Authors
Ota FILIP
Writer, Ota Filip was born, 9 March 1930, in Ostrava, into a Czech German family. He grew up in the multinational and multicultural environment of Silesia. After graduating from secondary school, he worked for several years on the youth daily Mladá fronta and then continued his career as a journalist in regional media. At the same time he was studying at the school of journalism in Prague. From 1960 to 1968 and again from 1970 to 1974, he had a number of manual jobs - among which he worked as a miner and a metal sharpener. Later, he became an editor in the Profil publishing house, based in Ostrava, but shortly afterwards, was arrested for political reasons and sent to prison for 18 months. In 1974, he emigrated to Germany, where he has lived ever since. He worked there as a reader for the Fischer Verlag publishing house until 1994. While in exile, Filip wrote his novels in German, but all were closely connected to Czech history and society.
Filip's writings in Czech have centred on those books written and published in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. In these, Filip has shown his great narrative skills. His debut novel - although this was a very late debut - A Way to the Graveyard (Cesta k hřbitovu) features a young, partly autobiographical, hero who reflects on what had happened in Ostrava and North Moravia at the end of the Second World War. The novel shares a time and setting with Josef Škvorecký's, Cowards (Zbabělci), and therefore the two novels have often been put together. Although his novel has become an event in the history of Czech literature, it was published "at the eleventh hour" - in the last few moments before censorship. This was the reason why it never received sufficient critical evaluation. The books and works that followed were shaped by Filip's own experience with imprisonment and exile. In his exile, Filip became a writer in two languages, Czech and German. In the first years, Filip still translated his texts that were written in German into Czech and consequently published them in the exile’s publishing house Index. However, later on he stopped doing this.
It may only be a matter of coincidence, but it was Filip's very first novel, published in exile, that has remained his most successful and critically acclaimed one to date: a tragic and also comically grotesque novel, The Accession of Lojza Lapáček (Nanebevzetí Lojzy Lapáčka). It’s set in the Silesian part of Ostrava and is interesting due to an unconventional (and almost epic) point of view that observes several decades of the history of North Moravia, and its unique inhabitants, up to 1968. The book, portraying the eternal split into "big" and "small" history, was adopted for TV after 1989, but the series is somewhat bland and without spirit. The novel is characterised by the ironic distance that the narrator maintains while describing the adventures of the main character and society in general. A similar ironic approach to the philosophy of history and the philosophy of humanity dominates other early novels by Filip, especially his parody from a Husák-esque prison, A Blemished Conception (Poskvrněné početí). However, after November 1968, these texts received little critical evaluation either in Czechoslovakia or abroad. Also, many of his books, written and published in Germany, remain unknown and thus have received little critical attention in the Czech cultural environment. There is one exception to this: Filip's fantasy, Café Slavia (Kavárna Slavia) was published first in Czech samizdat and after November 1989, officially published by one of the Czech publishing houses. The book received much critical acclaim, mainly due to the author's observation that life and social progress is an endless "absurd mummery" (M. Zelinský). Filip was welcomed back to Czech literature only after some time with his autobiographical, The Seventh Life (Sedmý život), where he comments on controversies around him, and with 77 Pictures from a Russian House (77 obrázků z ruského domu), which is loosely based on the experience of Wassily Kandinsky, who in the first years of the 20th century stayed for a short time in the area of Germany where Filip currently lives..
(vn)
The profile updated as of 1 January 2007.
En français 
Ota FILIP
