When the Tugendhat family had their villa built in the late 1920s, they had no idea how many stories it would inspire. A few years ago, British writer Simon Mawer wrote a novel called "The Glass Room." The novel tells the story of Liesel and Viktor Landauer, set in Brno between the two world wars. He was a promising industrialist, she was a rich beauty from a good family. As a wedding gift, they received a plot of land and had an Austrian architect build them a monumental house made of glass and concrete. Inside the house, their family life unfolds, but so do passionate stories of infidelity and even lesbian love. Through the glass of their villa, however, they can also observe the brown threat approaching from Hitler's Germany and the transformations of the young Czechoslovak Republic. When the threat becomes real, the Landauers understand that their time in the fictional City and in the house with the glass room has come to an end.
Ivana Vaňková
