Prague
Prepare for the CSA
Every year, we compose a list of websites, books, films, and podcasts for our Summer Academy participants. Naturally, we know how busy you are, but we promise that any time spent with these publications will greatly enrich your visit and your teaching.
Please keep checking for updates, as we add to the list continually.
Podcasts
Prague off the Beaten Track
A podcast exploring the hidden gems of Prague, uncovering unique places, stories, and cultural experiences away from the usual tourist paths.
Bohemian
A look into the history, culture, traditions, and people of the Czech Republic from the eyes of two American expats.
Prague Times
This podcast looks at Prague, in the center of Europe, from a number of perspectives, including what it is now, what is has been and where it's going.
Films
While filmed mostly in Prague, this Oscar-winning epic gives deep insight into the genius of Mozart, much of whose life unfolded in Vienna. Through the eyes of rival composer Antonio Salieri, the film paints a vivid portrait of musical Vienna at the height of its cultural power. Watching it before attending a classical concert helps you understand the drama behind the music.
Factory manager gets army reserves to boost female workers' morale. Local beauty spurns them for jazz pianist who seduces her. She leaves for Prague to find him but his parents are displeased when she arrives.
This British and Czech co-production is based on the WWII mission to assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich, aka Operation Anthropoid. Starring Cillian Murphy, Jamie Dornan, and Czech actress Anna Geislerová, Anthropoid gives an insight into a defining moment in Czech history.
Kolya is a 1996 Czech drama film directed by Jan Svěrák and written by his father Zdeněk Svěrák, who also stars as the lead character. Set in late-Communist Czechoslovakia, the film explores the unlikely bond between a middle-aged Czech cellist and a young Russian boy.
Cutting It Short (Postřižiny) is a beloved 1980 Czechoslovak feel-good comedy directed by Jiří Menzel, based on the nostalgic novel by Bohumil Hrabal. Set in a quiet interwar small town, it follows the vivacious Maryška, whose unconventional behavior drives her conservative brewery-manager husband and the town board to distraction
Daisies (Czech: Sedmikrásky) is a 1966 Czech New Wave film directed by Věra Chytilová. The film is celebrated for its avant-garde style, feminist subtext, and anarchic humor, and it is considered a landmark of experimental and feminist cinema.
Books
Non-Fiction
The book takes readers from the Bohemian capital's thousand-year-old castle to the bomb shelters of London, from the desolate prison ghetto of TerezÍn to the highest councils of European and American government. Albright reflects on her discovery of her family's Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland's tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation
Fiction
Nineteenth-century Europe abounds with conspiracy both ghastly and mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian priests are strangled with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses by night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres.
Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles, to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.
The Engineer of Human Souls spins its own story from the torn entrails of Central Europe. yet what emerges is comedy - clack, grimacing and explosively funny, as peculiarly middle European as the despairing wit of prague's own Franz Kafka' Tim
Left unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle.
A favorite work of Czech humor, We Were a Handful depicts the adventures of five boys from a small Czech town through the diary of Petr Bajza, the grocer’s son. Written by Karel Polácek at the height of World War II before his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, this book draws on the happier years of Polácek’s own childhood as inspiration.
Bohumil Hrabal's post-war classic about a young man's coming of age in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is among his most beloved and accessible works. Closely Watched Trains is the subtle and poetic portrait of Miloš Hrma, a timid young railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief
Mendelssohn is on the Roof Full of dark humour and bitter irony, this moving novel traces the transformation of ordinary lives during the occupation of Prague. Weil is a neglected master of European literature, and this is one of only two of his novels to be translated into English.
War with the Newts (1936) is Karel Capek's darkly humorous allegory of early 20th-century Czech politics. Captain van Toch discovers a colony of newts in Sumatra which can not only be taught to trade and use tools, but also to speak.
Good-natured and garrulous, Švejk becomes the Austro-Hungarian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of the First World War - although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. The story of a 'little man' caught in a vast bureaucratic machine, The Good Soldier Švejk combines dazzling wordplay and piercing satire to create a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war.
