Czech Radio has one of the richest and most diverse audio archives in the world, going back to the very beginnings of radio in the 1920s. These recordings map a hundred years of Czech and Czechoslovak history through the voices of the people who shaped it. We hear not only their words, but also the tone of their voice, the mood and the atmosphere. We travel in time, as voices from the past speak to us with an immediacy that is powerful, moving and sometimes dramatic.
Prague was at the centre of many 20th century dramas: the Munich Crisis of 1938, the German occupation of March 1939, the Prague Uprising of 1945, the Communist putsch of 1948, the Soviet-led invasion of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. That the archives exist at all is little short of a miracle, especially after surviving a direct hit on the radio building from a Luftwaffe aerial torpedo in 1945.
They include famous names, like Czechoslovakia’s first President, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and his son, Jan Masaryk; we have the pioneering feminist Františka Plamínková and the inspirational politician Milada Horáková who was sentenced to death in the show trials of the 1950s; we have writers like Karel Čapek, inventor of the term “robot”, musicians like the great Czech jazzman Jaroslav Ježek, who paints a picture of the Czechoslovak jazz scene in the 1930s, and we have sporting heroes like Emil Zátopek, one of the greatest long-distance runners of all time. And then there are some of the people who came to Czechoslovakia from abroad, as visitors or exiles. They include the great German novelist, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Dwight Eisenhower, Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, to name just a few.
There are also some fascinating curiosities, such as some of the earliest ever live radio sports commentaries, a Dvořák opera sung in Esperanto and an experimental 1960s English-language adaptation of Karel Čapek’s “War with the Newts”.
This series of podcasts brings together some of the most vivid and evocative of these archive recordings. Through the alchemy of sound, we bring the past to life.
The podcast can be accessed here and on most major podcast platforms.