Vlastný životopis zla

A novel in two parts in search of the nature of evil, about the fear many grew up with under socialism and their warped idea of freedom, spanning the 1950s to the present. In the first, Czechoslovak state security lures Dušan, an émigré, from a small Austrian village into the Soviet zone of Vienna and takes him back to Bratislava. Holding his wife and two children on the Austrian-German border, they force him, under the new identity of Jozef Karsten and in a safe flat, to visit influential friends and report on them, and in his struggle with evil he begins to use his captors' methods. In the second part a retired literature teacher, close to the author's alter ego, studies Goebbels's diaries and sets out to trace Mária M., missing for twenty years.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

301 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

Austria, Slovakia, 1950s–2000s

First published

2009 by Kalligram

Author's age

68 when first published

ISBN

9788081012136 (original)