Petr Brod grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family in communist Prague, soon learning it was wiser to converse in Czech in public. When we spoke Brod, today 73, also discussed his friendship with protest singer Karel Kryl — and what might have happened if the Sudeten Germans had not been expelled after the war. I presume that was quite unusual in s Czechoslovakia? But did you, for example, walk down the street speaking German together, or speak it together on the tram?
In fact in those years it could be dangerous. One of my early memories is riding on the tram in — this was related to me by my mother, many years later — when I was three. So in , after the Communist takeover, he was dismissed from his job and for the next 10 years he was a manual worker. He said that in , after the events that I have just described, after his dismissal from his job, he thought of emigrating.
Because the first one had happened in , when he fled before the Nazis. But in your family did emigrate after you completed school — you moved to Munich. What did you find when you arrived in Munich?
I guess there a lot of Sudeten Germans formerly from Czechoslovakia living in Bavaria at that time? Neither did my parents. Because they had family there, they had friends there. My father had voted Social Democrat and he found Sudeten German Social Democrats in Munich, for example, with whom he had good conversations and he attended their meetings and so on. I also became close with several of the old Sudeten German Social Democrats and with their descendants and so on.
We were aware of that situation and made our own arrangements. But you were able to return to Czechoslovakia for many years, because your family had left legally?
