Kratochvil, Antonin. Broken Dream: 20 Years of War in Eastern Europe by Antonin Kratochvil.

Monacelli Press, 1st U.S. edition, hardcover with dust jacket, new in original shrink wrap. Born in Czechoslovakia and an exile for most of his life, photojournalist Kratochvil, whose father was a photographer in Prague,  spent twenty years documenting the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, traveling in Albania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union. His revealing photographs of workers, gypsies, thieves, street kids, refugees, and others raise awareness of the desolation caused by oppression and environmental pollution.  Kratochvil commented, "All I wanted to do was record how these poor people adapted to lies and suffering, how they got used to it, in fact, that they were bound to miss it when it was over." Summary:

Broken Dream: 20 Years of War in Eastern Europe (published in 1997 by The Monacelli Press) is a powerful, 144-page monograph by Czech-born photojournalist Antonín Kratochvíl. The landmark book serves as a devastating, intimate visual history compiled from two decades of clandestine travel behind the Iron Curtain, capturing the bleak realities of the Cold War and the complex, turbulent aftermath of the collapse of Soviet communism.

Core Themes and Content

• The Vision of an Exile: Having escaped from communist Czechoslovakia as a young man in 1967, Kratochvíl approached his subject matter with a deeply personal sense of urgency. Returning to Eastern Europe from his exile in the United States, his photographs cross borders into Albania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, East Germany, the Soviet Union, and his native homeland, capturing life in regions that few Western photojournalists dared to infiltrate.

• A Chronicle of Desolation and Adaptability: Rather than focusing strictly on military engagements or political figures, the book provides an unflinching social narrative centered on the fringes of society. Kratochvíl documents an environment plagued by extreme industrial pollution, systemic corruption, and isolation, focusing his lens on the daily endurance of workers, Romani communities, street children, thieves, and refugees.

• Psychological Adaptation to Oppression: A central thesis of the work is how citizens internally process institutional trauma. As Kratochvíl famously noted of the project, his primary goal was to record how ordinary people adapted to structural lies and suffering, becoming so habituated to the harsh restrictions of totalitarian rule that the sudden arrival of freedom brought its own profound sense of disorientation and displacement.

• Expressive Photographic Style: The monograph features stark, high-contrast black-and-white imagery that rejects standard, objective photojournalism in favor of an gritty, highly emotional aesthetic. Utilizing dramatic shadows, blurred motion, and tight framing, the visual style mirrors the unstable, anxious atmosphere of a crumbling empire.

By bridging the oppressive depth of the Cold War with the chaotic transition into the late 1990s, Broken Dream stands as a definitive, tragic monument to a historic era of transition, illustrating how the invisible scars of political oppression linger long after regimes dissolve.

Antonín Kratochvíl (born 1947) is a highly acclaimed, Czech-born American photojournalist celebrated for his raw, expressionistic documentary style that captures human catastrophe, political upheaval, and societal fragmentation. Born in Lovosice, Czechoslovakia, Kratochvíl lived a tumultuous early life; he escaped the oppressive communist regime in 1967, surviving European refugee camps and a stint in the French Foreign Legion before earning a BFA in photography from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Immigrating to the United States in 1972, he established himself as a prominent editorial photographer, shooting high-profile portraits for publications like Vogue and Rolling Stone while simultaneously infiltrating global conflict zones. Over a prolific four-decade career, Kratochvíl documented the Rwandan genocide, the war in Iraq, the plight of street children in Mongolia, and the lingering scars of the Cold War—culminating in his seminal monograph Broken Dream: 20 Years of War in Eastern Europe. A co-founder of the prestigious VII Photo Agency in 2001 (from which he later resigned in 2018), his gritty, high-contrast, and deeply subjective imagery has earned him numerous accolades, including the Infinity Award and three World Press Photo first prizes, cementing his legacy as a master of humanist and conflict photojournalism.

Copies available:

• As new hardcover cloth bound with protected dust jacket. 
• New in original shrink wrap.