Ferdinand Peroutka - Prague, Czech Republic
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Ferdinand Peroutka (6 February 1895 – 20 April 1978) was a Czech journalist and writer. A prominent political thinker and journalist during the First Czechoslovak Republic
Waymark Code: WMTNT4
Location: Hlavní město Praha, Czechia
Date Posted: 12/19/2016
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Peroutka was also a Holocaust survivor, who later emigrated to both the United Kingdom and the United States following the 1948 coup d'état instigated by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
Peroutka was born to a Czech-German family in Prague in 1895. In 1913 he began his career as a journalist. After World War I, he became an editor-in-chief of a new newspaper Tribuna ("Tribune"). Some articles published in Tribuna were later incorporated into books Z deníku žurnalistova ("Of the Journalist's Diary") and above all Jací jsme ("What we are like") —in this book Peroutka mapped some myths about the Czech nation.
In 1924 Peroutka passed from Tribuna to Lidové noviny and founded—thanks to Tomáš Masaryk's donation—revue Prítomnost ("The Presence"). As a commentator he became very influential, standing on the position of the "Castle" (group of President Masaryk) and criticizing both communists and the Right represented by the national-democratic party of the first Czechoslovak prime minister Karel Kramár.
As a representative of the Czech democratic tradition, Peroutka was arrested after the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and held in the Buchenwald concentration camp until 1945. He was offered freedom on the condition that he would serve as editor of a collaborationist Prítomnost; he refused and spent the whole of the war in Buchenwald.
After liberation, Peroutka became an editor-in-chief of the newspaper Svobodné noviny and refounded his famous revue Prítomnost under the name Dnešek ("Today"). The journal became prominent through its critical stance on postwar violence committed on the German minority and hundreds of alleged collaborators.
The 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état caused Peroutka to decide to emigrate. In 1951 he became a director of the Czech division of the Radio Free Europe. The summa of his democratic life views was issued in 1959 as Democratic Manifesto.
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Ferdinand Peroutka ceský novinár a spisovatel v tomto dome žil a odsud musel odejít 1939 - koncentr.tábor Buchenwald 1948 - exil . SNCFP 2005