2. Váchal’s Nazi Bookplate

Prompted by his own family's discovery of a Nazi flag brought home from the war — a story chronicled by the author's journalist cousin — this chapter confronts the discomfiting revelation that Josef Váchal, an idiosyncratic Czech polymath revered for his self-made books, woodcuts, and the astonishing painted house known as the Portmoneum, was during the war years a documented Nazi sympathizer and antisemite, expressing admiration for Hitler and Göring in letters and diaries. The chapter centers on Váchal's České ex libris (ca. 1939), a densely allegorical bookplate depicting a muscular Aryan Germany, a caricatured Jew struck by lightning, and a supplicating Czech homeland — an image whose meaning (celebration, indictment, or ambiguous provocation) the author argues cannot be separated from Váchal's contemporaneous writings, even as two later wartime ex libris, savagely condemning Hitler and the Nazis, complicate any simple verdict on the artist's convictions.Using a personal digression about his father’s favorite folk singer (the "Alevizos effect") and Richard Taruskin's discovery of Stravinsky's fascist sympathies as comparative cases, the author explores how audiences cycle through anger, distaste, and often eventual forgiveness toward artists whose biographies turn out to be morally compromised, and questions whether "madness," obscurity, or seeming political powerlessness should mitigate judgment. Rather than resolving whether Váchal's ex libris should be condemned, quarantined, or aesthetically bracketed from his broader oeuvre, the chapter uses the case — alongside a coded quodlibet in Viktor Ullmann's final Terezín piano sonata and a folk painting variously seen by the author, his physician wife, and imagined others as being "about" a violin, a mother and child, or a cooking pot — to argue that reception of ethically fraught art is inescapably individual, unstable, and irreducible to any single authoritative reading, leaving the question of how to hold both admiration and horror for the same body of work genuinely, deliberately unresolved.