You learn in Ostrava that you can't trust the underground when you ask about the small pipes that stick out of the ground in the middle of the city. Ostrava is built on coal seams that have been exploited for many decades. The tunnels have now been abandoned, but they still produce methane gas, which can explode under certain circumstances and is therefore released upwards in a controlled manner through the small pipes. He advises people not to smoke nearby, says Petr Hruška. And lights his next cigarette, at a safe distance from the pipe.
Hruška, born in 1964, a tall, slim man with long gray hair, is the most famous poet in the Czech Republic. His father had grown up in the prosperous industrial city of Ostrava and later married a young woman from the green “Bohemian Paradise” in the north of Czechoslovakia. It wasn't easy for her to adjust to the coalfield, where she worked as a nurse and had to deal with always drunk, aggressive miners, says her son. Back then, the city was a place where people moved to quickly earn above-average wages in industry. Then they moved away again.
Hruška found work as a literary scholar in Brno and Prague and continues to live in Ostrava. He went to school here, in the nearby Comenius Park by the river he recites his poems to himself at night and laughs at the warnings of his family, who see him as a victim of attacks, while, as he says, there is no place in Ostrava that would be safer: because "all the murderers and robbers are waiting at the stops - there is only crazy Hruška in the park."
This is how his latest volume of poems emerged from orality, which is now available in German from Voland & Quist. “And I saw my face” is a cycle based on the travel diary of Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed around the world for the first time with Magellan's expedition from 1519 to 1522. Hruška's short poems trace Pigafetta's amazement at the foreign world he visits, the ignorance and underlying aggression of the European that shimmers in Pigafetta's almost chronically brief notes, but above all the realization that, despite all the differences, there is no completely new world to discover. This sharpens your awareness of the unknown, changeable and uncontrollable in your own environment.
Hruška also describes his own relationship with Ostrava. The city, he says, with its unadorned harshness, is no place for writing poetry. But that is why it makes the poet immune to “escapism and romanticism”. Anyone who is thrown here understands that this is their world, “there is no other”. And anyone who wants to achieve something here cannot demand it. He has to take care of it himself. The city's episcopal church, which was threatening to sink into the leaky underground, could only be saved through a citizens' initiative that raised the money to fill the cavern beneath the church with concrete. Ostrava, says Hruška, is characterized by multiple insecurities, tangible material ones such as the sinking or shaking ground, but also social ones. This can only be good for literature.
In fact, in contemporary Czech literature, which will be appearing as guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair this fall, the expression of fluctuating conditions can be perceived everywhere. Nothing is certain, everything is in upheaval, for example in the novel “Burned Out” by Petr Šesták, born in 1981, which tells of a bicycle courier in the big city. For the young man who delivers food in a big city, the environment becomes one big “you” that is hostile to him in the form of jostling SUVs or other road users. He is in no way protected, and when he later joins an activist group against the excesses of road traffic, it quickly becomes apparent that their path is leading him even further into social exclusion.
While Šesták's protagonist has little to lose materially, Tomáš, an aging journalist who is at the center of Jáchym Topol's new novel "There Is No Hell", published in German by Suhrkamp, is reasonably well off at the beginning of the book. In the end he lost everything, not least because he didn't notice the crumbling of his social existence or at least didn't take it seriously. Topol describes this process as the result of a lie in life, which the reader - past Tomáš - clearly perceives. When external events occur that massively shake up normal life, especially Russia's attack on Ukraine, which awakens fears and memories of 1968 in the Czech Republic, Tomáš has nothing to counter them. What if the Russians come back?
It is perhaps the most pressing question that arises in many texts in contemporary Czech literature: What about people who cannot rely on anything, who have to be constantly flexible in order to survive in a fluctuating world? Or who do not feel able to behave in accordance with the requirements placed on them?
The most impressive literary evidence of this constitution is currently Marek Torčík's novel “What Time Doesn't Take”. The book retrospectively describes the path of young Marek, who grows up in a Moravian industrial town at the beginning of the new millennium and gradually becomes aware of his homosexuality - in a decidedly homophobic environment. His attempts to fit in and not stand out do not have the desired success, and the only way out of the deeply depressing situation is to flee to Prague. But the clever author repeatedly shows what part the massive insecurity in Marek's environment plays in this atmosphere. The boy spends his school years in the years that followed the Velvet Revolution of 1989, in a time of political freedom that went hand in hand with massive economic restructuring and demanded a lot from people.
So everything is a consequence of capitalism? Czech literature has been suggesting for several years that this would be too short-sighted by focusing on a second disturbance. Since the turn of the millennium, numerous novels have been published that deal with the great upheaval of 1945, which ended the centuries-long coexistence of Germans and Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia. Particularly among the younger generation, the question of the legacy of former German citizens and the void that resulted from the expulsion after the end of the war is raised.
This is achieved most impressively in Kateřina Tučková's novel "Gerta. The German Girl" from 2009, which was also published in translation by Klak Publishers in 2018. It focuses on the expulsion of the German population from their hometown of Brno shortly after the end of the Second World War, but also how this injustice was later dealt with in Czechoslovak society. The author, who had spent a long time researching it in Brno, aroused a lot of resistance, but also received a lot of approval in the Czech Republic. Brno's mayor apologized to the displaced people, and this spring Sudeten German Day took place in Brno - something that would have been unthinkable for decades.
Other Czech novels, such as the recent “Divided House” by Alice Horáčková or some books by Jaroslav Rudiš, also ask about how Germans and Czechs once lived together and what is missing today. Radka Denemarková's novel “Chocolate Blood” begins in the 19th century. It is dedicated to an icon of Czech literature, Božena Němcová, who wrote the novel “Grandmother” and numerous Czech fairy tales, including the basis for the film “Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella”. Denemarková mirrors Němcová's life as an author with that of the much freer French writer George Sand and describes how Němcová, who actually stands between German and Czech, is pushed in a direction that reduces her to just one language. For Denemarková, this goes hand in hand with an idyllic, almost kitschy image of the Moravian province.
Tučková's books, of which a total of around half a million copies have been sold, are published by the Brno publishing house Host, whose authors will be represented in particularly large numbers at the Frankfurt Book Fair. There is no great pressure here to orientate oneself towards the all-powerful metropolis of Prague, and the decision of the German publishers Suhrkamp and Fischer to move from Frankfurt to Berlin in order to benefit from the spirit of the capital is met with little understanding in the Brno publishing house on an old industrial site. In general, Brno is in some respects central to this guest country appearance, which, like the one in Leipzig in 2019, will again be led by Tomáš Kubíček, the director of the Moravian State Library in Brno, and Martin Krafl.
Anyone who asks what is missing, who explores the gaps, quickly ends up in the space of possibilities in literature. Fantasy has a long tradition in the Czech Republic; it is hardly a coincidence that escalating technical visions were particularly influential in Czech literature at the beginning of the 20th century - for example Karel and Josef Čapek with the play “R. U. R.” and the neologism “robot”. In his great novel “The Other City,” which was written in the 1990s and was only published in German last fall, Michal Ajvaz tells how the whole of Prague can be supplemented by a fantastic twin, a parallel city connected to the one we are familiar with by crossings.
Jonáš Zbořil addresses such gaps in the reality of our cities with his novel “Flora” from 2024. He describes a couple with an unfulfilled desire to have children who suddenly meet an abandoned creature - human and non-human at the same time - and hide it in an actually inaccessible part of the city, a place that lies fallow, is possibly contaminated and takes on a life of its own. Is this wasteland growing, is it something that civilization needs to protect itself from? Or is it, on the contrary, the starting point for new creativity, a possibility for change in a rigid society?
Shaking ground here too, and in the reality of the city of Ostrava, an empty space is hardly physically tangible, but is all the more present in conversations. It is the poet Jan Balabán, who died in 2010, an exceptional figure among the city's literary figures. And if you listen to the stories that Petr Hruška tells about his friend, with whom he had a close working relationship including mutual proofreading, and if you read what little Balabán has published in German - an essay about Ostrava, an excerpt from his novel "The Black Aries" in the magazine "Lichtungen" and a story in "Die Horen" - then you wish even more that German publishers would take on the author.
The changes in the post-industrial age also shaped Ostrava. An area of huge disused machines, conveyor belts and chimneys between the city highway and the railway line has become the magnificent backdrop for the annual Colors of Ostrava festival. At its edge a small bridge leads over the railway tracks. It is dedicated to Balabán and the titles of his books are inscribed on its railing. “We are here” means one thing, “Maybe we will go” means another.
