Ladislav Fuks
Ladislav Fuks was a Czech writer born on November 24, 1923, in Prague. His early life was marked by the impact of World War II, as he was conscripted into labor under the Nazi regime shortly after completing high school. Fuks pursued higher education at the University of Prague, studying subjects including philosophy and psychology, and graduated in 1949. He initially worked in various capacities, including at the Prague Paper Mills and the State Institute for Preservation of Historic Monuments, before dedicating himself fully to writing in 1963.
Fuks's notable works, such as "Pan Theodor Mundstock," explore themes of despair and survival during the Holocaust, often focusing on the psychological struggles of his characters rather than the direct atrocities of the time. His writing style, which incorporated elements of absurdity, was influenced by his own experiences during the Nazi occupation, during which he lost many friends. Despite not being Jewish, Fuks faced his own vulnerabilities as a homosexual in a repressive society. His literary contributions continued even after the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, as his nuanced use of symbolism evaded censorship. Fuks passed away in 1994, leaving a legacy that raises questions about identity, trauma, and resistance in times of oppression.
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Subject Terms
Ladislav Fuks
Writer
- Born: September 24, 1923
- Birthplace: Prague, Czechloslovakia (now Czech Republic)
- Died: August 19, 1994
- Place of death: Prague, Czech Republic
Biography
Ladislav Fuks was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), on November 24, 1923, the son of a police court official, Vaclav Fuks, and his homemaker wife, Marie Fryckova. He graduated from high school in 1942 and immediately was sent to work for the agricultural administration in Moravia as part of the Nazi invaders’ plan for the total mobilization of labor. He entered the University of Prague in 1945, studying philosophy, psychology, pedagogical sciences, and the history of art, graduating in 1949.
From 1950 until 1955, he worked at the Prague Paper Mills, first as a clerk and then as an associate. In 1956, he was hired as an associate for the State Institute for Preservation of Historic Monuments. After three years, he left to work at the National Gallery. In 1963, he became a full-time writer and lectured on anti-Semitism and Czech literature.
An early novel, Pan Theodor Mundstock (1963; Mr. Theodore Mundstock, 1968), created a sensation. It is the story of Mundstock, who is living in Czechoslovakia in the period just before the Germans round-up the Jews and send them to concentration camps. Mundstock, a former clerk to a haberdasher, is forced to sweep the streets and to wear a yellow star to identify him as Jewish. He has no control over what is being done to him but knows that he can control how he responds. He begins a complex program of readiness that will help him to survive in desperate conditions. He works to strengthen his upper arms, sleeps on an ironing board, exposes himself to gas, encourages the local butcher to punch him in the face, wears shabby clothes, and finds hiding places in his jacket for bits of bread. His rehearsal for the horrors is his way of resisting the Holocaust, of maintaining his hope amid the despair. In an ironic twist, while carefully going over his plans, he is struck down in the street by a truck.
Instead of detailing the atrocities of those times, Fuks deals with the psychological weight of despair. He noted: “My creation has been influenced by my experiences and life under Nazi occupation during which I lost a great many of my Jewish friends. In my work I often reach up for horror or absurdity, but it is always functional, never self-purposeful.” Fuks was not Jewish, but he was a homosexual, which made him a victim of potential exposure and blackmail.
Pan Theodor Mundstock was adapted for Czech television, as was his novel Spalovac mrtvol (1967; The Cremator, 1984), about the manager of a crematorium, who under Nazi occupation becomes the owner and is convinced by a friend to join the Nazi Party. The man becomes so obsessive about the Nazi cause that he hangs his half-Jewish wife from a ventilator chain in the bathroom and begins to see victims of disease and imagined perpetrators of evil as people who should be cremated, or incinerated.
Fuks’s work was published after the Communists took over Czechoslovakia because his literature seemed safe. The censors did not catch on to his use of animal names for some of his minor characters, such as Cizek, meaning siskin or green bird, a symbol of hope and eternal spring. Fuks died in 1994 after a long period of dementia. Some people believe that his embrace of the Communist Party in 1989, at the beginning of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, was the result of his addled state, though there is a possibility that this self-destructive gesture was a final expression of his ironic approach to life.