Authors

He then worked at the Barrandov Film Studios, firstly as a script editor, then from 1970-1991 as a screenwriter, and since 1991 he has focused on writing. He is an external lecturer at DAMU (Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). Since the late 1960s he has been writing both film and television screenplays. He was awarded the State Prize for Literature (2006), the Annual Czech Literary Foundation Fund prose award (1995) and the Olomouc Regional Prize for contributions to culture (2010).

The prose writer and screenwriter Vladimír Körner is one of the most distinguished figures in Czech literature from the second half of the 20th century, and his importance and contribution to the areas of literature and screenwriting in postwar culture have been more or less equal, even though many of his projects and artistic goals could not be realized. However,  Körner does tend towards two basic themes in both his literary and screenwriting output. With the benefit of hindsight it is evident that he is more comfortable and more sensitive when interpreting the so-called present. As a writer this means the world of his childhood, the final period of the Second World War and the initial postwar period along with everything which is connected to it, such as the consequences of the catastrophic war for the human psyche – consequences which the writer sees as being more and more general, more pronouncedly timeless. Körner sets out his screenwriting work in a similar manner, particularly when it touches upon the aforementioned turbulent period, which over the decades has increasingly taken on the character of historical reminiscence. The issue of the Second World War and the highly explosive relationship between Czechs and Germans in politics and history, as well as the fates of individuals, had been taboo for a long period in Czech literature and there had developed a strictly black-and-white view of good and evil and negative and positive principles. It was these obstacles set up by the censors and the overall unreadiness of society to deal with postwar moral dilemmas which finally led Körner (who in his early years had not been drawn to historical subjects) to write historical prose, and then after the 1980s he turned more emphatically towards this genre. However, it is also true that his stories of past times are in their own way fictional historical novels and fictional historical prose. Even though the author brings his own personal knowledge of the given period to these books, each time his approach to history is an approach to the universal problems of human fate. He imprints upon them a general, often explicit, existential character. For this reason in particular it is possible to place Körner’s work – starting in the 1960s and including his work as a screenwriter – alongside the second wave of European literary existentialism which tried to address both the traumas of the Second World War and the threat to human existence when faced with nuclear destruction. As for the author’s poetics, it is significant that whilst literary critics point to (or question) the film-maker’s vision in his books with his propensity towards grand visual phenomena and spectacularly conceived themes, film critics, on the other hand, are reminded of the “literary quality” of his screenplays, in particular Körner’s refined and unusually sensitive “film language”, which shows itself in lyrical descriptions and in a subtle sense for social ambience and the immediate atmosphere of the moment, as well as a feeling for the characters’ emotions. Such “spectacularness” and a propensity for distinctive “living pictures” and effective settings are evident in the author’s later historical works (particularly from the 1980s), whilst the writer’s stories from the present – that is, from the turbulent year of 1945 (or the years that were to follow) – are based on precise character studies and an emphasis on the narrative’s symbolic context, as well as specific details and the aforementioned first-hand knowledge of the period. His novella Střepiny v trávě analyses the deformed psyche in both adults and children, in particular in the postwar years. However, even before this novella the writer had completed an existentially conceived novel, Slepé rameno, in which he attempted an eyewitness account of the existential problems of the previous generations: again within the context of wartime. His artistic novel Adelheid received great critical acclaim. It is similar to Durycha’s Boží duhu in that it emblematically represented the “landscape after the battle” in people’s souls, in this case the “victorious” Czech and the “defeated” German. The author once more turned to the year 1945 in Zánik samoty Berhof and in Zrození horského pramene, with both books laying emphasis on the representation of children’s damaged psyches and the possibilities of dealing with these psychic traumas. Paradoxically, it is not until the beginning of the new millennium that Körner returns to the theme of the Second World War and the following years, in a text which has until now only taken the form of a film (and television) script, and which he himself describes as being his most autobiographical work, even though it is not about his own life, rather (in a stylised way) about what he evidently saw and experienced in early childhood, what went on in front of his very eyes along the North Moravian border after the end of the Protectorate – and during the following fifteen years. From this viewpoint the author as screenwriter returns to the problems of his early work Střepiny v trávě. There is a significant existential character to one of the author’s most popular works, his first historical prose Písečná kosa, which is thematically similar to the dramatised novella Údolí včel. Here Vladimír Körner demonstrated his propensity towards a timeless understanding of moral dilemmas and more generally towards a theory of the meaning of life, at the same time, of course, breaking through certain traditional bad habits in our historical understanding, thoroughly integrating the fate of the Czech lands into a European context, even if this is done more at an existential level rather than from the point of view of detailed political events. In the following historical works, completed after a certain interval of time, the author partly strengthens the notion of history as the aforementioned “living pictures” (e.g. in the novel Lékař umírajícího času or in the novellas Post bellum 1866 or Anděl milosrdenství) and partly emphasises the analytical character description of broken and lost heroes, in which Körner innovates upon the older approaches of decadentism and naturalism to prose writing (e.g. in Život za podpis or in the book Oklamaný). While Vladimír Körner was at first concerned with the Middle Ages (e.g. in Písečná kosa), later on – with the exception of the book Smrt svatého Vojtěcha, which describes the Czech lands of the 10th century as a cradle of barbarism and a womb of iniquity – he was attracted on the one hand by Austria-Hungary in the period between the Prussian War and the First World War. Afterwards, however, the historical period in which he situated most of his stories, albeit existentially, became another world war – the Thirty Years’ War, as well as the period shortly beforehand, i.e. the period of King Rudolph in the Czech lands. In this period the author sets the aforementioned Lékař umírajícího času, a story about Jan Jessenius, as well as other striking prose works such as Psí kůže or the more recent novel Kámen nářku.  In these narratives, however, existential problems are moved to the background and esoteric problems are brought to the fore, emphasising the inevitable character of human conflict and tragedy. Several of the author’s works have been filmed (or dramatised), including Střepiny v trávě, Adelheid, Zánik samoty Berhof, Zrození horského pramene and Anděl milosrdenství. Since 2002 the Prague publishers Dauphin have been bringing out Körner’s collected works.

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This author profile was last updated in 2006.

Deutsch Vladimír KÖRNER

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