Tight home - wide world and other texts

The Czech-German politician, journalist and untrained historian Karel Kreibich (1883-1966) is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable figures in the modern history of the Czech lands. A native of Cvikov in North Bohemia and a graduate of the trade academy in Ústí nad Labem, he was one of the representatives of the left wing of the German-Austrian Social Democracy in Liberec before the First World War. He participated in the war on the Italian front, where he was promoted to officer. Subsequently, he supported the establishment of the separatist province of German Bohemia from the Czechoslovak point of view, and after his election as a deputy, he finally became a prominent actor in the founding of the German section of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1921. The new, critical edition of his memoirs (originally published under the title Těsný domov - širý svět (Tight Home - Wide World) in a period-contingent form at the end of the 1960s) presents the fate of this complicated personality from his childhood in the North Bohemian borderlands until the founding of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. These memoirs are also supplemented by an extensive introductory study and Kreibich's other memoirs and letters, which give an insight into his later life. He lived in the Soviet Union for several years, became a senator of the National Assembly, the only German in the exiled London Council of State of Czechoslovakia, a history teacher at university and the Czechoslovak ambassador to Moscow after the war. Although in some respects he had already criticized the policies of the Communist Party and its Moscow centre, his loyalty to it reached its limits in the 1950s, when he became a strong critic of the Stalinist processes. Kreibich's positions at this time can also be seen in the context of the gradual reform efforts within the party that culminated after his death during the so-called Prague Spring. This book as a whole is therefore an important contribution not only to the history of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but also to the complicated fate of the German-speaking inhabitants of the Czech lands.