- journalist and exile
CV
Petr Brod was born on 25 November 1951 in Prague into a predominantly Jewish family. He had relatives who died during the Shoah. Petr Brod's father, Lev, lived through the war in England and after his return to Czechoslovakia he began working as a lawyer for the so-called National Administration of the Jewish Council of Elders, which administered the public property of Jewish communities. He also continued his journalistic practice from the 1930s, when he occasionally worked as a night editor for the Prager Montagsblatt. He began to publish more consistently after the war, when he wrote for the Bulletin of the Jewish Religious Community and the Jewish Yearbook, and later for the World in Pictures and for German magazines published in the 1960s by Orbis, as well as for Austrian and German newspapers.
Brod's mother, Alžběta Herrmann, née Brod, came from a mixed Christian-Jewish family with Sudeten, Czech and Austrian ancestors. She moved with her parents from Rotava near Kraslice to Karlín in Prague at the beginning of the Second World War. Thanks to her marriage to a non-Jewish woman, Alžbeta's father was not transported to a concentration camp and was interned in the Jewish hospital in the Hagibor complex in Vinohrady until the end of the war. In 1946, all members of the family were given back their Czechoslovak citizenship.
Brod's parents met in 1950. Elizabeth was 18 years younger than Lev. Petr Brod's parents experienced the 1950s with apprehension, both because of their German-Jewish background (the couple spoke German together) and because they did not hide their critical attitude towards the regime. They had relatives in West Germany (Petr Brod's father had a sister in Munich, his mother had one brother in Ingolstadt and another near Nuremberg). Moreover, after the trial of Rudolf Slánský and Co. (1952), they feared that Lev Brod might be included in a similar trial, because his cadre profile was similar to that of those already accused - with the exception that he refused to become a member of the Communist Party, although he was invited to do so. However, he was also of Jewish descent, a pre-war lawyer, and had spent his exile years in Britain. In 1948 Lev Brod became a worker instead of a lawyer. After ten years in factories, he was employed by the Prague Information Service and guided foreigners in the State Jewish Museum.
Petr Brod has been participating in these activities since the autumn of 1966, when the Jewish community was allowed to bring together its youth (later called the Maiselovka Children). A year later, he began studying at the Nad Štolou High School.
The communist takeover of power meant that the Brod family had tried in vain to emigrate several times since the 1950s, to Ecuador, Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany. They managed to leave legally in July 1969. Petr Brod came to Prague for the first time in 1971. Subsequently, he came to Czechoslovakia four more times, the last time in 1979 before the Velvet Revolution.
Petr Brod was interested in political science, Eastern European history and journalism. He first studied these subjects at the University of Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität). During his studies he received a one-year scholarship at the London School of Economics in London (1974/1975) and later received a fellowship in Political Science at Harvard University in the USA (1978/1979).
His professional resume is very varied. He wanted to become a journalist (like his father) and in 1979 he saw an advertisement in The Economist magazine that the BBC was looking for editors. He applied for an audition and from the summer of the following year worked at the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) in London. He worked his way up through the Czechoslovak editorial staff and the German foreign desk, and also worked in the domestic British Broadcasting Service. He remained at the BBC until 1987. He then moved to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich. He successively held the positions of assistant American director and editor of the Czechoslovak broadcaster. With respect to relatives and friends in his homeland, he used the pseudonym Petr Lukavec, which he chose after the birthplace of his grandfather Josef Brod.
After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, he was the first permanent correspondent of Free Europe in Prague from 1990 to 1992. He also married a Czech woman, Lea Šmídová, in his hometown in March 1992. They had a daughter Zuzana.
From 1993 to 1996 Petr Brod worked as editor of the liberal daily Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He was the Prague correspondent of this newspaper in 1998-2000. From 2000 until its closure in 2006 he was the head of the BBC editorial office in Prague.
Petr Brod specializes in the history of Czech-German relations and the Jewish community in Bohemia. He currently works as an occasional commentator for ČT24 and also moderates discussions at the Department for Culture and Education of the Jewish Museum in Prague. In 2011, he was employed by the Collegium Bohemicum organization in Ústí nad Labem.
Awards
He has received numerous awards for his work. For his long-standing efforts to improve the mutual relations between the Czech Republic and Germany, he and the German publicist Jürgen Serke received the Art Prize of Czech-German Understanding from the Adalbert Stifter Association in Munich in 2012.
Excerpt from the interview
Remembrance dedicated to Pavel Tigrid
"Among the topics Pavel Tigrid influenced me with are, for example, the Czech-German settlement after World War II or the question of displacement. He, like other people, came to the conclusion that the expulsion as such was reprehensible, that it was not worthy of a civilized society. Although, of course, as someone who knew modern history very well, he understood the circumstances in which it occurred. He was in many ways very critical of President Beneš, although on the other hand he was able to understand and appreciate how Beneš personified the idea of a democratic Czechoslovakia. At least until 1945. And in that sense he also influenced me, even though I was more inclined to believe that the expulsion was historically inevitable, that it was necessary, because if it had not taken place, post-war Czechoslovakia would have been faced with the problem of a three and a half million disaffected German minority. Now truly discriminated against after the Second World War, and for understandable reasons. Whereas, in my opinion, the German minority was not as discriminated against during the First Republic as was later claimed in Sudeten German circles. So he also made me see the expulsion more critically. Later on, and this was an indirect influence, I became involved in this new phase of Czech-German relations, which basically came after the Czech Republic was founded. By this I mean, for example, the negotiations on a joint Czech-German declaration on the compensation and redress of certain injustices that had taken place in connection with the removal of the German population from Czechoslovakia. These negotiations led, among other things, to the establishment of the Czech-German Future Fund."
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