The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch
E-book, Czech
The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch
A novel about a life broken by history, about the guilt of Czechs and Germans, and about whether forgiveness and understanding are possible...
The night of 30th–31st May 1945. Gerta Schnirch, the mother of a several-month-old daughter, is 'expelled' with only her personal belongings, along with other Brno Germans, towards Vienna. The exhausting march ends in Pohořelice, where many of the displaced succumb to an epidemic of typhus and dysentery. Gerta and some other German women are saved by being put to forced labour in South Moravia, where they remain even after the transports end. After regaining her Czechoslovak citizenship, Gerta returns to Brno, where she lives through the other tumultuous events of the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to the painful questions of guilt, retribution, and forgiveness between Czechs and Germans that this unusually vivid and powerful novel raises, we witness an unconventional mother-daughter relationship. It is deformed not only by the restricted environment in which they, as Czech Germans pushed to the margins of society, were allowed to move, but also by the mutual misunderstanding between two generations, difficult communication, and the impossibility of conveying personal experience.
Magnesia Litera 2010 – Knižní klub Readers' Prize, nominated for the Josef Škvorecký Award, the Magnesia Litera for prose, and the Jiří Orten Award (all in 2010).
Kateřina Tučková
(born 1980) is a writer and playwright. After studying art history and Czech studies at Masaryk University, she earned her doctorate at Charles University. Her novels Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch (The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch, 2009), about the Brno death march, and Žítkovské bohyně (The Žítková Goddesses, 2012), which deals with the fate of healers from the Moravian Kopanice region, were awarded the prestigious Magnesia Litera prize and, for their social engagement, the Award for Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights, presented to her in 2017 by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. She connected the worlds of art and literature in the books Můj otec Kamil Lhoták (My Father Kamil Lhoták, 2008) and Fabrika (The Factory, the Story of the Textile Barons from the Moravian Manchester, 2014). In 2018, her play Vitka, based on the life story of the Brno composer and conductor Vítězslava Kaprálová, premiered at the Husa na provázku Theatre; the text of this play was also published as a book (2018). In 2022, she published her long-awaited novel Bílá Voda (White Water). For this book and her literary work to date, she received the State Prize for Literature. Bílá Voda was also voted Book of the Year in polls by Deník N and Lidové noviny, and in 2023 a deluxe limited edition with illustrations by Jaromír 99 was published. Kateřina Tučková's books have been translated into more than twenty languages.
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