Bridge to the future

In the 1960s and 1970s, one of the most valuable historical towns in northern Bohemia was destroyed due to open-pit coal mining. A new bridge was built to replace the old one, which raised great expectations, but ultimately became a symbol of the decline and ruthlessness of Czechoslovak state socialism. < br> The book Bridge to the Future vividly tells the story of life in the old Most in the decades after World War II and conveys the discussions and negotiations that preceded the decision to demolish it, as well as those in which the character of the new city was decided. < br> The author also places key aspects of the post-war history of Most in the context of intellectual and social changes in Czechoslovakia and Europe in the second half of the 20th century. The originally medieval city swallowed up by a large-scale quarry or the concrete architecture of the new Bridge thus do not remain for the reader just meaningless manifestations of communist dictatorship. The author shows, that we can understand them, if we include them in the context of the displacement of Germans and the alienation between people and nature in the Czech borderland, productivism and technocracy, shared by the vast majority of Europeans in the post-war decades, or the former persuasiveness of the vision of rationally planned cities.