Bücher von Peter Demetz

Peter Demetz ist der letzte Zeuge einer Stadt, die wie keine andere über Jahrhunderte für das fruchtbare Miteinander der verschiedenen europäischen Kulturen stand. Deutsche, Tschechen und Juden verband in Prag eine wechselhafte gemeinsame Geschichte, die mit Hitler endgültig zu Ende ging. Der Zeit der deutschen Okkupation zwischen 1939 und 1945, zugleich die finstersten Jahre, die er in seiner Heimatstadt verbrachte, hat Peter Demetz nun endlich ein großes Erinnerungsbuch gewidmet, das ein einzigartiges Licht auf eine alles verändernde Epoche der europäischen Geschichte wirft.

Prague is at the core of everything both wonderful and terrible in Western history, but few people truly understand this city's unique culture. In Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz strips away sentimentalities and distortions and shows how Czechs, Germans, Italians, and Jews have lived and worked together for over a thousand years. .

A dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's great capital during the Nazi Protectorate With this successor book to Prague in Black and Gold, his account of more than a thousand years of history in the great Central European capital, Peter Demetz focuses on the six years that Prague was under German occupation in World War II: from the bitter morning of March 15, 1939, when Hitler arrived from Berlin to set his seal on the Nazi takeover of the Czechoslovak government, until the liberation of Bohemia in April 1945. Demetz was a boy living in Prague then, and here he joins his objective chronicle of the city under Nazi control with his personal memories of that period, expertly interweaving a superb account of the German authorities' diplomatic, financial, and military machinations with a brilliant description of Prague's evolving resistance and underground opposition. The result is a complex, continually surprising book filled with rare human detail and warmth, the gripping story of a great city meeting the dual challenge of occupation and of war.