Karel Pecka

Karel Pecka (born December 6, 1928 in Kližska Nemá , † March 13, 1997 in Prague ) was a Czech writer and dissident .

Life

In 1948 he finished his studies at the commercial academy in Budweis and then worked as a technical employee in the Tesla company. With some colleagues from the Barrandov film studios , he created and reproduced the illegal magazine Za pravdu (For the Truth). In it he criticized socialist realism in art.

In 1949 he was captured while trying to escape to Germany and sentenced to eleven years in prison. He went through several labor camps, including the mines in Kladno , uranium mines in Jáchymov (Sankt Joachimsthal) and the Bytíz labor camp near Příbram . In the latter he began to write stories that were smuggled out of the camp with the help of workers.

In December 1959 he was dismissed and employed as a stage worker in the National Theater . After the regime was persecuted again after the Prague Spring and his books were banned, he worked as a pump attendant. He was one of the first to sign Charter 77 . In 1981 he took early retirement as a disabled person (Pecka pretended to be endogenous depression), then in 1988 he retired.

In 1997 he received the Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk Order from President Václav Havel in memoriam .

Works

Pecka initially published in various magazines such as Host do domu , Literární noviny , Tvář . Mostly it was stories dealing with the subject of political prisoners. Since 1965 he was active as a literary writer and also wrote some screenplays. In 1969 he was banned again and only self-published his works abroad.

His first book published by 68 Publishers was Štěpení .

Published in German

• Thicket of fear

Web links

• Filmography
• Literature by and about Karel Pecka in the catalog of the German National Library