Peter Demetz is the author of many books, including The Air Show at Brescia, 1909 (FSG, 2002) and Prague in Black and Gold (H&W, 1997). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"Prague in Danger is a compulsive read, and very finely done. There
is by now a mass of more or less analytical commentary on the
Protectorate, and of course we have powerful memoirs and personal
testimony. But I haven't seen the two genres combined in this way,
and with such great sensitivity to the interplay of public and
private.
Demetz conveys very poignantly, and with sharp insight, just what
it was like to live day to day in occupied Prague, and moreover to
live right at the intersection of the Czech, Jewish and German
spheres. He embodies exactly what was destroyed by Nazi thuggery
and then by Czech vengefulness. I enjoyed too the forays into
cultural history--of jazz or film, for example, or about Orten and
Jesenska; and I hope that they can be appreciated, even by those
who know nothing of the background, as conveying a flavour of the
period and place.
The politics are likewise depicted with a sure touch and sound
judgment, as well as with an eye for the unfamiliar vignette, even
in the case of the best-known episodes. Demetz's book should
sharpen many readers' sense of the peculiar tragedy of the very
last phase of the old multicultural Prague whose downfall he
chronicles." --Robert Evans, Regius Professor of History, Oxford
University "Demetz conveys very poignantly, and with sharp insight,
just what it was like to live day to day in occupied Prague, and
moreover to live right at the intersection of the Czech, Jewish and
German spheres. He embodies exactly what was destroyed by Nazi
thuggery and then by Czech vengefulness. I enjoyed too the forays
into cultural history--of jazz or film, for example, or about Orten
and Jesenska; and I hope that they can be appreciated, even by
those who know nothing of the background, as conveying a flavour of
the period and place.
The politics are likewise depicted with a sure touch and sound
judgment, as well as with an eye for the unfamiliar vignette, even
in the case of the best-known episodes. Demetz's book should
sharpen many readers' sense of the peculiar tragedy of the very
last phase of the old multicultural Prague whose downfall he
chronicles." --Robert Evans, Regius Professor of History, Oxford
University "The politics are likewise depicted with a sure touch
and sound judgment, as well as with an eye for the unfamiliar
vignette, even in the case of the best-known episodes. Demetz's
book should sharpen many readers' sense of the peculiar tragedy of
the very last phase of the old multicultural Prague whose downfall
he chronicles." --Robert Evans, Regius Professor of History, Oxford
University "A rich and intricate story . . . [Demetz] deftly tells
the legends of the city's origin . . . He deliberately avoids the
sanitized and prettified guidebook approach to Prague in favor of a
more somber register which acknowledges that conflicts were never
far beneath the surface and could explode in the most brutal
forms." --R.J.W. Evans, The New York Review of Books on Prague in
Black and Gold "[Demetz] writes with the ease and authority of a
man showing us his old neighborhood. He seems to be on speaking
terms with the many poets, chroniclers, rabbis, and clerics who
lived and wrote in Prague, and allows us to read history through
their lives and words . . . Reading Demetz is more like taking a
graduate course with a master teacher: You know you are in the
hands of an authority." --Helen Epstein, The Boston Sunday Globe on
Prague in Black and Gold
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