🚨 NAZI GERMANY OCCUPIES CZECHOSLOVAKIA
March 15, 1939 — Hitler's Wehrmacht marches into Prague Castle as swastika flags rise over the Gothic towers. The Munich Pact lies in ruins as Czech civilians watch in silence from the shadows. This betrayal marks the end of appeasement and the final step toward war.
This post is 100% AI generated.
#z_image #AIart #GenerativeAI #LLM #CinematicRealism #AtmosphericArt #OnThisDay #WW2History #Czechoslovakia
"Russia needs a military alliance" says Russian paper
by #SteveRosenberg #Readingrussia
04:03
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6jClWRnSic
An opinion piece in Moskovsky #Komsomolets calls for Russia to form a military alliance.
Remembering the Warsaw Pact, the writer claims that Moscow was “restoring constitutional order in #Hungary in 1956 & in #Czechoslovakia in 1968,” a sign of how Russia in 2026 is reinterpreting history.
"They survived the #Nazis, were confiscated by the #communists, and for the last three decades they have been jealously guarded, bound in red tape, by a #museum in the #CzechRepublic. Due to the attentions of an overzealous #Czech customs guard and the vagaries of the #British weather, a happy conclusion had been in doubt to the very end.
But last Thursday a small suitcase filled with 681 #drawings, love #letters, #poems and #manuscripts created by the #Jewish #artist and #poet #PeterKien in the #Theresienstadt ghetto in #German-occupied #Czechoslovakia between 1941 and 1944 finally made a blustery landing at Heathrow.
From there, the treasures were transported to their new home: the Wiener #Holocaust #Library in central #London, where #JudyKing, 66, was anxiously waiting for them. She was keeping a promise she had made to her mother, #HelgaWolfenstein, beside her deathbed in 2003."
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jan/26/jewish-art-letters-saved-from-nazis-peter-kien
You Can See a Swirling Sculpture Made of 8,000 Books at a Library in Prague – Smithsonian Magazine
You Can See a Swirling Sculpture Made of 8,000 Books at a Library in Prague
Officials are managing an influx of tourists coming to see “Idiom,” a seemingly infinite tunnel of books by the artist Matej Krén, at the Municipal Library
By Christian Thorsberg, Correspondent January 16, 2026
Inside Idiom, which uses mirrors to provide the illusion of infinite length Omar Marques / Anadolu Agency / Getty ImagesNearly 30 years after a dizzying sculpture fashioned from books was first installed at the Prague Municipal Library in the Czech Republic, literature lovers on TikTok and Instagram have turned the artwork into a viral fascination and unexpected tourism hotspot.
Idiom, created by Slovak artist Matej Krén, features roughly 8,000 books stacked into a tower. Mirrors placed on the top and bottom give the illusion of infinite length, and a raindrop-shaped entryway invites visitors to peek inside the wormhole—almost like they’re literally disappearing into a good book.
“The Idiom is meant to symbolize the infinity of knowledge,” according to a description of the sculpture on the library’s website. “[Books] are like bricks to [Krén], but they contain much more information, destinies, stories and knowledge. He puts them into the form of dwellings: primitive on the one hand, infinitely intelligent on the other.”
During peak travel seasons, the library estimates that 1,000 people per day are visiting the installation. Omar Marques / Anadolu Agency / Getty ImagesThe installation made its debut at the Sao Paulo International Biennial in 1995, and in 1996 it was brought to Prague. It was first exhibited for a summer at the Jiri Svestka Gallery, which in the 1950s was a communist warehouse of banned books, before moving to its permanent home at the library in 1998.
For years, Idiom stood as little more than a familiar fixture, with its fame generally limited to the regular library-goers in the Czech capital. But beginning in 2022, the sculpture gained renown by going viral on BookTok, the pocket of TikTok dedicated to discussions of books and writing. Algorithms on Instagram similarly pushed the sculpture to the forefront of feeds.
“Kids that were in Prague looking into their phones suddenly saw a cool thing that they liked and they wanted to see it as well,” Czech journalist Janek Rubeš told Radio Prague International in 2023. “And as it is in today’s world, everyone wants to have the same picture or same video, because it looks cool and they can get likes.”
Quick fact: Idiom on the cover of Science
A photo of the sculpture was featured on the magazine’s cover in January 2011.In that issue, researchers analyzed a massive collection of 5.2million books to study cultural trends.
Today, librarians and local tourism officials are bewildered at the foot traffic the sculpture generates. During peak travel seasons—such as Christmas and Easter—more than 1,000 people each day endure wait times of more than two hours to snap a photograph.
“We’ll have to deal with it in some way, because working with tourist crowds is a completely different service from that we have provided up to now,” Lenka Hanzlikova, a spokesperson for the library, tells Agence France-Presse (AFP). “Most readers laugh about it and say it’s bizarre, but we have had people who wanted to return books and joined the queue.”
Continue/Read Original Article Here: You Can See a Swirling Sculpture Made of 8,000 Books at a Library in Prague
#8000Books #CzechRepublic #Czechoslovakia #Idiom #Instagram #Library #MatejKren #MunicipalLibrary #Prague #Slovak #SmithsonianInstitution #SmithsonianMagazine #SwirlingSculpture #TikTok
And 3- because Beck leaned more towards Nazi #Germany than the #USSR (pact of non-aggression, participation in the carving of #Czechoslovakia) until early 1939
4- Finally, and to the last moment, he refused the only option #France had to help #Poland at that time, which was French lobbying for a Soviet defence of Poland against Nazi Germany. Whether it would have been workable with his assent and/or improved Poland's fate is another question entirely.
When political repression intended to isolate and break individuals instead produces solidarity, resistance, and moral authority: Klára Pinerová examines the prison experience of Czechoslovak political prisoners from the 1950s to post-Communism as both a tool of repression and a foundation for collective identity and memory politics with the emergence of the "heroic victimhood" narrative.
Skull-man(🇨🇺🇨🇦)
Marvin the Martian 🇺🇦
Hublai (charismatic megafauna)
דער קערפער פֿון השם
World news | The Guardian
DrWeb
Mathieu Gotteland
Liam O'Mara IV, PhD
de.hypotheses