L’expulsion des Allemands des Sudètes reste aujourd’hui encore un sujet sensible des deux côtés de la frontière germano-tchèque. En témoignent les polémiques liées à l’ouverture du « Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen » à Berlin ou les déclarations de Milos Zeman affirmant que les expulsions n’avaient pas été une punition assez sévère pour les Allemands. Dès 1945, les trois millions d’Allemands vivant encore sur le territoire de la future République tchèque furent expulsés vers l’Allemagne, transitant par des camps de travail, forcés de laisser derrière eux leur maison, leur ferme ou encore leur entreprise. Comment alors se reconstruire dans un pays qui n’est pas le sien ? Nombre d’entre eux considèrent dans un premier temps que cette expulsion est provisoire et entretiennent l’espoir d’un retour. Toutefois, ils seront rares à retrouver leur ancienne patrie. Ces événements sont violents, car sous le mot « expulsion » se cache en réalité des termes tels que « viol, expropriation, exploitation, déracinement ». La génération des parents expulsés, tout entière concentrée sur une reconstruction matérielle, fermera les yeux sur les souffrances des héritiers du non-dit. Aujourd’hui, ce sont eux qui prennent la parole, dans des œuvres romanesques que nous analyserons dans le présent travail. Le roman de Pavel Kohout, L’Heure étoilée du meurtrier, est un roman qui a manqué sa réception. Son message hautement politique a été masqué par l’appellation « Thriller » qui lui a été attribué, censure du régime communiste tchèque oblige. Toutefois, les personnages qui évoluent dans le récit, même s’ils enquêtent sur une série de meurtres, font plus que cela. Ils donnent à voir à quel point les relations germano-tchèques ont été détruites par la politique nationale-socialiste et l’occupation. Ainsi la rencontre entre les deux protagonistes, l’un allemand, l’autre tchèque, soulève la question de l’après. Alors que les expulsions sauvages débutent, leur amitié se renforce, leur questionnement face à l’avenir ouvre la voie de la réconciliation. Les personnages des Inachevés sont quant à eux les victimes des expulsions annoncées dans le roman de Pavel Kohout. Les quatre femmes de la famille Rosenbach vivront ce traumatisme dans le déni, l’opposition ou le silence, jusqu’à le transmettre au dernier-né, projeté dans un passé qui n’est pas le sien. Cet homme brisé par une histoire qui lui est étrangère pose alors la question de la transmission. Que s’échangent les personnages du roman de Pavel Kohout, lorsque Buback l’allemand reconnaît sa culpabilité ? Quel rôle le silence joue-t-il dans la transmission d’un traumatisme, lorsque même les générations actuelles souffrent des blessures de leurs aînés ? / The theme of my research is identity, the transmission of History into a family and the social deconstruction of the German expellees after World War II. The expulsion of the Sudeten Germans is the historical frame in which the novels of Reinhard Jirgl and Pavel Kohout evolve. The questions that are explored in this doctoral thesis are: How can literature be the medium of their suffering? Which part did the lost homeland play on their identity and how could they pass on the History to their children or grand-children without imprisoning them in a jail of silence? Pavel Kohout’s novel, Sternstunde der Mörder, embodies the interrogations of the allied forces in 1945: are German and Czech people able to live side by side? The expulsions, the violence and the loss of the homeland gave birth to a trauma that still isn’t healed. The Rosenbach family in Reinhard Jirgl’s novel Die Unvollendenten are the victims of those expulsions and pass their trauma on to the grandchild, sick of a wound that isn’t his own. The suffering of this generation is still present in today’s Germany: can literature be part of the healing process?

This thesis on Work of Pavel Kohout from 1979 to 1989 deals the period of Kohout's life and work during his exile in Austria. The aim was to find out the main characteristics of Pavel Kohout's prosaic art and also to compare the period critiques and show their contact and different points. The first part focuses on a destiny of Pavel Kohout in chosen decade. The second part examines his novels Nápady svaté Kláry and Hodina tance a lásky together with the memoir-novel Kde je zakopán pes. The final part studies the period critiques and try to point out their similarity or difference. Thanks to analysis, the author found out that in exile Pavel Kohout continues in his poetic style, but his work also evinces the element of autentization. The novels Nápady svaté Kláry and Hodina tance a lásky represent Kohout's ability in fabulation. Value of the memoir-novel Kde je zakopán pes consists in its genre, which places the text on the border between fiction and non-fiction. The author proved that the beletrization of own memories increases the esthetic impact of a text. A comparison of certain critiques showed that a literary criticism looks at Kohout's work inconsistently. In novels Nápady svaté Kláry and Hodina tance a lásky the reviewers appreciate the presentation of chosen themes. The memoir-novel is often...

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In 1950 Pavel Kohout published under the title O černém a bílém [‘About the black and the white’] a book of fairy tales, which appeared in 1953 in East Germany under the title Dreizehn rote Rosen [‘Thirteen red roses’]. If one can still recognize elements of (literary) fairy tales in the original agitative text, these are largely obliterated in the translation. The fairy tales lose the elements that marked them as fairy tales. In East Germany, the early Soviet fairy tale criticism, which had lost its sharpness at the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934, is taken over, while in Czechoslovakia it is still represented only by orthodox criticism.

The 1950s and 1960s in Czechoslovakia witnessed a fundamental shift in the dramatic and theatrical realms. Following the Communist takeover of 1948, Soviet-inspired Socialist Realism became the official aesthetic of the Czech lands, displacing the avant-garde trends that had dominated the pre-war era. This normative aesthetic program demanded a party-minded ideological perspective (partiinost) and a certain level of accessibility to the masses (narodnost). After the death of Stalin, as the political situation began to thaw, various theatre practitioners began to undermine these Socialist Realist demands, widening the literary horizons by experimenting with a variety of trends, and ultimately sowing the seeds that would lead to the flowering of the Czech theatre of the 1960s. This thesis investigates the ways in which the Socialist Realist model for dramatic and theatrical expression was subverted on the experimental stages of Prague in the late 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, it analyzes the changing role of ideology, dramatic and theatrical space, and objects during this period. By the 1960s, the earnest, socialist ideology that pervaded Socialist Realism in its purported message to the audience had become a stale aesthetic model. In 1963, Václav Havel’s Zahradní slavnost couches this ideology in an absurd dramatic world, subverting and satirizing the didactic nature of Socialist Realism while simultaneously drawing from the Czech avant-garde and foreign trends like the so-called Theatre of the Absurd. Prague’s experimental theatre movement in the 1950s and 1960s, though certainly present on large stages like the National Theatre, primarily sprang from the city’s small stages. Both Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr’s Semafor Theatre and Otomar Krejča’s Theatre Beyond the Gate managed highly innovative productions despite limited stage space. This was made possible, in part, due to their remarkable use of the off-stage and imaginary action spaces. In his article “Man and Object in the Theatre,” Jiří Veltruský notes that human actors on stage operate between two poles: highly spontaneous and highly determined actions. Socialist Realism, which offered its audience models of behaviour for their lives outside the theatre, reduced characters to types, limiting their perceived spontaneity, as they exist primarily to fulfill necessary narrative functions (i.e., the positive hero). In a sense, human beings are objectified. In his adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi, director Jan Grossman takes this to the extreme. By presenting the actions of his actors as highly determined, he reduces the human figure to a manipulated object. When Ubu oversees the annihilation of these beings, Grossman both parodies the Socialist Realist approach to characterization and offers a stunningly subversive rebuke of the Czech political culture. In this work I show how the innovative spirit of Czech theatre and drama of the 1960s represented an era of shifting aesthetic norms, which reacted to the strict, normative Socialist Realist trend of the 1950s, borrowed from numerous foreign and domestic trends both past and present, and developed unique techniques of their own in order to create impactful works on the stage and on the page.

The 1950s and 1960s in Czechoslovakia witnessed a fundamental shift in the dramatic and theatrical realms. Following the Communist takeover of 1948, Soviet-inspired Socialist Realism became the official aesthetic of the Czech lands, displacing the avant-garde trends that had dominated the pre-war era. This normative aesthetic program demanded a party-minded ideological perspective (partiinost) and a certain level of accessibility to the masses (narodnost). After the death of Stalin, as the political situation began to thaw, various theatre practitioners began to undermine these Socialist Realist demands, widening the literary horizons by experimenting with a variety of trends, and ultimately sowing the seeds that would lead to the flowering of the Czech theatre of the 1960s. This thesis investigates the ways in which the Socialist Realist model for dramatic and theatrical expression was subverted on the experimental stages of Prague in the late 1950s and 1960s. Specifically, it analyzes the changing role of ideology, dramatic and theatrical space, and objects during this period. By the 1960s, the earnest, socialist ideology that pervaded Socialist Realism in its purported message to the audience had become a stale aesthetic model. In 1963, Václav Havel’s Zahradní slavnost couches this ideology in an absurd dramatic world, subverting and satirizing the didactic nature of Socialist Realism while simultaneously drawing from the Czech avant-garde and foreign trends like the so-called Theatre of the Absurd. Prague’s experimental theatre movement in the 1950s and 1960s, though certainly present on large stages like the National Theatre, primarily sprang from the city’s small stages. Both Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr’s Semafor Theatre and Otomar Krejča’s Theatre Beyond the Gate managed highly innovative productions despite limited stage space. This was made possible, in part, due to their remarkable use of the off-stage and imaginary action spaces. In his article “Man and Object in the Theatre,” Jiří Veltruský notes that human actors on stage operate between two poles: highly spontaneous and highly determined actions. Socialist Realism, which offered its audience models of behaviour for their lives outside the theatre, reduced characters to types, limiting their perceived spontaneity, as they exist primarily to fulfill necessary narrative functions (i.e., the positive hero). In a sense, human beings are objectified. In his adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi, director Jan Grossman takes this to the extreme. By presenting the actions of his actors as highly determined, he reduces the human figure to a manipulated object. When Ubu oversees the annihilation of these beings, Grossman both parodies the Socialist Realist approach to characterization and offers a stunningly subversive rebuke of the Czech political culture. In this work I show how the innovative spirit of Czech theatre and drama of the 1960s represented an era of shifting aesthetic norms, which reacted to the strict, normative Socialist Realist trend of the 1950s, borrowed from numerous foreign and domestic trends both past and present, and developed unique techniques of their own in order to create impactful works on the stage and on the page.