One early evening this April, a writer, former dissident and politician Milan Uhde (1936) gave a talk in the auditorium of Olomouc University\u2019s Arts Department. It was a charming performance laced with characteristic self-irony. What had he achieved during his two years as the Minister of Culture in the Czech government (before Czechoslovakia split up)? There was apparently only one achievement he could boast about: helping to secure the survival of a fine military orchestra, which had been under the threat of closure after the fall of the previous regime. His intervention had given the orchestra a chance to adapt to the new conditions of free arts and a free market. The talk offered a fresh perspective even on issues he had discussed many times before. A fantastic performance, not only for someone who is 88 years old\u2026 Yet you could have fitted all of the audience in the great auditorium around four caf\u00e9 tables.<\/p>\n
Later that evening I stopped in a student pub for a beer. The students were singing a song from the musical Balada pro banditu \/A Ballad for a Bandit with Uhde\u2019s lyrics, repeating the chorus over and over again. This is the third generation for whom this faux folk song is a staple of their pub and campfire repertoire: Zabili, zabili \/ chlapa z Kolo\u010davy. \/ \u0158ekn\u011bte, hroba\u0159i, \/ kde je pochovan\u00fd\u2026 (They killed, they killed \/ a man from Kolchava \/ Gravedigger, tell me \/ Where he\u2019s buried\u2026). Nearly all Czechs and almost every Slovak knows it by heart. An Internet search engine brings up multiple hits for the song lyrics but only the seventh gives the author\u2019s name. The song has become folklore: almost everyone knows it but hardly anyone knows who wrote it.<\/p>\n
The Hollywood-style musical was shot at a Hollywood pace and achieved, in Czechoslovakia\u2019s 1970s terms, Hollywood-level success. Milan Uhde claims\u2014and there\u2019s no reason to doubt the veracity of his memoir\u2014that it took him two weeks to write the play [based on Ivan Olbracht\u2019s 1933 novel Nikola \u0160uhaj loupe\u017en\u00edk] for a Brno theatre The Goose on a String. The film version of A Ballad for a Bandit followed in 1978. By 1975 Uhde, a prohibited author, could no longer be acknowledged as the author and could most definitely not be credited in the 1978 film: after all, he had signed Charter 77 a year earlier.<\/p>\n
It would never have occurred to the students singing Zabili, zabili\u2026 that just around the corner from the pub they could come by an autograph of the author of their beloved song. Surely the tall, burly man, a politician, chairman of Czech Television\u2019s Board of Directors, with his charming, lively, slightly histrionic as well as schoolmasterly delivery, couldn\u2019t possibly, in another day and age, have written the ballad of the slain bandit?<\/p>\n
But maybe this is what all three Czech authors (more accurately: two authors and one interviewee) of seminal memoirs published in Prague over the past six months have in common. The famous yet unknown playwright. The ninetyyear-old journalist revered by the nation and hated by Brezhnev\u2019s Kremlin. The leading Charter 77 figure who has shocked every reviewer: how could someone who had spent nine years in jail \u201cunder the Communists\u201c be so vehemently opposed to anti-communism, of all things?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It took some guts for A. J. Liehm (1924) to publish in book form his almost entire output written for Listy, the exile newspaper, from Czechoslovakia\u2019s early \u201cnormalisation\u201c in 1971 to the heady days of \u201cperestroika\u201c in 1988 and 1989, when people went out into the streets for the first time after many years, and Alexander Dub\u010dek made a public comeback. This was also the time when the issue resurfaced of the legacy of Prague Spring and the future role for its representatives, i.e. not only Dub\u010dek\u2019s but also Liehm\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Anton\u00edn Jaroslav Liehm\u2014whom his readers recognized for decades just by the initials AJL\u2014 was a journalistic star of the highest order. Destined for a stellar future after the war, he was prevented from climbing up the ladder by his extraordinary intellect and stubborn character; he was perhaps the most influential critical guide to the \u201cnew wave\u201c of Czechoslovakian cinema in the 1960s, the best period in his country\u2019s film history so far. But he also \u201cenjoyed\u201c a popularity of a different kind. The pamphlet entitled On the events in Czechoslovakia, known at the time as the \u201cWhite Book\u201c\u2014distributed by the occupying army after the August 1968 invasion and authored by an unspecified \u201cSoviet journalist press group\u201c\u2014cites Liehm several times as one of the men who had planned to take power over Czechoslovakia after a counter-revolution. The canonic interpretation of the Prague Spring, Lessons Drawn from the Crisis Development in the Party and Society following the XIII Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1970) mentions him, alongside Franti\u0161ek Kriegel, Ji\u0159\u00ed Pelik\u00e1n, Eduard Goldst\u00fccker and others as a representative of the \u201cforces championing Zionism in politics, a key tool of international imperialism and anti-communism\u201c\u2014apparently being endowed with a defiant intellect and a German-sounding name was evidence enough, even without the requisite \u201corigins.\u201c<\/p>\n
Present-day Czech culture and politics would be missing a great deal without AJL. Even though his return from Paris exile to his native Prague shortly before his 90th birthday was noted warmly by the media, in the still prevalent \u201cpostVelvet\u201c atmosphere, epitomized primarily by V\u00e1clav Klaus, it is considered right and proper to say that someone is a \u201cman of 1968, but otherwise an interesting (decent, bright, experienced) person\u201c\u2026 In the post-1989 public discourse being called a \u201cman of 1968\u201d is definitely not a compliment.<\/p>\n
AJL defends the Prague Spring but he is far from being nostalgic about it. In one of his articles written in exile he said: \u201cIn 1968 there were plenty people in the world, in Europe in particular, who believed in democratizing and humanizing what Moscow referred to as socialism, and the Prague Spring appeared to offer an interesting option. (\u2026) Nowadays, twenty years later, the situation is fundamentally different, in that nobody believes in such an option anymore. And that includes the Czechs and Slovaks, who have, of course, always favored, and always will, any improvement of the stupid system they live in, but would send packing those who try to preach socialism with a human face or any other face, for that matter.\u201c (1988, p. 411). This wasn\u2019t his only hunch. In 1984, writing about the prominent representatives of Hus\u00e1k\u2019s real-existing consumer socialism, he pointed out something the Czech world is still characterized by: \u201cFirst and foremost, these people are anti-socialist and fiercely anti-communist, as befits members of the bourgeois class. They have understood the essence of our system and quickly adapted to it.\u201c They join the Communist party and other official institutions \u201cbecause membership is a condition of social advancement\u201c, \u201cthey join [\u2026] without any inhibitions, in fact they would often do anything to become members, without giving up any of their anti-socialism or anti-communism\u201c (pp. 335\u2013336). Indeed, it was this kind of \u201canti-socialism or anti-communism\u201c that had a significant effect on the generalized condemnation of the \u201cmen of 1968,\u201c whereas you rarely hear any objections to the \u201cpragmatic\u201c former members of the Communist party.<\/p>\n
What has stood the test of time in the 18 years\u2019 worth of essays, opinion pieces, reviews and interviews? In a few samples, necessarily chosen at random, what strikes one after all these years more than it did at the time (when the readers were probably most interested in a critical view of the situation in Czechoslovakia ) is the fact that in those days Listy in general\u2014it bore the subtitle \u201cA Journal of Czechoslovakia\u2019s Socialist Opposition\u201d\u2014 and its commentator AJL in particular were much freer (or simply, more relaxed) when writing about the US than many other important exile magazines and, quite understandably, than Radio Free Europe. No committed Czech intellectual, from 1956 onwards at the latest, could have failed to be fascinated by Poland; and AJL obliged with several opinion pieces focusing on John Paul II, Martial Law, an interview with the writer Tadeusz Konwicki, as well as an especially noteworthy interview with the noted critic Jan Kott.<\/p>\n
Although a political animal par excellence, AJL does not expect works of art to reinforce his own views. He is quite brilliant at capturing the high aesthetic and intellectual standard of Josef \u0160kvoreck\u00fd, who was born in the same year, yet whose depiction of Prague Spring must have clashed with that of Liehm the citizen. His obituary of Ferdinand Peroutka (1978, p. 650)\u2014 the legendary Czech journalist of the interwar period who had to flee his the country at the time AJL embarked on his journalistic career\u2014 is a wonderful tribute across generations and human stories.<\/p>\n
Few people are as vulnerable in the eyes of future generations as those who comment on public affairs in print, while other people\u2019s expressions of loyalty to dictatorship, or simple mistakes or errors of judgment, are soon forgotten. Readers\u2019 complacency, however, is cheap and easy: they have the advantage of knowing \u201chow things turned out.\u201c AJL frequently knew \u201chow things would turn out.\u201c It was quite a daring thing to do\u2014to publish in book form nearly all of his writings for one of the two or three significant exile papers of the second of the four decades of Communist rule. But he could afford to do it.<\/p>\n
Here is his assessment of V\u00e1clav Havel: \u201cHavel voiced the feelings of his generation (\u2026) with great accuracy, across political and other affiliations. Right up to the generations that will follow. Whoever fails to comprehend this will lose in this country once and for all.\u201c<\/p>\n
AJL made this observation in 1968. The promising playwright was only 32 years old.<\/p>\n
Milan Uhde\u2019s memoirs begin with a drama he would have been unable to grasp at the time: the German occupation interfered with the childhood of a boy from a \u201cmixed marriage,\u201c leading to incomprehensible events: \u201cMy parents were inventive in their resistance. For example, they managed to prevent me from noticing the disappearance of my maternal grandfather and grandmother from my life.\u201c (p. 16). These are chilling sentences showing that religious or \u201cracial\u201d issues played no role in the boy\u2019s life up to that point. That was what things had been like in his middle-class family of lawyers in Brno, a city that was by then predominantly Czech but which was still significantly influenced by German language and culture.<\/p>\n
The young boy took words seriously, sometimes including those of Nazi propaganda. Initially he also made much of the postwar promises about building a new order. In this respect he fits a simplified, yet generally accepted clich\u00e9 that Czech intellectuals born in the 1920s were more prone to become fanatical believers in communism. This included Uhde\u2019s professor of Marxism at university, Jaroslav \u0160abata, who spent many years in prison after 1968 and whose portrait in Uhde\u2019s memoirs is as respectful as several previous depictions of the man. Milan Uhde, by comparison, is a \u201c1936 man\u201c, a label often applied to uncompromising writers among Havel\u2019s intellectual peers. Not that some of them, at least, had not been socialists, or that they always rejected the socialist regime\u2019s potential human face. However, they had kept their distance from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, to say the least. Breaking with \u201creal existing socialism\u201d was for them a financial (albeit severe) drama rather than an existential, fundamental one as it was for the likes of \u0160abata or Liehm. Uhde\u2019s existential drama took place after 1968. While he felt no desire to conform and recant publicly after the August invasion of Czechoslovakia, nevertheless, as he describes with great candor, he had initially hoped to remain at least a tolerated author. The turning point came when he resolved to publish his work in the West and especially after he signed Charter 77. He subsequently became one of its most distinctive and influential personalities outside Prague.<\/p>\n
It is this that is so valuable about Uhde\u2019s memoirs, maybe more so for Czech than foreign readers in this instance. Fate has given the Czech Lands only one metropolis with everything that this entails: before the War the theatres outside of Prague used to be referred to\u2014not pejoratively\u2014as \u201ccountry\u201c theatres (these days the correct term is \u201cregional\u201c). Brno is the only city that defies these categories, and not only in terms of official institutions. It is the only city that also boasted something that might be called a \u201cCharter 77 scene,\u201c compared with all the other towns and cities that basically had only one or two courageous individuals. A depiction of postwar Brno, a city left with just one \u201cregional\u201c publishing house and a single literary journal, Host do domu (whose quality improved continuously in the 1960s) is quite rare in memoir literature. However, Uhde\u2019s depiction of a \u201cnormalised\u201c Brno is far from being just black-and-white or grey, the color often used to describe the two decades under Gustav Hus\u00e1k. In those years it was solidarity shown by a few individuals that helped Uhde become one of the most successful Czech playwrights\u2014albeit not under his own name.<\/p>\n
While Milan Uhde is in many ways a typical \u201c1936 man\u201c, he is rather isolated in terms of his post-1989 civic stance, even though he served as a Cabinet Minister and a Speaker of the Parliament. Being that rare case\u2014a member of the older generation of the erstwhile democratic opposition (\u201cthe dissenters\u201c) to embrace the Right and promote a market that was as free could be\u2014he found himself at loggerheads with friends of many years\u2019 standing when he supported the privatization of Prague\u2019s Barrandov Film Studios. He championed a democratic system with a (conservative) emphasis on the role of political parties, whereas V\u00e1clav Havel was rather sceptical of party affiliations. While this has estranged Uhde from many of his Charter 77 friends, as a suspect humanist intellectual he has never gained the full confidence of the newly-constituted Right led by V\u00e1clav Klaus either.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It its only seemingly paradoxical that Petr Uhl\u2014journalist, self-taught legal expert defender of political prisoners (he is an engineer by training) and himself a long-term political prisoner (having served nine years in total)\u2014the most Left-leaning of our heroes, should be most distant in spirit from the previous regime. Born in 1941, he grew up at a time when Moscow was actually less influential than the independent, non-Moscow based French, German or Polish Left of the 1960s: \u201cOne of the things I brought back to Prague from Paris was Jacek Kuro\u0144 and Karol Modzelewski\u2019s open letter to the Polish United People\u2019s Party\u201c (p. 74).<\/p>\n
His book provides a further reminder that at least from the 1970s onwards, the non-conformist circles in Poland followed Czech affairs much more avidly than the other way around, yet the Polish influence is far from negligible, as can be seen in, for example, Kv\u011bten, the first post1948 Czech literary journal that was not wholly conformist, or the impact the Polish Orange Alternative had on the (much less witty) young dissident grouping, The Society for a Funnier Present.<\/p>\n
In 1968 Petr Uhl was one of those young people who drew their inspiration from the Western European Left, as well as the Polish student and the nascent dissident movements. While that entailed standing up for at least parts of the Prague Spring legacy, Uhl was not a \u201cdissident\u201c in the narrow sense of the word; since his heart had never been in what he and his friends criticized not as a Communist regime but rather as a Bureaucratic Dictatorship, he could not possibly have become an \u201capostate.\u201c That was one of the reasons why he was skeptical about Alexander Dub\u010dek\u2019s political comeback at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. And it was also a reason why his opposition to the Lustration law brought him closer to Dub\u010dek:\u201cHe had a good heart and came from a political culture that was different from mine, yet not a hostile one. I had many reservations about him but I came to recognize that while some moments in his life might be described as failures, they were not the result of his being afraid. It wasn\u2019t out of cowardice that he signed the Moscow Protocol after the August 1968 invasion or the package of extraordinary measures adopted by the Presidium of the Federal Assembly in August 1969 but rather out of a realization that it was, unfortunately, inevitable.\u201c (p. 106). This is characteristic of Uhl\u2019s approach to politics and people: he doesn\u2019t approve of a \u201cbureaucratic\u201c notion of politics yet at the same time he is not dismissive of human decency and is prepared to enter into a political alliance where there is common ground. This happened in Charter 77 as well as in the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted in relation to V\u00e1clav Benda, a conservative Catholic and a Pinochet admirer: a reliable ally in a good cause, a sensible and brave man.<\/p>\n
When he speaks of people whose guilt he regards as proven and not atoned for, Uhl can be blunt and harsh, however, not just in blanket terms, applying collective guilt: he rejects the notion of the Sudeten Germans\u2019 collective guilt while being severely critical of the postwar role played by President Edvard Bene\u0161 and repudiating the notion of the collective guilt of all the members of Czechoslovakia\u2019s Communist Party.<\/p>\n
Uhl can sound schoolmasterly; you have to read him very carefully to find humor and detachment, but it is worth the effort. This is how he describes his first encounter with his newlyminted father-in-law and his son\u2019s grandfather Jaroslav \u0160abata in 1976, after the latter\u2019s release from a five-year prison term: \u201cWe both felt we had to analyze the course and implications of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International as well as other issues, for example, whether the decision to establish People\u2019s Fronts had been the right one. (\u2026) My father-in-law spent about an hour at our place before travelling to Brno. I walked him to the Museum subway station but somehow we couldn\u2019t bear to break off this fundamental debate on the Communist International.\u201c<\/p>\n
Less than a month later came the publication of Charter 77, in which the two men came to play a major role.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The temptation to tell the author of a memoir what he should have done better or what he should have thought is as great as it is pointless. More to the point is the question of what kind of witness an author bears to his own life. Uhde\u2019s and Uhl\u2019s life summaries are among the best and most comprehensive Czech memoirs of recent years. AJL\u2019s memoir, The Past in the Present (Host, Brno), appeared twelve years ago, well before his current stock-taking. It is good that after publishing his memoir he has been granted time for more work. Let us hope that these stocktakings of Milan Uhde and Petr Uhl too are far from definitive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A. J. Liehm: N\u00e1zory tak \u0159e\u010den\u00e9ho Dalimila \/ The Opinions of Dalimil, Doko\u0159\u00e1n, Praha 2014, 680 pp.; Milan Uhde: Co na sebe v\u00edm \/ What I Have on Myself, Torst\/Host, Praha\/Brno 2013, 648 pp.; Petr Uhl (a Zdenko Pavelka): D\u011blal jsem, co jsem pova\u017eoval za spr\u00e1vn\u00e9 \/ I did What I Thought was Right Torst, Praha 2013, 600 pp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nezarazene"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10122,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9057\/revisions\/10122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}