Today you have to lure men away from cell phones, 30 years ago from the television, and more than 100 years ago from the pub. The Czech writer Alice Horáčková opens her novel “House Divided” with a wonderful scene in which children are sent by their mothers and grandmothers to fetch the fathers home from playing cards because dinner is ready at home.
It is the most interesting book about the Czech Republic's appearance as guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair, because it is set in the Sudetenland, this region that was once Habsburg, Czechoslovak since 1918 and annexed by Hitler after 1938, and which became purely Czech after the expulsion of the Germans after 1945. Here, on the Bohemian side of the Giant Mountains, small farmers and forest workers, glass blowers and other craftsmen, as well as postmen, priests, village school teachers and some entrepreneurs traditionally lived. For centuries it hardly mattered whether your name was Emil Hollmann or Zdenka Honcu, whether you spoke German or Czech. Benetzko is one of the few villages with a Czech majority, and nothing prevents Zdenka Honcu from marrying one of the Hollmann boys from the village.
Already in the first chapters, Horáčková offers a rich family panorama. Village life does not mean idyll. Especially not in this harsh area in the shadow of Sněžka, where it is winter for half of the year and cold for the other half.
The action begins around 1900, when people still belong to the Imperial and Royal Monarchy and the achievements of modernity also arrive here, such as “these boards from abroad”. How Zdenka learns to ski and the eroticism involved is described so delicately that with this book - despite its 880 pages - you know early on: you want to get involved with these characters, you want to immerse yourself in this family saga. Horáčková keeps most chapters short as vignettes. She can do quick dialogues and compact, concise scenes.
In Benetzko there is “no wedding, no baptism and no dance without a fight,” but that has nothing to do with ethnicity, but rather with normal neighborhood feuds that have been known since Gottfried Keller. Things only became political when people in the new state of Czechoslovakia were asked to clarify their affiliation in censuses. Horáčková describes, with a sense of tragicomicism, how cheating and manipulation took place - on both sides. In the fight for one's own school building, the culture war (fueled by officials from distant capitals) became apparent early on. After the Munich Agreement in 1938, Benetzko was suddenly divided. The upper (German) part can only be entered with a pass, which poses absurd challenges for village life and the post office.
Due to the multi-perspective of its characters, “Divided House” does not take a national side, but tells the story: Czech and German characters, victims, perpetrators, followers – and everything in between. A figure like Hans Hollmann, the textile dealer, tells us how non-ideological Germans seized the opportunity to enrich themselves through Aryanization loans after the annexation of the Sudetenland and the German occupation of the “rest of Czechia”. Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler's governor in the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”, and his wife Lina, are woven into the plot of the novel as people from contemporary history. Horáčková incorporates dates and contemporary historical events into the novel in a very measured manner, so that she does not reduce her family saga to a mere decoration of contemporary historical events.
Similar to how many Germans took advantage of the fact that they were in charge on a small scale during the Nazi years, after the German defeat at the end of the Second World War, some Czechs looted from neighbors before they were officially expelled: "You have three hours to pack. You leave the keys in the lock outside." In the end, bitterness remains on both sides: among the displaced people, who are insulted as “Bohemians” in their new homeland, often Bavaria. And those who remain are now “acting as if they were Czechs”. But what happened to the mixed existences?
Horáčková, born in 1980, is one of the younger Czechs who are now looking for the German that was long part of Bohemia. Her own family had a German (Hollmann) branch that adopted a Czech name after 1945 and hid its German identity until the next generation. With the Beneš Decrees, the Czechs not only drove out the Germans, but also everything German from themselves. The fact that things always get ugly in history when only the pure and unambiguous are valid is an experience that the historian Andreas Kossert also tells about this autumn using the example of his grandmother ("Elsa's World").
For her book, Horáčková researched relatives, archives and parish chronicles. Because every relative told her their version of things, she knew early on: This had to be a novel. No medium offers more opportunities for nuances and ambiguities.
The fact that Czechs can also be perpetrators and Germans can also be victims sparked debate almost 20 years ago, when Radka Denemarková's novel “A Wonderful Spot of Earth” was published. Today in the Czech Republic many historians and writers are working on the topic, but in “families there is still silence,” said Horáčková at an event on “House Divided.” We hope your novel has many readers – and perhaps even a film adaptation.
Alice Horáčková: House Divided. Translated from Czech by Sophia Marzolff. Diogenes, 880 pages, 28 euros
