INTERVIEW / Czech author reflects on cultural erasure under authoritarian rule

By Wu Kuan-hsien, CNA staff reporter

Taipei, Feb. 22 (CNA) When best-selling Czech author Kateřina Tučková was in Taiwan earlier this month to promote the Chinese version of her novel "The Last Goddess," she said she felt the story would resonate with Taiwanese readers because of a common authoritarian past.

In an interview with CNA during the Taipei International Book Exhibition in the first week of February, Tučková said she saw her work as an effort to "preserve cultural memory" extinguished by state persecution.

"I wanted readers to know our own history and how we behaved under different regimes toward marginalized people, which can lead to losing a whole culture," she said.

Ancient knowledge under persecution

"The Last Goddess" draws heavily on 20th-century history, a period of major political upheaval in what was then Czechoslovakia. It follows modern-day researcher Dora Idesová, who was raised by her aunt, a "goddess" of the White Carpathian Mountains believed to heal body and spirit through herbal knowledge and divination.

An adult ethnologist, Dora traces the persecution of the goddesses from 17th-century witch trials to Nazi scrutiny and communist repression.

As seen in the novel, the goddesses were repeatedly targeted by the authorities. The Catholic Church accused them of witchcraft, Nazi officials attempted to appropriate them for ideological purposes, and the communist regime ultimately labeled them enemies of the state.

Communism eventually destroyed the tradition by severing the generational transfer of knowledge, according to Tučková, with the last recognized goddess, Irma Gabrilová, dying in 2001.

"It's such a pity," said Tučková, who was in Taipei for the book show following the publication of the Chinese translation of her novel in Taiwan on Jan. 28.

Preserving the past and present

Tučková believed Taiwanese readers would relate to the novel, as both Taiwan and the Czech Republic experienced political turmoil and totalitarian rule, during which "brutalities in the name of the regime destroyed individual lives."

"The political changes taking place in my country are not so different from what Taiwan has experienced. You have your own history of totalitarianism and your own victims of political terror," she said.

The goal of her novel, she said, was to give future generations an understanding of the perspectives of those who lived through authoritarian rule so that they can recognize how easily societies may shift if citizens remain passive.

Such a shift happened in 1946, when voters made the communists the largest party in that year's Czechoslovak parliamentary election without foreseeing the consequences.

Two years after that, in 1948, the communists staged a coup that ended free elections in the country until the 1990s after the Berlin Wall fell.

Call for cultural protection

Beyond similarities between the histories of Taiwan and the Czech Republic, Tučková also drew parallels between the goddesses and shamanic women among some of Taiwan's Indigenous groups, including the Amis and Kavalan peoples.

She praised Taiwan for recognizing the importance of preserving cultural traditions before they disappear, which did not happen in the Czech case because there was little left to save by the time people started to appreciate the goddess culture.

"It is great that you make such a change in your society and try to preserve them [the indigenous shamanic cultures] and support them now. Because we were too late," she said.

Such was the persecution of the goddesses in Czechoslovakia, Tučková said, that bias against them was built into the language, including the phrase "you lie like a goddess."

Tučková said she first encountered the phrase while growing up under communism, unaware of its political meaning.

She only connected the dots many years later as a university student in the democratic-era Czech Republic when she heard about the special ethnographic phenomenon of the goddesses and learned the old saying was actually communist propaganda aimed at discrediting them.

To counter that narrative, Tučková spent over a year gathering information from several sources, including official documents, history archives and writings, as well as interviews with people in the region who still had memories of the goddesses.

She then spent another year to piece together her novel, blending documented events with fiction while identifying only state actors and giving individuals anonymity.

The power of art

Tučková's novels often focus on marginalized groups, particularly women. Her earlier work Gerta, about the postwar expulsion of ethnic Germans during the 1945 "Brno Death March," helped spark broader public discussion about historical responsibility and reconciliation.

Similarly, "the Last Goddess" drew many to the mountains where the goddesses once resided to learn more about the lost culture.

She said literature has the power to move readers emotionally in ways history books often cannot.

In recognition of her contribution to confronting modern history, she received the Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights Award from the Czech Republic's Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in 2017.

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