Studio & Archive · 2026-06-29
"At first we thought it was a radio play" — a photo exhibition on the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia
At the Šumperk library, an exhibition of photographs by Martin Žarnay recalls the 1968 entry of (Polish) Warsaw Pact troops; the show's title — "at first we thought it was a radio play" — is about the blurring of reality and fiction.
The exhibition shows Martin Žarnay's contemporary photographs documenting the August 1968 occupation of Šumperk — the town was occupied by Polish Warsaw Pact units; the tanks reached the edge of town on 21 August but, blocked by a wall of people, did not reach the centre. In those days the sudden, unbelievable reality made many feel as if they were hearing radio fiction — hence the show's title.
The most famous case of the genre is the reverse: in 1938 Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre performed "The War of the Worlds" so convincingly, in the form of news bulletins, that many listeners took the Martian attack for real and panicked. There, fiction was taken for news; in Šumperk, the news — reality — was taken for fiction.
Both point to the same thing: when we have no direct, personal experience of an event, we are entirely dependent on the media — and on how much we trust it. The framing of the medium (news or drama, live or recorded) decides what we accept as real. That is why the line between audio drama and news has never been an innocent question: radio's power lies precisely in building the world in our imagination, through the ear. (Source: Šumperský a Jesenický deník; historical background: the 1938 "War of the Worlds")
Sources: Šumperský a Jesenický deník · sumperk.cz
This article was machine-composed under human supervision.