(1973) is a Czech translator and journalist and an editor of the literary monthly Host.
Even if a humane and just society is just a dream, it is not one that humanity can afford to give up on. Of this much Walter Famler, editor-in-chief of Wespennest, remains convinced. A portrait in prose by former Host editor Marek Seckar.
Today, nothing suggests that Karl-Heinz Dellwo and his girlfiend Gabriele Rollnik differ from normality in any important way. They look like a common elderly married couple. They live in a cozy middle-class apartment in the center of Hamburg. They make great coffee and they have a cookbook by Jamie Oliver on the bookshelf in their kitchen. Yet, the appearances are misleading. Their fates have been very dramatic. Karl-Heinz Dellwo, now documentarist and publisher, is a former RAF member who directly participated in the death of two people. Child therapist Gabriele Rollnik is a former member of the anarchist Bewegung 2. Juni. She was involved in several kidnappings and prison break-outs. They both spent many years behind bars. Marek Seckar went to meet with them in Hamburg in order to hear about their past and present.
Heavy dependency on steadily declining state funds makes the situation for Czech journals unsustainable, says Host editor Marek Seckar. As a small sector of the cultural budget, journals funding barely registers wider policy trends. It is precisely this inconspicuousness that gives cause for concern.
British author Simon Mawer has used the history of Brno and the personalities connected with the city in two of his novels. His latest, The Glass Room, loosely based on the story of Mies van der Rohe’s famous Villa Tugendhat, was recently published in Czech to a very favourable reception. It would, however, be a mistake to connect Simon Mawer with only one book and one theme. Marek Seckar talks with the writer about real and literary buildings, Brno, and about art, science and uncertainty.
The Czech communist party might be an anachronism, but to ostracize it only prolongs its existence. Whether irrational or calculated, anti-communism in the Czech Republic distracts from more pressing problems, writes Marek Seckar.
The question is not how we can protect the EU from demagogic leaders, but how the EU can protect us from them. Marek Seckar, editor of Host, responds to Samual Abrahám’s warning that European stability is threatened by the type of illiberal politician gaining ground in the Visegrád Four nations.
Interviewed in “Host”, the Israeli novelist Avraham B. Yehoshua echoes Barack Obama’s Cairo speech on the necessity for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. “I am hopeful that Barack Obama will say to Israel: enough, enough with the settlements,” he says with foresight. “The settlements are the problem.”
