American Soup

Viliam Weisskopf was a postwar art editor known for his political satire. His soup named Crisis, distributed to a neverending crowd of anonymous workers, appeared at a time when the repressive tendency of Slovak politics in the late 1950s was escalating. This was accompanied by nationalisation of the retail trade and self-employed functions, collectivisation of agriculture, dismissal of politically unreliable employees, prob-lems with supplies, and embarrassment with the fact that the standard of living in Slovakia lagged behind that of the Czech lands by roughly a quarter.