Johannes Urzidil

Born in Prague on February 3, 1896, Johannes Urzidil was a German-Bohemian writer, poet, historian, and journalist. He grew up in the city’s mixed cultural world and later studied German, art history, and Slavic languages before turning fully to writing and journalism.

His life was deeply shaped by exile. After the rise of Nazism, he and his wife Gertrude Thieberger left Czechoslovakia, eventually reaching the United States in 1941. Much of his later work looks back toward Prague and Bohemia, preserving the people, landscapes, and cultural memory of a world that had been shattered by war and displacement.

Urzidil wrote in German and became especially known for essays, stories, and literary portraits marked by clarity, intelligence, and affection for Central European culture. He died in Rome on November 2, 1970.