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.

An entrancing avant-garde adventure at the dawn of the modern ageIn 1909, municipal authorities built an airfield in northern Italy and invited leading pilots to compete on it. The show attracted thousands of spectators--among them Giacomo Puccini and Gabriele d'Annunzio--and reporters, including, amazingly, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Luigi Barzini. Peter Demetz's sparkling new book tells the enchanting story of what happened in the air and on the ground before, dur...

The acclaimed historian and author of Prague in Black and Gold shares a dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's capital under Nazi occupation.From 1939 to 1945, Czechoslovakia endured as a Nazi Protectorate. Peter Demetz lived in Prague at that time, designated a "first-degree half-Jew," according to the Nazis' terrible categories. In Prague in Danger, he joins his objective chronicle of the city under Germa...

Only recently available for the first time in English, Panorama is the newly rediscovered first novel of H. G. Adler, a modernist master whose work has been compared to that of Kafka, Joyce, and Solzhenitsyn. A brilliant epic told in ten distinct vignettes, Panorama is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of the young Josef Kramer. It moves from the pastoral World War I–era Bohemia of Josef’s youth, to a German boarding school fu...

The towering twentieth century thinker delve into literature, philosophy, and his own life experience in this "extraordinary collection" ( Publishers Weekly).A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berl...

A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.Benjamin moves seamlessly from literary criticism ...

Max Brod prägte den Begriff Prager Kreis für die Treffen mit seinen Schriftstellerkollegen und -freunden Oskar Baum, Felix Weltsch und Franz Kafka - später kam noch Ludwig Winder dazu. In seinem Erinnerungsbuch schreibt er nicht nur über diese Gruppe, sondern zieht größere Kreise, die alle wichtigen Prager deutschsprachigen Autoren umfassen. Es ist nicht zuletzt Max Brods Verdienst, dass die literarische Öffentlichkeit außer auf Kafka auch auf die anderen Prager deutschsprachigen Autoren b...