Touha po milované vlasti. Svědectví o české kultuře v terezínském ghettu a o poválečné reintegraci

• Authors: Lisa Peschelová

Title variants

EN

LONGING FOR THE HOMELAND: CZECH CULTURE IN THE THERESIENSTADT GHETTO AND POST-WAR REINTEGRATION

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

This article examines three memoirs by survivors of the Terezín (in German, Theresienstadt) ghetto, and especially their testimony about the cultural life of the ghetto, in the context of postwar reintegration. All Czech-Jewish survivors of the concentration camps returned to a society very different from the prewar Czechoslovakia they remembered. Many found themselves struggling to adapt to the complete rejection of German-language culture, the shift to the political left, and postwar anti-Semitism. The authors of these three memoirs were all over sixty years of age, were all bilingual, and before the war had served as ambassadors between Czech- and German-language culture. In their postwar memoirs, published in Czech, they employed their descriptions of the cultural life of the ghetto as a reintegration technique. That is, by describing their intense love of the specifically Czech works performed in Terezín, they attempted to establish common ground with their non-Jewish fellow Czechs and overcome the suspicion engendered by their prewar association with German-language culture.

Keywords

EN

TEREZIN; THERESIENSTADT; CZECH JEWS; REINTEGRATION; AUREDNICKOVA ANNA; FEDER RICHARD; UTITZ EMIL; PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Česká literatura (Czech Literature)
• Year: 2010
• Volume: 58
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 444-464

Contributors

author

Lisa Peschelová

• Česká literatura, redakce, Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, v.v.i., Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic