Subjective Biography and the Limits of “Objective” Sources
Subjective Biography and the Limits of “Objective” Sources

Summary/Abstract: Miles, Jonathan. Devět životů Otto Katze: Příběh komunistického superšpiona z Čech[original edition: The Nine Lives of Otto Katz: The Remarkable True Story a Communist Super-Spy. London: Bantam, 1998]. Trans. Petruška Šustrová. Praha and Litomyšl: Paseka, 2012, 336 pp.; Laurence, Charles. Společenský agent Jiří Mucha: Láska a žal za železnou oponou –intriky, sex, špioni [original edition: The Social Agent: A True Intrigue of Sex, Spies,and Heartbreak behind the Iron Curtain. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010]. Trans. KateřinaLipenská. Praha: Prostor, 2012, 250 pp. The reviewer compares the biographies of two cosmopolitan Czech intellectuals who worked as agents of the Communist secret police. The publication by Charles Laurenceis about the writer Jiří Mucha (1915–1991), the son of the renowned painter Alfons Mucha. Jiří Mucha spent a considerable part of his life in France, but also lived in Czechoslovakia, where he spent four years in prison in the 1950's. The other book under review, by Jonathan Miles, is about the journalist Otto Katz (1895–1952).Under the name André Simone, Katz worked to promote the Communist movement in interwar Europe and then in the United States and Mexico during the war, before returning to Czechoslovakia after the war to be a functionary of the Communist press. Katz was eventually sentenced in the Slánský show trial and was then executed.Whereas Miles, on the basis of wide-ranging archive records, seeks to give an objective account of Katz’s life, Laurence tells Mucha’s story from a subjective standpoint,with personal bias, as part of his own complicated family history. According to the reviewer, Laurence makes his points more compellingly than Miles, thanks in part to his effective literary style; Miles, by contrast, remains in the grip of the sources and their apparent objectivity, thus failing to pay enough attention to the historical context.

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