Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch / The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch
novel,
hardback, 135×205, pp 416, ISBN 978-80-7294-315-9
About the fate of one woman in a shattered world, the guilt of Czechs and Germans, whether forgiveness and mutual understanding are possible
On the night of 30/31 May 1945 Gerta Schnirch, the mother of a baby daughter, is “displaced” from Brno with the rest of the German community and nothing but a few personal belongings, and pointed in the direction of Vienna. The gruelling march ends in Pohořelice, where many of the expelled die in an epidemic of typhoid and dysentery. Gerta and several other German women save themselves by doing forced labour in southern Moravia, where they remain once the transports have ended. Having reclaimed her Czechoslovak citizenship, Gerta returns to Brno, where she lives through the tempestuous events of the second half of the twentieth century. This uncommonly subtle and powerful book addresses painful questions of guilt, vengeance and forgiveness between Czechs and Germans. We also witness an unusual mother-daughter relationship, which is distorted on the one hand by the limited space Czech Germans are forced to inhabit on the margins of society, on the other by a lack of mutual understanding between the two generations, difficulties in communication and the impossibility of conveying personal experience. The story is given a unique atmosphere by the genius loci of the unrestrainedly developing town of Brno.
Kateřina Tučková
- born 1980
- prose writer, curator
- a graduate in History of Art and Czech of the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University, Brno; currently
a postgraduate student at the Institute of Art History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague; author of many publications in the field of art history and a monograph on the writer Věra Sládková
- her debut work of prose is the novella Montespaniáda / Montespaniade (Větrné mlýny, 2006); her short story Poslední večer / The Last Evening is included in She Who Write (Artes Liberales, 2008), a reader of contemporary short stories by Czech women
Extract from novel The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch – Prologue (download PDF)
Foreign rights.
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