From Prague to New York: Two Lives of Josef Guttmann, Two Views of a 20th Century Tragedy

Two lives, two names, two perspectives on Soviet communism and its post-war expansion into Eastern Europe. They may seem neatly separated, yet they are united by one man’s experience and his attempt to understand the hopes and tragedies of the 20th century. Josef Guttmann, a leftist intellectual and later member of the Communist Party leadership, broke with the party in the early 1930s, becoming, alongside Záviš Kalandra, a prominent anti-leftist. He left Czechoslovakia at the end of 1938 and three years later settled in New York, where he worked under a pseudonym as an expert on events in the Soviet Bloc, a critic of totalitarianism and the author of the first articles on anti-Semitism in the Slanský trial. His Czech texts from the 1930s, together with studies and essays on the nature of communist regimes, genocide and anti-Semitism written in the United States, were selected by Jacques Rupnik and are being published in his native country for the first time.