Czech Books Radka Denemarková and the importance of digging up skulls
The novel “Peníze od Hitlera” (Money from Hitler), is one of the best Czech books I’ve read for a long time, and luckily for English-speaking readers, it has just been published in an excellent English translation by Women’s Press in Toronto. When it first appeared in Czech over three years ago, Money from Hitler caused quite a stir; it won the prestigious Magnesia Litera award, but Czech critics remained divided. Perhaps this is no surprise. The author, 41-year-old Radka Denemarková, chose one of the most sensitive and painful episodes of modern Czech history as her starting point, a subject that for many remains taboo to this day. Her book goes back to the days just after the end of World War Two, when tens of thousands of Czechoslovakia’s German-speakers were being rounded up and expelled from the country. It is no secret that the expulsions, especially in these early stages, were often accompanied by acts of violence, sometimes quite indiscriminate. In her novel Radka Denemarková literally pulls these events out from the topsoil of the recent past, as we see in the vivid opening chapter, when a small boy digs up a rather unusual object in his parents’ orchard with his little green spade. Here is an extract:
Radka Denemarková
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