On the death of the literary historian and journalist Jürgen Serke, who had the gift of elevating the dead to the status of contemporaries.
In the spring of 1968, Jürgen Serke was the chief reporter for the German-language edition of the United Press International news agency on Wenceslas Square in Prague. There is a photo, actually two, that show Serke next to Alexander Dubček, the first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and chief messenger of that Prague Spring, which was very quickly replaced by the winter of the Soviet tank invasion. Dubček then disappeared from the party and from the politics of the CSSR. In the retouched version of the photo, Dubček can no longer be seen, but Jürgen Serke can be seen, looking over the shoulder of the then opportunist Prime Minister Ludvík Svoboda.