How desperate he must feel sitting there helplessly: Jews, Gypsies, Czechs...and the Chinese...from Zápisník to Terezín and beyond

Abstract

This study looks at three related „snapshots“from, respectively, Janáček‘s Zápisník zmizelého, Pavel Haas‘Chinese Songs, and Hugo Haas‘film, The Girl on the Bridge. All three invoke the agonizing tension between movement and stasis, raise questions of freedom and imprisonment, and they all involve delicate and painful connections between the groups mentioned in the title above. It is my argument that together these thickly packed snippets can be considered a kind of continuous art work, providing a micro-history of the period between 1919 and 1951.