Uncompromising – as only memories of life in exile in Germany can be.

Literary fiction

This novelistic memoir by literary historian Markéta Brousková, who lives in Germany, provides a detailed account of the life of the Czech exiles who arrived in Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s with idyllic notions about life there and returned after the revolution with similarly unrealistic expectations. This harsh, unkind and almost sarcastic depiction presents a blasphemous image of the life of Czech exiles and Czech provincialism in a circle of people who might be expected to exhibit more noble characteristics. A book of memories, a book of defiance, a book of stories.

 

 

Markéta Brousková (1941–2019) was a novelist and literary historian. She studied at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. She emigrated to Stuttgart in 1969 and then to West Berlin, where she worked at the Freie Universität. In 1995 she brought out the novel České taroky (Czech Tarot Cards), in which she looks at her own roots and the fate of her German Jewish family, and in 2019 her memoirs Nežádoucí svědek (An Unwanted Witness).