On Wednesday October 29th 2025, the library - together with IDEAs (Inter-Departmental European Advanced Studies) – will organize the fifth and final book presentation during lunch break of the new academic year.
Professors Jacques Rupnik will present his book Josef Guttmann et le destin de l'Europe centrale entre Hitler et Staline (to be published)
You can read the book full text online here: xxx
Two lives, two names, two perspectives on Soviet communism and its post-war expansion into Eastern Europe. They may seem neatly separated, yet they are united by one man’s experience and his attempt to understand the hopes and tragedies of the 20th century. Josef Guttmann, a leftist intellectual and later member of the Communist Party leadership, broke with the party in the early 1930s, becoming, alongside Záviš Kalandra, a prominent anti-leftist. He left Czechoslovakia at the end of 1938 and three years later settled in New York, where he worked under a pseudonym as an expert on events in the Soviet Bloc, a critic of totalitarianism and the author of the first articles on anti-Semitism in the Slanský trial. His Czech texts from the 1930s, together with studies and essays on the nature of communist regimes, genocide and anti-Semitism written in the United States, were selected by Jacques Rupnik and are being published in his native country for the first time.
The discourse will be followed by a short Q&A-session with the students.
To take part in the book presentation, please register: https://forms.office.com/e/1SvYtgPUqu
Should you have any questions, please contact Carole Kerduel: carole.kerduel@coleurope.eu