Emerging from Behind the Irony Curtain ― The Czech Republic in the Mid-1990s

The Czech Republic has struggled to throw off its cloak of communism and perform in the capitalist West. Since the early 1990s it has struggled to figure out where to go next. The author lived there during a crucial period of time, 1996-1997. He travelled everywhere through the Republic, lived with a Czech family in their high rise panelal apartment and tried to teach journalism at Masaryk University in Brno. He also talked to many of the main actors in this Czech drama, the playwrights, newspaper editors, communist party leaders, average citizens. Their outlooks of the future were filtered through the pervasive sense of irony that permeates Czech culture. Subjugated for most of their history since the seventeenth century; pawns in great power struggles involving neighboring Germany, Austria and Russia; guardians of breathtakingly beautiful Baroque cities set amidst the squalor of Soviet suburbs; caretakers of pleasant rolling farmlands, which were actually some of the world’s most polluted landscapes—the Czechs could easily see the best and worst in themselves. The author offers a comprehensive, no-holds-barred look at a country trying to come to terms with itself and the rest of the world.