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The study deals with the thematisation of Jewishness in the inter-war prose writing of four authors from assimilated Jewish families: Richard Weiner (born 1884), František Langer (born 1888), Karel Poláček (born 1892) and Egon Hostovský (born 1908). Whereas the prose of the last-named author has received considerable attention in contemporary literary history, in the case of the remaining authors their Jewishness remains on the periphery of scholarly interest, or is mentioned in works of a synthetic character. A detailed reading of the work of all three prose writers reveals that for them Jewish culture did not represent an essential literary theme, and indeed they barely mentioned it whatsoever. An exception relates to the abundant references to anti-Semitism in Karel Poláček’s cycle of novels about the provincial town, which can be explained among other factors by the aggravated political situation in the second half of the 1930s.

In the Czech culture of the turn of the 20th century we can see the phenomenon of the orientalising of the Jewish populace, in which the archetype of the beautiful Jewess (la belle Juive) occupied a significant and somewhat different position. This study examines types of depiction of the beautiful Jewess in travelogues and fictional literature, and divides these tendencies into three types. The beautiful Jewess is construed by means of biblical similes and antecedents, while these often concern heavily eroticised representations that are not based on a biblical template but rather arise out of the imagination of the authors of the 19th century. The erotic subtext plays a fundamental role also in the case of the second tendency, though here the primary precursor is not a biblical figure or narrative, but the fictional character in the story rather represents a unique existence, without direct and determining intertextual ties. This type of beautiful Jewess is characterised by a significant borderline role between the Orient and the Occident, and at the same time in the narratives she also occupies the role of a tragic figure. The final tendency is to conceive the beautiful Jewess negatively, in which the narrative accentuates her use of her beauty in order to pursue her own selfish interests. Among other factors, the study examines modes of the orientalising of beautiful Jewesses, and reflects upon whether they concern positive or negative representations.

Philip Roth made no secret of his great admiration for the work of Franz Kafka, which ultimately brought him to Prague in the 1970s and fostered his interest in Czech culture. This contribution focuses on the reception of the personality and work of Franz Kafka in Philip Roth’s non-fiction writing. The first section focuses on Roth’s essential Kafkaesque essay ‘“I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting”; or Looking at Kafka’ from 1973, in which Roth combines an empathetic portrait of his favourite author with a counterfactual vision of Kafka’s life, in which the author of the Trial and the Castle did not die of tuberculosis and instead fled from the Holocaust to the United States, where he became Roth’s uncle. In the second section, based on Roth’s dialogue with Ivan Klíma from 1990, we document how Kafka serves Roth in his reflections on the position and role of the writer in society.

Even though the anthology Jewish Names, often called the beginning of Czech alternative culture, was published in 1995, several central questions concerning this seminal collection from the early 1950s remain unclear: Who initiated it, when was it assembled, and what is its connection with the causa of the ‘Trotzkyites’ in Prague and later anti-semitic show trials? Answers can be found if one appreciates the pivotal role of Honza Krejcarová in this unique project. The article connects dots between Czech history during the Protectorate when young Honza witnessed her mother Milena Jesenská’s resistance activities, and the late 1940s of Stalinist Czechoslovakia when the State Security started surveilling and persecuting Krejcarová. Based on archival studies the article argues for the parallelism between secret service practices (interrogation, the revealing of names in the form of denunciation) and automatic surrealist writing techniques. Drawing on the example of the name of the Author it analyses the paratextual structure of the anthology connected to its literary models, mainly from France. Jewish Names is a rich collection of fictitious ‘Jewish’ pseudonyms attributed to real Czech writers, stressing the vulnerability of the literary intelligentsia, their mineurité. And it is this paratextual construction which can be considered as the most daring and auto-referential aspect of this illegal publishing project. The article reveals problematic aspects of the chosen path of pseudonymy and anonymity. Changing or omitting one’s name is a common trait of female biographies, complicating the attribution of authorship. The article shows how pseudonymy takes its toll on an existential, gender, political, and historical level — precluding until today the proper names from entering Czech literary history

The study focuses on Bronislav Wellek, Adolph Donath, Camill Hoffmann, Oskar Wiener and Otto Hauser and their translations and articles on modern Czech literature published in the German journal Aus fremden Zungen (1891–1910). This fortnightly established by Joseph Kürschner dealt exclusively with foreign literature. Its openness to all kinds of literary currents and little-known minor literatures was unique within the system of German literary journals. A comparison indicates the key role played by mediators. The primary requirement for their activity was multilingualism, and it turns out that in the case of all the figures under consideration, language did not necessarily have the nationally symbolic significance ascribed by politics, and their identity basically did not depend on their use of one language or another. The progress and success of this mediation was not just decided by the literary standard of the translation, but all five translators were concerned to improve the standard of translation, as well as to change the approach to translation in general. The choice of text and its succeeded publication was determined by the involvement of the mediators in the Czech and German literary context. Hence Bronislav Wellek focused primarily on translations and interpretations of poetry by Jaroslav Vrchlický and J. S. Machar, whom he knew personally and who also introduced him to their own literary and intellectual circles. It was thanks to Vrchlický that he printed his translations in Eduard Albert’s anthologies Poesie aus Böhmen (1893–1895). Machar was responsible for other translations, e.g. Hilbert’s drama Vina, which Hermann Bahr was to help promote in the German-language sphere. Between 1896 and 1898, Adolph Donath attempted to build up his position as mediator between the Moderní revue circle and some representatives of Viennese modernism (e.g. Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg and Felix Rappaport). For Aus fremden Zungen he translated an impressionistic short story by Luisa Ziková Bílý květ (White Flower). In a fivepart series and an accompanying study modern Czech prose (J. Zeyer, V. Mrštík, F. X. Svoboda, J. K. Šlejhar and R. Svobodová) was presented by Camill Hoffmann and Oskar Wiener. Their mediation activities were based on direct relations with Prague Czech authors of the youngest generation, on whom Hoffmann also focused in his articles for other German journals, though in Aus fremden Zungen he was concerned with surveying the modernist work of the 1890s. Samples of Czech prose were followed on by translations from modern Czech lyric poetry (O. Březina, A. Sova, K. Hlaváček and V. Dyk) written by Otto Hauser. This polyglot and translator from numerous languages was a different kind of Viennese mediator. In contrast to Wellek and Hoffmann, Hauser was only in sporadic correspondence with Sova and Březina. His literary assessment of their poetry was based on his broad knowledge of contemporary European poetry, including minor literatures (such as Danish, Dutch and Croatian) and as such is of importance. These examples show that literary mediation is a complex rapprochement of variously defined and construed contexts, which have their reflected and unrealized limits.

The article examines vampires in Czech Decadent literature as polyvalent symbols that stand simultaneously for culture as a vampiric force and for decadence as a poisonous and infectious phenomenon. Vampires can also be associated with homosexuality, particularly in the work of Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic. In addition, they represent the power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had been draining the blood of Bohemia for centuries, leaving Prague a “dead city”, as well as the Czechs’ resistance to their subaltern status through a poisonous entropy that destroys not only the oppressors but also Czechs themselves. As such, Czech vampires have their counterpart in barbarians, who threaten to destroy the empire from without.

The article focuses on Milan Kundera’s works from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, particularly on Poslední máj (The Last of May) in the versions of 1955 and 1961, and Kundera’s first Art of the Novel (Umění románu), a study on the works of Vladislav Vančura, finished in 1959. The article argues that these works are interesting not only from the point of view of Kundera’s then Marxist-Leninist political stance, but also with respect to genre theory and practise as it can be retraced in his writing before the appearance of the famous novels of the mid-1960s. The article demonstrates that the relationship between lyricism and the novel in these early works exhibits many features which are to be found in his later work. The novel takes up a privileged position — albeit with a different and more explicitly political, party-bound motivation, representing the “great epic” required by “the people”. The article also contains reflections on Kundera’s role in the Czechoslovak Stalinists cult of Julius Fučík, related to the genre issues mentioned insofar as Fučík is placed by Kundera in the same category as Vančura in the first Art of the Novel.

This article presents a research project on the history of mentalities in Czech culture of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. The project analyses textbooks for the teaching of Czech literature for secondary schools. It focuses in particular on the excerpts from the literary works and analyses their potential for the learners to acquire cultural and historical knowledge as well as personal skills. These excerpts are conceptualized here as Denkbilder, a term that has been used repeatedly in German literature studies recently to define short prose texts that stimulate imagination as well as reflection. Responding to the high number of literary works from world literature in the Czech textbooks analysed for the project, this article addresses the contrasting presentations of one classic of German literature, Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues). It illustrates how a single literary work can be presented in different ways in literature textbooks, offering the learners different approaches for relating to the text and activating their cognitive and imaginative resources.