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Literary section of London exile journals - free publishing platform for Czechoslovak writers during WWII

Publication at Faculty of Social Sciences |
2015

Abstract

A large part of artists who emigrated after 1938 for racial or political reasons from their homeland during the Second World War setlled in London. There arose an important cultural center in exile, expressed among other things in cultural magazines as Obzor (Horizon) and Kulturní zápisník (Cultural Notebook).

Obzor (Horizon) was a literary journal published by a circle of writers united around a weekly Čechoslovák, a central periodical of the Czechoslovak foreign resistance. The magazine dealt largely with exile works - poetry (Ivan Jelinek, Viktor Fischl, Viktor Kripner) and prose (Jiri Mucha, František Langer) and thus formed an important publishing platform for writers in exile.

Kulturní zápisník (Cultural Notebook), a second important cultural magazine in London, published under the direction of Paul Tigrid Valter Berger by former authors of Young Czechoslovakia, the central periodical of the organization emigrant Mladé Československo (Leftist Youth). Their monthly magazine focused on Czechoslovak culture, especially on overprinting examples of works that were published during the war in the Protectorate.

Literary rubrics of both magazines formed during World War II an important (and still poorly understood) publication space for the exiled Czechoslovak writers.