The City of Truth

As this month began my research turned in different directions. My reading of the Kriseová and Keane biographies proceeded in the opposite order from what I outlined previously – which is to say in chronological order. Rather than beginning with the supposedly more detached account, I opted to read the first account followed by the second, because Keane very clearly acknowledged it was a reaction to an alleged hagiography by Kriseová.

The readings gradually led me to new sources. One initial source was the transcript of a 2007 interview by James Pontuso of Havel. Later I found an article reviewing rather critically both the Kriseová and Keane biographies. This article by Stefan Auer directed me to Václav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Postmodern Age (2004), also by Pontuso, of which I will use a limited portion.

In turn I have added and discarded some sources. Guidance about how to narrow my focus allowed me to leave off a planned examination of several plays (The Garden Party, The Memorandum, Protest, and Largo Desolato). A collection of his selected writings from 1965-1990 and The Art of the Impossible (1997) give me greater access to Havel through a frequently employed translator, Paul Wilson, and allow me to be judicious about which writings to examine. The recollections of Havel in To the Castle and Back (2007) and his lengthy interview in Disturbing the Peace (1990) may be useful, but at this point are of secondary consideration.

At this point I have articulated my thesis and gone back to neaten and condense my introduction. Topics in his controversial presidential tenure I plan to analyze are (1) Lustration (2) the Velvet Divorce, (3) the 1993 Citizenship Law, as well as the early construction of his historical legacy. If circumstances permit I may also examine the leadership of Havel regarding the shift from the defunct Warsaw Pact to NATO and his competition for influence with Václav Klaus, but will try to remember not to let ambition get the better of me. My printed articles are organized by theme along with notes from other texts on notecards. There remain about a dozen journalistic articles for me to format for my bibliography. In short, I am grateful for a lot of helpful sources, and for the good advice to pare them down. The writing is coming along as the reading wraps up, and I look forward to some momentum this weekend.

My research up until now on the development of Václav Havel from playwright to politician to historical figure has brought me to many sources written by and about the man himself. In the authorized biography, by a personal friend Eda Kriseová, the author addressed the criticism which alleged that she had written a moralistic fairy tale. She claims to be “glad that [she is] guilty of writing fairy tales” in her preface. My cursory examination of her book from 1993, and the commentary about it, indicates that there is a fair amount of legacy cultivation in its pages. As such, I have chosen to begin the 1999 biography by John Keane before that of Kriseová, in order to get a more detached treatment of Havel before the official version.

The challenge which I feel is before me stems mostly from the volume I hope to tackle in order to present a credible argument about why Havel was the hero of 1989 who ascended to the Presidency instead of somebody like Petr Miller, who Timothy Garton Ash (p.106) characterized as a potential “Czech Wałęsa.” Havel publicly expressed his desire to remain a writer rather than a political leader (Garton Ash, p.103), and yet takes a “Havel for President” button (Garton Ash, p.118) which has appeared mysteriously out of nowhere (Hungary). Thus far my reading seems to support the argument that Havel was not the reluctant politician he claimed to be, but to me it is not yet clear why entirely this was the case. Much of his legacy seems to rest on the accepted truth of his pristine record of promoting democracy (and anti-communism) as an ideal figure, unblemished by crass ambition and political machinations. Being separated twenty-five years from his greatest triumph, I want to understand why and how his legacy has been crafted and interpreted by his fellow Czechs, the Slovaks, and his western devotees who made him a celebrity in the first place, and make monuments to him from Malta to Washington, DC.

In addition to these biographies, I hope to get a sense of his own work – before politics from some of the Vaněk plays, The Garden Party, and Largo Desolato, as well as his own characterization of his record in To the Castle and Back, and from his public speeches in The Art of the Impossible. There are also a dozens of interviews with Havel, and articles about him that are on my list. I would appreciate any input regarding the order in which I might attack this abundance of material.

Garton Ash, Timothy. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of  ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

The account from Tina Rosenberg, in The Haunted Land, of those living in the shadow of recently collapsed communist regimes provides a more intimate look at the effects of a half-century of totalitarian rule on culture and relationships than the previous readings. I appreciated the narrative depictions of, among others, dissidents decried as collaborators, the general (Jaruzelski) enslaved by communism as much as any of his countrymen, and ordinary men whose court proceedings put the GDR itself on trial. However, I thought the interjection of her critical judgements of Falk Zimmermann’s contrition beside compassion for the struggles of Lothar Pawliczak, or the criticism of the sensational Opfer-Täter (victims and victimizers, p. 386) mediation media phenomenon, interfered with an important documentation of recent history. Once I was reminded of the fact that hers is a journalistic perspective, I came to better appreciate her choices. In fact, some personal reflections that were impossible to get from the thorough but detached work of Dr. Gale Stokes (hopes for reflection in the second edition on his predictions in the first) were present in The Haunted Land, and they provide benchmarks for the reader to consider.

As I mentioned in class, I feel like the justice administered for crimes which occur in moral grey areas, and relies on newly written or rewritten codes, is problematic. As such, the trials in Germany of former East German border guards were important for presenting the realities of the recent past for national consumption, but the sentences ultimately imposed seemed fair despite the heinous nature of their actions. This also applies broadly to lustrace in the Czech case in my opinion.

Another critical piece of this story is evaluation of the new societies formed after communism. Rosenberg points out the many flaws of Falk Zimmermann as a dissembling penitent, and self-deluding betrayer of his friends, but of his set of environmental activists “he was the only one who knew his way around capitalism (p.373),” and perhaps that indicates some imperfections of the transition. More than once Rosenberg alludes to the problems created by a rash nature of the cleanup. Zukal, the chartist disallowed from practicing his profession by the communists or participating in the new democracy by the democrats, was a typical (p.45) figure in his evolution from idealistic communist to idealistic dissident. But in fact, the system that condemned his youthful mistakes informing for the StB also found Václav Havel to be “StB positive” with a C rating (p.102). Clearly Havel was could not be tainted by the contents of a file because of his credibility, but a selective double standard said that the guilty communists were unfit to participate, even though Dubček was once a communist politician. The ideological backlash, informed by a need to isolate some for their participation in the system without acknowledging that all were tainted by it, is itself an unfortunate legacy of communism. This notion, a desire for quick and simple answers, is captured most succinctly in the words of a Czech grammar which once read “only socialism can guarantee the development of mankind” and by the time Rosenberg was reporting it had changed to “only capitalism can guarantee the development of mankind (p.114).” Whether this is an apocryphal example, it highlights a common tendency in humanity to embrace uncomplicated solutions that absolve us of moral responsibility for wrongdoings in a complicated past.

Rosenberg, Tina. 1995. The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism. New York: Random House.

Addendum:

Here is a news article about Andrej Babiš and his legal challenge to assertions of his StB collaboration as an informer and agent. This is an example of the political implications of lustration twenty five years after 1989. The contention that the past is a tool in the struggle to control the present is a fair one, and the Czech Finance Minister appears to think this issue is important enough to take his case to a Slovak court to protect his reputation.

The author, Padraic Kenney, argues that social and political movements changed the relationships between communist states and their populations in the years before 1989 in such a way that made possible the seemingly sudden revolution. He uses the term carnival to highlight the plural and joyful nature of many of the phenomena that constitute his subject matter. This argument differs somewhat from that presented by Gale Stokes in The Walls Came Tumbling Down in that his focus is narrower, on the 1980s and particularly the years between the 1986 incident at Chernobyl and 1989. It also highlights much more the role of grassroots dissent and its variety of political flavors and younger/smaller characters (Ludwig Melhorn in the GDR, Czechs like Jan Svoboda, Petr Placák , and Ruth Šomorová, and Hungarians like Tomás Fellegi and István Stumpf) rather than the well known opposition leaders (like Lech Wałęsa, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, etc.) or party leaders (Károly Grósz, Imre Pozsgay, Gen. Jaruzelski, Erich Honecker, etc.) that dominated the narrative in our first reading.

The cast of characters and sampling of organizations presented a broader view of the people who participated in the carnival from 86-89. Kenney made the accounts much more vivid for having so much detailed personal recollection; and perhaps dealing with personalities of students and artists, among others, made it easier to flesh out the stories than those of the big names. Environmentalists, church activists, teenaged students, and varied musical devotees (of punk or John Lennon) changed the nature of dissent; by embracing causes that were not explicitly political to break the stranglehold of the communist party on various facets of life, they made things like music and school into political spheres and their resistance thus became political. Surrealist performers and artists, bringing the public on the street into their spectacular “happenings” found innovative ways to combat communist orthodoxy; not by “refusing to ape official ideology,” but instead they found it “more effective to ape it grotesquely” (1). Confronting party  rhetoric in public gave another view of the hollow promise of communism which was publicly visible in an empty Warsaw butcher shop (2), but had not previously been open for public discussion.

Though some of the important groupings that provoked public action were supplanted by the older dissident leaders (as in Poland when Solidarity took the lead at the Roundtable negotiations), their efforts built momentum for a civil society that laid foundations for revolution and later political pluralism. Kenney uses extensive personal interviews, ranging from 1996 until 2000, while acknowledging that he accounts for personal biases by claiming to filter out obvious accounts of personal self-glorification or blame. He also lists a great number of samizdat publications as sources of direct evidence. Kenney concludes that the end of the carnival came suddenly in each case, but that the training needed to make it possible came over years; 10-13 in Poland, followed by progressively shorter courses in Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech lands, East Germany, and Western Ukraine. He mentions that many of the younger leaders were marginalized in favor of the Havels and Wałęsas once the negotiations began for new governments. Where Stokes moved from cautious optimism to a more circumspect reflection between his first and second edition, Kenney writes in between and seems to present the carnival as having ended firmly when the revolution came. His reflection is more about the memory of participants, and in the end how the lack of public catharsis manifests in a lack of public remembrance, than on the legacies that are observable in the societies of contemporary Central Europe.

The Polish Voting Rights poster (3) seems a good representation of the way the old guard (of dissenters) harnessed public energy, preserved during the period of martial law by a flowering of different aboveground and underground groups, for new electoral possibilities. An electoral strategy to compel change in a new government (with a Senate as a new feature) relied on an empowered populace that had come to believe in change as a realistic prospect.

1 Kenney, Padraic. A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. p.159

2 Chris Niedenthal, “The Butcher Shop, Warsaw,” Making the History of 1989, Item #23, http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/23 (accessed February 18 2014, 1:27 pm)

3 “Polish Voting Rights,” Making the History of 1989, Item #93, http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/93 (accessed February 18 2014, 1:27 pm)