This book is the third in a trilogy that looks at the cultural history of Prague in order to
tell the larger story of competing notions of European modernity-Reformation and
Counter-Reformation empire and nation fascism and democracy-as they all played out on a
single stage. This volume begins in 1938 when Czechoslovakia was dismembered by the Munich
agreement and shortly before the invasion of the Third Reich and it runs until the present day
when liberal democracy appears to be giving way to right-wing populism (as in much of the
world). Like the previous volumes in the series it sees Prague as a palimpsest of the cultures
that overtook it-cultures that aimed to impose their own visions of modernity on the city. In
this book Sayer charts three major modernities: the Third Reich's brutal totalitarianism the
shifting face of Soviet communism and the supposed freedoms of Western capitalist democracy.
In Sayer's reading the Nazis Soviets and Western democrats each believed that Prague had
reached the end of history that it had achieved the final form of human government (in
Fukuyama's words). All were proved spectacularly wrong. As these political movements
disintegrated they returned the city to a state of banal surreality that Czech dissidents in
the 1960s dubbed Absurdistan. Putting the notion of Absurdistan at the center of his story
Sayer engages with artists creators and the things they produced which unsparingly revealed
the absurdity of the modern world and its notions of progress. He explores the work of Milan
Kundera Miloés Forman Vâaclav Havel and many others lesser known in the Anglophone world. He
examines the tradition of vulgar absurdist comedy beginning with Kafka and he shows how
Prague's cultural products have been marked by persistent moral ambiguity or in Kundera's
words the intoxicating relativity of human things since the mid-century. The overarching
argument of this book is that by looking to Prague's cultural history we can see that
modernity has never been a single or stable notion and as different ideologies of modernity
have come head-to-head they have produced a rich culture of ambiguity and absurdity. We
published the first two books in the trilogy The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998)
which spanned the 18th to the turn of the 20th century and Prague Capital of the Twentieth
Century (2013) which looked at modernism and revolutionary thinking in Prague in the first
half of the 20th century. Both books did well and Prague Capital of the Twentieth Century won
the prestigious George L. Mosse Prize for European cultural and intellectual history from the
American Historical Association
