picking up what the horses lost on the street;

what a godsend that dung is!” Because the real gardener is not a man “who grows flowers, but a man who tends the soil”.

Once he's thawed.

Claudia Schulke

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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So it goes on in the garden breviary, which was published under the title "The Year of the Gardener" in Prague in 1929 and in 1957 by the Aufbau Verlag in the GDR. Karel Čapek and his brother Josef gardened in what is now Prague's Vinohrady (Vineyards) district. There, in Úzká ulice (Narrow Street), which today is called Brothers Čapek Street (ulice Bratří Čapků), they had built a semi-detached house in 1925. In March they were still fighting the frost with spades in the associated garden, as Josef caricatured in a drawing. He illustrated the little book that had emerged from his brother's feuilletons for the daily newspaper "Lidové noviny". He was also a writer and also a painter. For Karel's science fiction drama "RUR" (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in Prague's National Theater in 1921, Josef had rediscovered the word "robot",derived from the Czech "robota", which means "forced labor".

Reading "The Year of the Gardener" is not drudgery.

Cheerful and weightless, with humor and self-mockery, the author makes fun of himself and his obsession.

He was a "passionate gardener" like Rudolf Borchardt and yet a completely different one, because he doesn't take himself and his passion so seriously because he knows the futility of all human activity.

"Frauenzimmer" in the way

Karel Čapek, born in 1890 near Trutnov on the southern slopes of the Giant Mountains, was not only a gardener, but also a politically minded person who advocated democracy, founded the Czech PEN Club in 1925 and became its first chairman.

On Fridays, the “pátečníci”, a group of pragmatic politicians and journalists, met in the Čapeks' house.

Even President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk did not take long to ask and provided the material for the "talks with Masaryk".

When Čapek finally married his great love, the actress Olga Scheinpflugová, in 1935, a relative gave him a villa near Dobříš in central Bohemia for his wedding.

She was to be his downfall, but also his salvation.

Clairvoyant Čapek had warned early on about the National Socialist machinations among the German neighbors.

His parabolic novel The War with the Newts (1936) reads like a portent.

His almost prophetic play "The White Disease" (1937) about a deadly virus from China was filmed by Hugo Haas in the same year.

"Such a small nation has no right to life," he says in his "Marshal"/Hitler.

Soon the Gestapo regarded him as an enemy of the state.

After the Munich agreement on 29./30.

September 1938, the annexation of the Sudetenland on 1.

October and the invasion of the Wehrmacht on March 15, 1939, Čapek would have been in mortal danger.

But he died on December 25, 1938 of pneumonia, which he contracted while trying to clean up the damage to the pond in front of his villa during a flood.

His brother was arrested in 1939 and, after an odyssey through the Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps, died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in early April 1945.

"The Year of the Gardener" has outlived its authors and has just been re-released by Verlag Schöffling & Co.

Marcela Euler translated the text from Czech and fortunately did not use gender asterisks.

The "women" always stood in Karel's way when gardening.

Anna Luchs illustrated the book, but her pointed drawings lack the coarse, down-to-earth humor that characterizes Josef's drawings of rounded buttocks reaching up into the sky.

The Čapek brothers believed that the gardener could not see anything else anyway.