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Jiří Sozanský
Jiří Sozanský (born 27 June 1946) is a Czech sculptor, painter and graphic artist. He came from a poor background and worked in blue-collar jobs before being accepted as an exceptional talent to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He took manual jobs also as a student and graduate to keep his personal and creative freedom. He is an amateur boxer, founder of the Boxart group. His life was brutally affected by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and he was deeply touched by the sacrifice of Jan Palach. Sozanský was active organizer of various unofficial meetings and artistic activities at the Terezín Memorial or Old Most, demolished for coal mining, throughout the normalization until the fall of the communist regime. Then in the communist prison in Valdice and communist concentration camps at uranium mines in the Příbram District, or in besieged Sarajevo. In his work he consistently commemorates political prisoners and victims of the communist regime (Milada ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prague
Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its Prague metropolitan area, metropolitan area is home to approximately 2.3 million people. Prague is a historical city with Romanesque architecture, Romanesque, Czech Gothic architecture, Gothic, Czech Renaissance architecture, Renaissance and Czech Baroque architecture, Baroque architecture. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia and residence of several Holy Roman Emperors, most notably Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV (r. 1346–1378) and Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II (r. 1575–1611). It was an important city to the Habsburg monarchy and Austria-Hungary. The city played major roles in the Bohemian Reformation, Bohemian and the Protestant Reformations, the Thirty Years' War and in 20th-century history a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Political Prisoner
A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention. There is no internationally recognized legal definition of the concept, although numerous similar definitions have been proposed by various organizations and scholars, and there is a general consensus among scholars that "individuals have been sanctioned by legal systems and imprisoned by political regimes not for their violation of codified laws but for their thoughts and ideas that have fundamentally challenged existing power relations". The status of a political prisoner is generally awarded to individuals based on the declarations of non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International, on a case-by-case basis. While such statuses are often widely recognized by the international public, they are often rejected by individual governments accused of holding political prisoners, which tend to deny any bias in thei ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karolinum
Karolinum (formerly Latin: ''Collegium Carolinum'', in Czech ''Karlova kolej'') is a complex of buildings located in the Old Town of Prague. Karolinum, the seat of the Charles University, is one of the oldest dormitories situated in Central Europe. The dormitory was named after the Emperor Charles IV. History Shortly after the establishment of Charles University in 1348, the young institution encountered several organizational problems. One of the major complications was the lack of lecture and accommodation rooms for teachers and students. Emperor Charles IV, apparently inspired by the organization of the Sorbonne college in Paris and by the newly founded universities in Kraków (1364) and Vienna (1365), decided to donate to the school a new college. In 1366, the university received the house of the Jew Lazar, located in the Prague's Old Town. However, the school was given appropriate rooms only in the early 1380s by Wenceslaus, the son of Charles IV. Wenceslaus chose a re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Institute For The Study Of Totalitarian Regimes
The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes ( or ÚSTR) is a Czech government agency and research institute. It was founded by the Czech government in 2007 and is situated at Siwiecova street, Prague- Žižkov (the street is named after Ryszard Siwiec). Its purpose is to gather, analyse and make accessible documents from the Nazi and Communist totalitarian Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition from political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and completely controls the public sph ... regimes. The archives will also have documents from the former communist secret police, the StB or State Security. The institute is a founding member organisation of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, and hosts its secretariat. Exhibitions The institute shows exhibitions from other countries and has developed its own touring exhibitions. "Prague Through t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rudolf Höss
Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss (also Höß, Hoeß, or Hoess; ; 25 November 1901 – 16 April 1947) was a German SS officer and the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II, he was convicted in Poland and executed for war crimes committed on the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp and for his role in the Holocaust. Höss was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp (from 4 May 1940 to November 1943, and again from 8 May 1944 to 18 January 1945). He tested and implemented means to accelerate Hitler's order to systematically exterminate the Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe, known as the Final Solution. On the initiative of one of his subordinates, Karl Fritzsch, Höss introduced the pesticide Zyklon B to be used in gas chambers, where more than a million people were killed.Piper, Franciszek & Meyer, Fritjof"Overall analysis of the original sources and findings on deporta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi (; 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was a Jewish Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include: '' If This Is a Man'' (''Se questo è un uomo'', 1947, published as ''Survival in Auschwitz'' in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and '' The Periodic Table'' (1975), a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories, each named after a chemical element which plays a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written. Levi died in 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-storey apartment landing. His death was officially ruled a suicide, although that has been disputed by some of his friends and associates and attributed to an accident. Biography Early life Levi was born in 1919 i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1984 (novel)
''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (also published as ''1984'') is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by the English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final completed book. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a democratic socialist and an anti-Stalinist, modelled Britain under authoritarian socialism in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism and the practices of censorship and propaganda in Nazi Germany. More broadly, the book examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated. The story takes place in an imagined future. The current year is uncertain, but believed to be 1984. Much of the world is in perpetual war. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both authoritarian communism and fascism), and support of democratic socialism. Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella ''Animal Farm'' (1945) and the Utopian and dystopian fiction, dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including ''The Road to Wigan Pier'' (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and ''Homage to Catalonia'' (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction (Spanish Civil War), Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as George Orwell bibliograph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stories And Texts For Nothing
''Stories and Texts for Nothing'' is a collection of stories by Samuel Beckett. It gathers three of Beckett's short stories ("The Expelled," "The Calmative," and "The End": all written in 1946) and the thirteen short prose pieces he named "Texts for Nothing" (1950–1952). All of these works are collected in the Grove Press edition of Beckett's complete short prose. They were originally written in French and published in 1955 by Les Éditions de Minuit as ''Nouvelles et Textes pour rien'', with a second edition illustrated edition published by the same publisher in 1958. The Stories All three stories deal with the displacement or expulsion of old men who are forced to leave their modest lives in search of a new niche where they might fit. "The Expelled" Though the story deals with rejection and the forcible ejection of the narrator, it begins with the narrator's complaints regarding the difficulty of counting the stairs down which he had to go once he was expelled. The story ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tragicomic episodes of life, often coupled with black comedy and literary nonsense. A major figure of Irish literature and one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, he is credited with transforming the genre of the modern theatre. Best remembered for his tragicomedy play ''Waiting for Godot'' (1953), he is considered to be one of the last Modernism, modernist writers, and a key figure in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd." For his lasting literary contributions, Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both Frenc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Václav Havel
Václav Havel (; 5 October 193618 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and dissident. Havel served as the last List of presidents of Czechoslovakia, president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the Revolutions of 1989, fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays and memoirs. His educational opportunities having been limited by his bourgeois background, when freedoms were limited by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Havel first rose to prominence as a playwright. In works such as ''The Garden Party (play), The Garden Party'' and ''The Memorandum'', Havel used an Theatre of the absurd, absurdist style to criticize the Communist system. After participating in the Prague Spring and being blacklisted a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ivan Martin Jirous
Ivan Martin Jirous (23 September 1944 – 9 November 2011) was a Czech poet and dissident, best known as the artistic director of the Czech psychedelic rock group The Plastic People of the Universe, and later one of the key figures of the Czech underground during the communist regime. He is more frequently known as Magor, which can be roughly translated as "shithead",Zantovsky 2014, p161 "loony", or "fool" (though meant as a positive title), a nickname given to him by the experimental poet . Trained as an art historian but unable to work in this field in Czechoslovakia under the Communist regime, Jirous became a member of the dissident subculture, and during the period of normalisation, Jirous was imprisoned five times for his activities. His particular contribution to the dissident movement was the concept of "second culture", according to which simply expressing oneself through forbidden cultural and artistic activities would ultimately undermine the totalitarian system,Zantovs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
