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Vclav Havel: in memoriam

Vclav Havel, playwright andpresidentDec 18th 2011, 13:02 by E.L.

EARLY in 1989, your correspondent, newly arrived in communist

Czechoslovakia, passed an empty building in the Podoli district of Prague.Someone had written in the grime inside the window: Svoboda Havlovi[Freedom for Havel]. It was an interesting moment. The jailed playwright (aswe used to call him) was behind bars for hooliganism following an oppositiondemonstration. The authorities could jail individuals. But they had lost thewill, or the capability, to police the inside of shop windows.The slogan (which was still there a year later when Mr Havel was president)was particularly striking because shop windows were the theme of one of

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Vclav Havel's best-known essays. In "The Power of the Powerless", heponders the presence of a banal communist propaganda poster,reading "Workers of the world, unite!"in a greengrocer's window.

"Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he

genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the

world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse toacquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a

moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it wouldmean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority ofshopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do

they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered toour greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and

carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been donethat way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it

has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could bereproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone

might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things mustbe done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details thatguarantee him a relatively tranquil life "in harmony with society," as theysay."

That encapsulated the way many Czechs and Slovaks dealt with their fateafter the Soviet-led invasion of 1968. To many outsiders the country seemed

numb, the subject of a kind of moral castration. Resistance was useless:even if you changed the system, the Soviet tanks would crush what youattempted. So the only solution was to withdraw into internal (or, for a few,external) exile.

The cocktail that fuelled totalitarianism was a mixture of fear and pretence:the greengrocer pretended to be loyal for fear of the consequences. Havelnoted later in his essay:

"If the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan "I am afraid

and therefore unquestioningly obedient;' he would not be nearly asindifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the

truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such anunequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quitenaturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own

dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must takethe form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of

disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, "What's wrongwith the workers of the world uniting?" Thus the sign helps the greengrocer

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to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same

time concealing the low foundations of power."

But those shallow foundations were vulnerable to individual acts ofdisobedience. Havel concludes his essay thus:

"Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps andhe stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops votingin elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at

political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express

solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In thisrevolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual

and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressedidentity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt

is an attempt to live within the truth...."

That would come at a cost:

"He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to thewarehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will

evaporate. His children's access to higher education will be threatened. Hissuperiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him. Most

of those who apply these sanctions, however, will not do so from anyauthentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the

same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the officialslogans. They will persecute the greengrocer either because it is expected of

them, or to demonstrate their loyalty, or simply as part of the generalpanorama, to which belongs an awareness that this is how situations of this

sort are dealt with, that this, in fact, is how things are always done,particularly if one is not to become suspect oneself. The executors, therefore,behave essentially like everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree: ascomponents of the post-totalitarian system, as agents of its automatism, as

petty instruments of the social auto-totality."

Havel concluded with his most famous exhortation: to live in truth was todeny the communist system its legitimacy, and ultimately its power:

"Thus the power structure, through the agency of those who carry out the

sanctions, those anonymous components of the system, will spew the

greengrocer from its mouth....The greengrocer has not committed a simple,individual offence, isolated in its own uniqueness, but somethingincomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he hasdisrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has

shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. Hehas upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He

has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through theexalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of

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power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in

fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, thegreengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer

behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within

the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal.

The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no termswhatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, andtherefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens

it in its entirety..."

Havel practised what he preached. He himself was denied higher education,as the scion of a famous bourgeois family. Others might have curried favourby writing plays praising the regime. But he worked as a stage-hand, andstudied drama in his spare time. As Czechoslovak communist rule eased inthe 1960s, his plays were performed, and gained public acclaim. By 1968, hewas a well-known and successful playwright.

For him and the rest of the country's cultural elite, the Soviet-led invasionposed a sharp problem: emigrate, collaborate, or face the consequences.Philosophers became stokers, and poets street-sweepers. Havel took a job ina brewery (which he wrote about in his play "Audience"). In the mid 1970she moved into active opposition to the regime, defending the undergroundrock group Plastic People of the Universe and, in 1977, signing the dissidentdeclaration "Charter 77".

The late 1970s were tough years for the captive nations of the Sovietempire. Havel was jailed from 1979 to 1984, during which he wrote the

letters to his wife, Olga, that later became part of perhapshis best-knownbook. He also spent many days under arrest and interrogation. Out of jail,his every move, visitor, letter, phone call and utterance were subject toscrutiny by the StB, the secret-police servants of Czechoslovakia'scommunist masters.

His last bout of imprisonment came in happier circumstances. Communismwas crumbling across the whole of the Warsaw Pact. in Poland his closefriends and allies from Solidarity were on the verge of meeting theirexhausted persecutors across (or to be more precise around) the negotiating

table. At his parole hearing in April, the journalists, diplomats and friends(not exclusive categories) in the courtroom listened as prison officialssolemnly gave evidence of the prisoners good behaviour. They could saynothing about his rehabilitation, but he had certainly not broken any prisonrules. The small, tubby figure beamed and winked. That evening brought amighty celebration in the palatial rooms of his riverside apartment. Many ofthose present had spent the last 20 years as the victims of the regime'sbullying: for some, the fate was menial labour. For others, it was broken

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marriages, or children whose life chances were blighted (the StB would oftenuse threats to children's welfare to browbeat the stubborn). The sense ofbravery and resistance, matched with impending triumph, was palpable. Theregime itself might not know it, but its victims did: the days of the old greymen with cold grey faces were numbered.

Havel was the de-facto leader of the Czechoslovak dissident movement, butit was not a role he enjoyed. He hated the intrusive phone calls fromnewspapers and radio stations, often retreating to his country cottage forsome peace and quiet. He kept his appointments list on a small scrap offolded paper, sometimes entrusted to his beloved friendZdenk Urbnek,whose stately good manners and quavering English could deter even thepushiest television crews (many would turn up unannounced, determined tointerview the "opposition leader" on the spot, regardless of convenience oreven agreement). His habitual and even plaintive refrain was that he was aplaywright, not a politician. His only desire was for a political system in which

he could do the only job that he felt truly qualified to do.But events brushed such diffidence aside. After the riot police brutally brokeup a student demonstration on November 17th 1989 Havel and his colleaguesset up the Civic Foruma determinedly non-partisan group that initially hadno leaders.But it was leadership that the demonstrators wanted as they swelledWenceslas Square each day, always in greater numbers. As the regimeopened negotiations with Civic Forum, and as heads rolled in both the partyand the government, posters sayingHavel na Hrad (Havel to the Castle)began appearing. In December he reluctantly agreed to run for president(forestalling an attempt to put forward the architect of the Prague Spring,Alexander Dubek). A bunch of cheeky Poles tried to get in on the act too,with posters saying Havel na Wawel. If the Czechoslovaks didnt want him,they would make him king of Poland, to be crowned at the Wawel castle inCracow.

Havel confounded those who thought he was too dilettantish to be a properpresident. He rollerskated through the corridors of Prague castle, exorcisingthe ghosts of the communist usurpers with his humanity and humour.Hisaddresses to his fellow citizens on New Year's Eve 1989 and 1990makeilluminating and moving reading. In what would be a hallmark of his political

approach, he made a point of lending support to beleaguered but like-minded figures abroad. He invited the Lithuanian leader VytautasLandsbergis to Prague, as that country struggled to turn its declaration ofindependence from Soviet occupation into reality. He brought the Pope toPrague, overcoming the neurotic anti-Catholicism and secularism of someCzechs, who remember the counter-Reformation and priestly privilege as ifthey were yesterday. He was a close friend of the the Dalai Lamaalmostthe first foreign dignitary he received as president, and a visitor in the last

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days of his life. Others might counsel friendship with the mighty Chinese; forHavel matters of principle were just that. Having themselves been forgottencaptives, the Czechs could not possibly forget the plight of the Tibetans, theUighurs, the Belarusians and the Cubans.He laid other ghosts of the past too: opening warm diplomatic ties with Israel

and giving full co-operation to outside efforts to track down the many Arabterrorists who had trained in Czechoslavakia under communism. He alsomade a point of friendly ties with Germanyin those days a bogey figure formany Czechs and Slovaks, who feared that the expulsion of Sudeten andother Germans after 1945 was neither forgiven nor forgotten. He hosted thegreat Richard von Weizscker in Prague castle, issuing a carefully wordedjoint presidential declaration that, thanks to some fancy footwork with Czechgrammar, squared the circles of Czech and German resentments abouthistory.

He did not succeed in saving Czechoslovakia from the depredations of

ambitious politicians in Prague and Bratislava, who saw great possibilities fortheir own advancement in smaller and separate countries. But he returned aspresident of the Czech Republic in 1993 and again in 1998, piloting hiscountry into the European Union and NATO. His great aim, he used to say,was that his countrymen could enjoy life untroubled by politics. But that wasonly one of his achievements. As a playwright and as an essayist, and as aphilosopher of the human condition, his fame stretched far beyond the "smallboring European country" whose return to freedom he had so lovinglyoverseen.

(Picture credit: AFP)