Das Haus in der Karpfengasse (1965)

The Karpfengasse mentioned in the title lies in Prague’s old Jewish quarter. The three floors of the building at number 115 are home to a very diverse group of people: Czechs, Germans, and many Jews. A new and terrible era begins for them all when, on March 15, 1939, the German Wehrmacht enters Czechia and proclaims the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” The elderly Jewish widow Kauders wants to go to her “lost son” in Brazil. The inquiries made about her, the countless trips to Nazi offices, and the harsh treatment she receives drain the last of her strength, and she collapses. The awkward, apolitical Bohemian-German bookseller Marek loses his mind when his wife begins cheating on him with a lieutenant who is also an ethnic German and, one day, completely repudiates him, taking the side of the country’s new masters. The Lederer and Laufer families, closely connected as owners of a wholesale stationery business, are torn apart: the Laufers manage to emigrate at the last moment; their business partner, unable to bring himself to emigrate, sets fire to his business premises and perishes in the flames. The Mautner couple—he a cynic, she a hysterically ill woman—sets out into exile. But no rosy future awaits the German building superintendent Glaser and his son either—one a Party member, the other an SA man: past misdeeds (the old man has an illegitimate child with a Jewish woman) and the younger man’s brazen opportunism (he is beaten up in a deliberately provoked brawl in a hall) sour their enjoyment of their changed circumstances. Božena, the Czech caretaker’s daughter, works in a resistance group. Her fate, too, is tragic: she is arrested during demonstrations on October 27 and, along with others, faces an uncertain fate.