'Havel na Hrad' - Thirty Years On

Souvenir Series #12

Thirty years ago, on the 17^th November 1989, a series of political protests began in Czechoslovakia which culminated in the peaceful passing of totalitarian one-party state power from the Communist Party, who had ruled the country for 41 years, to an open democratic, multi-party system. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe had begun earlier that year with the rise of solidarity movements in Poland and Hungary, but really got going with the highly symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th. Watching these events unfolding as they were reported each evening on BBC TV News broadcasts in the UK, it seemed like a miracle was occurring. After so many years living with the threat of the Cold War, and having seen only very recently the brutal authoritarian state suppression of the student led democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square just a few months before in the tragic summer of 1989, the magnitude of these events felt huge. The Eastern Bloc seemed to suddenly fall apart like a house of cards. The opening up of East Germany (GDR), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and just two years later the actual collapse of the USSR itself truly signalled that the world was entering a genuinely new era, one which seemed to be characterised with unbounded hope and forward-looking optimism. I was entering my early teens at this time. I had always been fascinated and frightened in equal measure when watching the Soviet military parades on the TV News bulletins. The ranks of goose-stepping soldiers marching past the Kremlin followed by huge mobile rocket launchers laden with ominous-looking ballistic missiles motoring past the grey faced grandees of the Soviet Communist Party leaders seemed such a contrast to our own rather quaint and faintly ridiculous-looking Trooping of the Colour ceremony every year!

Sometime around Christmas that year at a family gathering I eagerly quizzed a relative who had been travelling in Europe at the time of these remarkable events. He’d managed to get to Berlin and then he’d travelled on to Prague in time to witness the Velvet Revolution as it happened. On 29^th December the former dissident playwright, Václav Havel, was elected as free Czechoslovakia’s new President. This was something which really fascinated me – how could a playwright become a President? – My relative was handing out chips of concrete smashed from the Berlin Wall to everyone as historic souvenirs when he ducked out of the room. Returning a moment later he placed a crumpled roll of papers into my hands telling me I could keep them. Intrigued I unrolled the large sheets to find they were a set of posters, each bearing the smiling face of the dissident playwright with bold red letters proclaiming “Havel na Hrad” – “Havel to the Castle.” The Hrad being Prague Castle, the official office of the President.

I knew even then that these were important, tangible pieces of history. Only a few years later I too travelled to Europe and the former Eastern Bloc. I went on two student exchanges to the newly reunified Germany – first staying with a West German family in Hannover, and then secondly staying with an East German family in Berlin. These two experiences had a profound effect upon me. They gave me a realistic grounding upon which to build a greater understanding of these events. The peaceful resistance movements which stood up to these totalitarian regimes fascinated me. My interests at school in literature and activism concerning human rights issues began to coalesce at this time, hence, following on from that initial question of how could a playwright become a President, I became very interested in samizdat (banned and unofficial literature circulated privately and secretly in typescript) as an underground phenomenon, as a means of resistance, and an expression of the irrepressible human urge towards freedom. Later on at university, as part of my undergraduate degree in anthropology, I researched and wrote a short dissertation on the subject of samizdat and civic resistance. On the wall of my bedroom in my student digs at the time, blu-tacked above my desk was one of the posters of Václav Havel which I’d been given that Christmas back in 1989.

I read a lot of Václav Havel’s plays and his political prose. I particularly liked the Vaněk Plays which managed to twist situations, suspicions and sympathies through clever word-play in the fine tradition of absurdist theatre. Essays such as ‘Power of the Powerless’ which expressed his concept of resistance through the everyday acts of choosing to ‘live in truth’ rather than buying into the little lies which make us all complicit in our own oppression seemed to resonate beyond the totalitarian constraints which he was fighting against, it seemed to me that they could equally well apply to the way we choose to live and organise our lives in the West and how much credence and legitimacy we afford to our own political leaders and the kind of powers they exercise over us in our collective name. It seems ironic that the Castle which Havel managed to enter after so many years of frustration and persecution was perhaps somewhat prophetically akin to the Castle which inspired the Prague born writer, Franz Kafka, to which his much beleaguered character, K, was never granted admittance. That idea of the everyman pitted against the overwhelming bureaucracy of the impenetrable machine which is trying to break him is a theme which has continued to intrigue me, and in many ways has evolved or transmuted even into the core question of my current PhD research – how the individual fits into and navigates the enormity of the systems of imperialism and global history, how we each strive to survive especially if we’re not fortunate enough to be in the upper echelons who seem to have all their advantages handed to them on a plate.

A subversive birthday greeting to 'Ferdinand Vanek', a character in one of Havel's plays, published in an official Communist Party-run Newspaper on Vaclav Havel's birthday in 1989

It’s no wonder then that one particular essay of Havel’s painted a vivid picture which has never faded from my mind. It’s a short piece of prose, playfully titled ‘Meeting Gorbachev,’ originally published in 1987 only two years before the events of the Velvet Revolution and Havel’s election as President, in which he describes how one evening, whilst he is out walking his dog he happened to pass a theatre, outside which a small gathering of people are waiting to get a glimpse of a great man. The great man is Mikhail Gorbachev, then the leader of the USSR, who was on a State visit to Prague and was being entertained at a gala performance that evening. Havel stops to watch the ‘Glasnost Czar’ and finds himself (despite his opposing convictions) gradually being seduced by the man’s charisma, sucked into the collective spirit of anticipation he unconsciously finds himself waving at Gorbachev and Gorbachev waving back in that strange disconnected sense of intimate connection which arises between a celebrity and their fan, fused together by the unreal intoxication of close proximity. Havel was by no means a wholly obscure, nor unknown character at this time, but even still, despite the thawing of authoritarianism which Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost (Openness) and Perestroika (Restructuring) were beginning to initiate, that leap which propelled Havel to the Castle still seemed almost unimaginable at that time. Yet only two years later in his first Presidential New Year’s Address he was able to speak candidly to the Czechoslovakian people, opening with the following words: “For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. – I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.” – No longer a playwright leading a dissident movement, he was now leading a nation in transition, a world leader – like Gorbachev, standing on a world stage.

In the summers of 1992 and 1993 London seemed to be full of second-hand market stalls selling off old Soviet memorabilia. I used to rummage through these – mostly army surplus: old uniforms, enamel badges, fabric patches, peaked caps and the like. I never bought anything, though I knew acutely that these things were the material remnants of an era which had now ended – these were tangible pieces of history which were slowly being dispersed and lost, merging into the blank space of the future, dissolving memory into the stuff of history books and dusty museum displays. The few tangible pieces of this history which I had in my possession – two tiny fragments of the Berlin Wall, four posters of Václav Havel, and a small, blue toy Trabant – were more than enough for me, because they were part of a lived experience, my lived experience, something which was greater than the sum of its parts. The experience of seeing real Trabants beetling about the streets of Berlin, of talking to German friends from both sides of that former dividing Wall, the Iron Curtain itself, hearing what life had really been like for them and how it had all so suddenly fallen apart and what they felt about it. Seeing and touching and breathing-in the last days of that moment in history for myself, and the fact that it was all suffused with that genuine sense of hope and optimism was something which had entered too deep into my soul to ever be forgotten or subsumed even by the passing of time. I can still picture it all so clearly in my mind.

It’s amazing now to talk to younger friends and colleagues who have no or next-to-no knowledge of these things. The Cold War is just a murky blank, merely the backdrop to old James Bond movies and redundant spy novels. It’s a defunct era. This seems almost incomprehensible to me, but that is simply the way of the world. Time does move on. And the world has changed so much in just the last two decades. We’ve accelerated at light speed, our fingers firmly pressed to the fast-forward button. The recent past has been all too swiftly eclipsed. But such memories and experiences are the important things which we really need to pass on. I realise now that it must have felt very much the same for my grandparents’ generation in the decades that followed on from the Second World War; they understood how vital it was that their life stories and experiences should be passed on. Some say that history is cyclical – that it has a tendency to repeat itself if we’re not careful. The current rise of nationalism and its discontents are proof enough, should we care to notice it.

The main set of posters I was given were designed by Joska Skalnik, using a photograph taken by Miloš Fikejz, and show Havel very much as a man of the people with the call to send ‘Havel na Hrad.’ The second poster is a version which depicts Havel in a much more statesman-like manner, dressed in a smart suit and with the tag line promising a ‘guarantee of free elections.’ Both posters are notably in the national colours of white, red and blue. Thirty years is a long time ago now in many respects. Even though there are still many people alive who remember those events – the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of the USSR – people who  remember it all far more intimately than I do. I feel it’s important that these remembrances on each major anniversary shouldn’t be allowed to fade quietly from our collective memory. And so perhaps my small part in keeping those memories preserved and accessible for the future has been partly fulfilled in a small way this year by my donating those election posters – as tangible pieces of history – to the British Library to mark this thirtieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution; where I hope they will be used by curators and visitors in the study rooms and in future exhibitions seeking to understand and interpret the past, and to remember those days in Czechoslovakia in the last two months of 1989, when anything seemed possible and all possibilities seemed so positive; when the future was still to be found and was still something to be looked forward to.

Also on 'Waymarks'

"The Wind of Change" - Germany 1991 & 1993 

Rest In Peace - Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)