Abstract
The German original of the book was published in 2017 in the prestigious series of " handbooks" by Metzler publishing house and is a representative collective work of contemporary Czech and foreign German studies dealing with German literature of the Bohemian lands. The publication is the most significant crystallization point and the richest material realization of a new approach to this literature, which rejects the established division between humanistic and aesthetically high-quality "Prague" German literature on the one hand and conservative-national, inferior "Sudeten" literature on the other.
This simplistic notion has deeper historical roots, but it has been almost hegemonically established since the time of the so-called Libelick conferences in the 1960s. Instead, the Compendium seeks to conceptualize and describe the processes of cultural and literary exchange in the common space of the Czech lands.
In addition to space, the key concept of the book is interculturality as a challenge to understand the different models of being together, against each other, in each other and alongside each other that were applied in this literature and its institutions. The book's primary focus is on the German-language literature of the Czech lands, but thanks to its intercultural starting point and its fundamental extension of the "classical" canon of "Prague German literature", it offers a completely different, multi-layered view of the German literature of the Czech lands and thus a new basis for thinking about the interactions between Czech- and German-language literature in this space.
