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Published: July 30th 2009
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Although I knew of Václav Havel before I began the seminar in Berlin, I admit that my prior knowledge of his life and work were, well, cursory. I knew he was a playwright-dissident who had become the first post-communist president of Czechoslovakia. That was about it. But many of us in the program became big fans of his writing and ideas as we read his Power of the Powerless and Summer Meditations. Here was someone who at least professed no desire for power, yet somehow, through the circumstances of the time and place in which he lived, had become a leading dissident and then a president. He advocated for “living in the truth”, even when confronting the hard realities of the muddy game that is politics. Whether his vision is possible, I don’t know; but I love the idea that those who do not seek power are the ones who should lead.
So, coming to Prague is one of those pilgrimages of mine. I am hunting for Havel, and seeking a sense of the tumult that this country experienced as the Velvet Revolution unfolded in 1989.
Several others from the seminar came here, too, for similar purposes. We met
up on Monday evening to begin our search together, symbolically meeting at the current location of the Laterna Magica, the Magic Lantern Theater (Havel and the others engineering the change of government met in the original location, which we had to “dig” hard to find). Unbeknownst to us, our first stop - dinner - was the first part of our Havel tour. We chose a Czech pub across the street from the theater, where we tucked into hearty Czech fare like roasted duck and bacon-wrapped rabbit with potato and bread dumplings (how the people in this region stay so thin is beyond me). Noticing a poster for an upcoming film about Havel, Craig asked the waiter about it; the waiter confided we were in a restaurant Havel often visited! Then we stopped for tea at the Café Louvre, a wonderful Viennese style café above the bustle of Národní třída (National Avenue) that was supposedly the haunt of writers and thinkers in the early part of the twentieth-century. Even Einstein got his coffee here, while he was a professor at the German university of Prague. But it is also - you guessed it - a haunt of Havel. The waitress even
told Tina which tables he usually sits at!
Next stop, the original Magic Lantern, the basement theater of the Adria Palace building. Except, funny thing, there was no marker 1) that there had ever been an Adria Theater/Magic Lantern and 2) that anything momentous, like the creation of an entirely new government, had ever occurred there. If it had not been for the appearance of a bunch of college kids on a Havel study tour appearing in the lobby, I would have begun to doubt the veracity of the information I had gleaned from my guidebook.
Actually, overall I have found the lack of acknowledgement of what occurred here just twenty years ago sort of strange. In Berlin, there’s much hype over the upcoming anniversary of the fall of the Wall. Exhibits on the Peaceful Revolution are everywhere. You cannot forget that something of world-historical importance had occurred in 1989. But, here in Prague, not a peep about the Velvet Revolution. What few hints there are of the communist era tend to be small and unobtrusive, even unmarked. Like the strange bronze plaque with a bunch of hands jutting out and the date: 17.11.89. This is in honor
of the students beaten during protests that eventually led to the fall of the communist regime. But it is almost hidden in a dark passageway next to an Italian restaurant. Then there is the tiny memorial to Jan Palach, who self-immolated in 1969 in protest of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague; the little wooden cross is in the center of the highly commercialized strip of Wenceslas “Square” (rather misnamed in my opinion!), so small you can easily miss in the glare of the neon signs for McDonald’s and Sephora beauty products. *
Perhaps the strangest part of this “forgetting” of 1989 is that the Melantrich Building, from which Václav Havel and Alexander Dubček (the reformist communist leader during the short-lived Prague Spring of 1968) had proclaimed the end of communism in Czechoslovakia to thousands and thousands cheering in Wenceslas Square, is now…a Marks & Spencer and a budget hotel. Our little group of Havel hunters was dumbfounded. Again, not even a commemorative plaque to indicate the building’s importance to modern Czech(oslovak) history.
[But the more I think about it, the more it makes some sense. Maybe it was just us, a group of teachers enthralled by the
past, who needed there to be some recognition of the events. Maybe others see it as simply moving on. What was the then was then, what is now is now. Maybe the pre-1989 period and the early pains of the Velvet Revolution are simply too traumatic to dwell on for some people. I don’t know. But it still seems odd to me that the forgetting process seems so aggressive here.]
Not to be deterred, however, our fearless group entered the Melantrich to see if we could find something, anything to indicate this was the spot of the proclamation. And that’s when the miracle happened. Tina, the most fearless of all, somehow talked the receptionist into letting us go onto the balcony itself! He seemed amused at how excited we were. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, so probably had no memory of the events we were retracing. But it didn’t matter; we were there, high above Wenceslas Square, standing where Havel and Dubček had stood. Tina even borrowed the receptionist’s keys to jangle them, just like keys were jangled that day in November 1989. (Ok, Tina now we might be taking it too far…)
While I don’t
Adria Palace
Where the new government was hammered out... expect I will actually run into Havel in my few days in Prague, I will relish haunting his haunts.** And, who knows, perhaps I WILL see the man, now that he is no longer president and is back to writing plays. Maybe I will see him sipping coffee and reading a paper at Café Louvre.
I would like to believe I would be brave enough to approach him and say: thank you.
*A couple of exception to this trend: There is the Memorial to the Victims of Communism, which is a series of bronze statues showing a man disintegrating into nothingness (the disappearance of the individual). And then there is the Museum of Communism, which is (irony alert) squeezed between a McDonald’s and a casino and which has a rather clear agenda (communism was very, very bad ).
**I found another former favorite Havel hangout, Hostinec u Kocoura (“The Tomcat”), a pub just down the road from me. Despite being on a busy tourist street, I observed that the crowd was mostly Czech - then I tucked into my bacon dumplings and red cabbage.
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Eso
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Czechs don't like to praise people whose are still alive. There will be enough time after they will die ;) Also Czechs blame Havel for some economic and politic decisions he made as president. And Czech aren't big on pathos, anyway :) About Dubcek - reform communists were still communists, you know. :) There is plate at Narodni trida, where students were attacked by police in 1989. Czech tv is full of programms about 20th anniversary of Velvet revolution.