplistic, activist approaches to the history of German colonialism, while Činátl warns about the commercialisation of memory. Both lament that a national framework still overrides a global perspective on the past, although this seems to be more the case in Czechia than in Germany.
Russian emigrés in 1920s Prague
Writer Ilma Rakusa and historian Ulrich Schmid present portraits of two Russian emigrés in Prague following the Russian Revolution: Marina Tsvetaeva and Roman Jakobson. The poet Tsvetaeva came to the city in 1922 and was inspired to write passionate poetry about it. The Prague period would form the pinnacle of her creative work, according to Rakusa, even though she lived in poverty with her family, whom she had to help support with her writing.
Even after leaving Prague for Paris in 1925, Czechoslovakia continued to figure prominently in Tsvetaeva's work, with poems responding to Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 and subsequent occupation of the country. She returned to the Soviet Union in 1939, where she committed suicide at the age of 49.
During the same period, the linguist Roman Jakobson formed a crucial link between Russian formalism and the Prague school. He worked for the Soviet diplomatic mission, writing a paper arguing that the cultural attraction of a language – meaning Russian – was more significant for national boundaries than native languages.
Jakobson influenced and was influenced by the Prague linguists, who absorbed Russian formalism while also emphasising the social factors that shaped literary works. Jakobson became increasingly critical of the Soviet Union, despite maintaining his Soviet citizenship until as late as 1935 and, in the 1950s, by now an American citizen, visiting the country and collaborating with scholars there and in Czechoslovakia – for which he was harshly criticised by Vladmir Nabokov.
Review by Millay Hyatt
