Sun and horizon

What did an adventurous bike trip look like on the eve of World War II?

A fleeting encounter with young girls by the pond was enough to turn it into a journey across half of Europe and an experience of a lifetime. One hot summer, twenty-two-year-old law student Vratislav Krainer decided to embark on an adventurous bicycle journey from Czechoslovakia through Austria, Germany, and Italy to Paris for the ongoing World Exhibition EXPO. At that time, he had no idea that during the 3,500-kilometer journey, he would experience freedom that neither he nor his compatriots would experience again for decades to come.

Sun and Horizon is an authentic cycling travel diary that records the appearance of interwar Europe through the observations of a young person. However, the dark side of time often shines through in the background of ordinary human stories: freezing political conditions and the threat of another world war. Young Vratislav uses poetic and sensitive language to describe his first encounter with other regions, the taste of freedom of travel, sleeping with fishermen in a wooden cabin, braided girls in traditional costumes over beer mugs, or his first swim in the salty waves of the sea. And it shows us how much the world has changed in more than eighty years.

As I read the diary, I felt a strange sense of nostalgia. Also because I would have really liked to have met Vratislav Krainer back then. The diary gives a very strong sense of what a free and freedom-loving person he was. That freedom radiates from his personality, from the way he speaks to us in his diary, it surrounds him like an aura, despite external complications. It was a completely different perception of freedom, above all a strong inner feeling and experience.

— Josef Vojvodík, literary historian