Lecture

There the world moves where the power is aimed!

The Czech myth about the Bata system from the perspective of two Prague-based German-writing authors Walter Seidl and Ludwig Winder.

Many discussions of the current political scene also concern the Bata myth and the myth of the ‘First Republic’. Two German authors from the Czech environment cause to consider whether we really have what we wanted, thirty years after the Velvet Revolution. Seidl’s view of Zlín in Der Berg der Liebenden (1936) is not nearly as positive as it may seem at first sight. In Winder’s novels, Dr. Muff and Die nachgeholten Freuden Bata’s system is then portrayed even more critically.

Lecturer: Zdeněk Mareček – Germanist, FF MU

The programme is held in cooperation with the German Cultural Association of the Brno Region.

The micro-world of the Jewish community during the normalization period

The period after the Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 was called “normalization” by the communist ideology coiners. With the return of Stalinist communist methods, the obsession of state authorities with all things Jewish returned. Fighting an imaginary, ubiquitous Zionist conspiracy could not leave the Jewish communities untouched. Their existence in the period of normalization represented a certain microworld in which similar processes as in the general society took place in a smaller space but no less intensively.
We invite you to a short tour of the Brno synagogue, accompanied by a guided walk down Ponávka Street to the hall of the Brno branch of the Jewish Museum in Prague, followed by a lecture by documentary filmmaker Martin Šmok, the author of the exhibition „Labyrinth of Normalization: The Jewish Community as the Mirror of the General Society“.
The programme takes place in cooperation with the Jewish Museum in Prague.

16:00 Meeting point in front of the synagogue at Skořepka 13.