Czechoslovakia 20 (and 40 and 50) Years Later
MELIA, THOMAS O.
A TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Czechoslovakia 20 (and 40 and 50) Years Later BY THOMAS O. MELIA Prague One of Czechoslovak Communism's few accomplishments has been its keeping intact much of...
...But either way, we must still assert our rights, create our music and share our art with our countrymen.' Especially since 1969, the government has contended that culture is politics, and consequently has compelled apolitical individuals to think of themselves as dissidents...
...by the lunch hour-size crowds filling the sidewalks at mid-morning...
...The desperate-looking poured-concrete apartment buildings on the outskirts of Prague, grimmer than the unkindest Western parody of Soviet block architecture, at best bring new and different tones of gray to the cityscape...
...In March 1985 the Jazz Section was "abolished" under a statute outlawing "counterrevolutionary activity...
...Although the anniversary posters occupied some of the shelf space that would otherwise have been filled with ever more canned Hungarian wieners, green Cuban oranges, or Vietnamese banana paste, they did not seem to spark a holiday mood in the people of the capital...
...Small wonder that an unseasonably warm winter has fueled one of those pithy little jokes Eastern Europeans use to explain their predicament...
...Particularly impressive, therefore, are the citizens and artists who refuse to succumb to the general malaise that seems to permeate Czechoslovak society...
...Far from having been cowed by his experience, Srp is reinvigorated...
...Another of Milan Kundera's novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, could not be filmed here in 1987 because the setting is Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the cultural commissars are resolved not to forget forgetting...
...Ina crowded restaurant she betrayed no interest in the West, or in her friends who have emigrated...
...A departing American visitor could not helpwonderhowitis possible to sustain such drive in so dark an atmosphere...
...Once a legally constituted association of the Musicians Union, its 7,000 members throughout Czechoslovakia are part-time amateur performers or simply fans...
...This February the famous doctored photo appeared in every public space and store window in Prague, amid celebratory red banners and slogans...
...the housing shortage is so severe that mere esthetics will not deter...
...If we do not assert our rights under the Czechoslovak Constitution and the Helsinki accords, then they will have disappeared.' Srp is gracious, good-humored and remarkably upbeat...
...Urban planners are today able to launch preservation projects-and scaffolding is everywhere-without having to confront modern office structures that would intrude onto turn-of-thecentury Wenceslaus Square, or clash with the Baroque clock tower facing the Old Town Hall and the surrounding Renaissance plaza...
...Because the Jazz Section actually went about its duty and served as a collective voice and a rallying point for its members in the 1970s and early '80s, it came to be treated by the authorities as a subversive enterprise...
...The only way the government matters is that they can make our work easier or more difficult...
...In 1952 Clementis was executed for "treason" (together with ousted General Secretary Rudolf Slânsky), and he was duly airbrushed out of the official photograph...
...There I was, a political prisoner in a part of the country that was liberated from the Nazis by Americans...
...He spent 20 days in a dungeon flooded with sewage because he wrote a letter complaining about overcrowded conditions...
...Thomas O. Meua, a new contributor to the NL, is associate director of the AFL-CIO's Free Trade Union Institute...
...They have applied to the government for legal status and welcome international affiliations with other musicians and other unions...
...But Czechs line up to move into these monstrosities before construction is finished...
...and by the resignation Czechs exhibit as they survey the paltry displays in shop windows...
...On reflection, though, they are not sure what to make of the continuous sellouts for Krokodyl Dundee, except that it must somehow be an officially sanctioned movie...
...It is also 50 years since Britain and France gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich (remember "peace in our time...
...Rather, and possibly in explanation, she expressed the hope that the state theater will offer her a job (and an apartment) when her dancing career ends, as it must before long...
...It is the policy...
...The solicitous Clementis, standing next to him, lent the older Gottwald his fur hat...
...It takes no imagination at all to realize how easy it must have been for Milos Forman, the emigre Czech movie director, to film Amadeus here in 1985...
...are not boat people, they are an official delegation from Hanoi...
...William Akers, the American artist and writer who visited the country recently to watch one of his screenplays being filmed, is persuaded that civilization reached its zenith locally with the remarkable Art Nouveau stained-glass window designed by Alphonse Mucha that was installed in the 14th-century cathedral of Saint Vitus two years after its completion in 1929...
...The depth of the torpor here is further illustrated by how often one sees half-liters of pilsner served for breakfast...
...Five were convicted and two were given prison terms...
...Visiting filmmakers are delighted to learn that reservations for the cinema have to be made two weeks in advance...
...As for the unsanctioned and the proscribed, Karel Srp, head of the banned Jazz Section, says that in the most practical sense it hardly matters whether the regime changes its policies toward independent cultural activities...
...One discovery on a traveler's photo safari through the Olden Days of Central Europe is that color film seems a silly and unnecessary extravagance...
...Kundera's memoir had to be filmed in the French city of Lyons instead...
...So a lot goes unsaid, and it is easy to forget...
...The official commemoration of the 1948 coup lasted just 30 minutes...
...Not only does this year mark the 20th anniversary of the Prague Spring, when reform-minded Party General Secretary Alexander Dubcek tried an early version of glasnost (remember "Socialism with a human face...
...The Vietnamese on the subway, the metro that looks much like the one in Washington, D.C...
...is still missing...
...The well-dressed young Arabs you meet in a hotel elevator are not Saudi princes, it turns out, they are Libyan "exchange students...
...On the contrary, his determination to maintain the country's "normalization" seemed to be confirmed on the evening of March 26 in Bratislava, where riot police beat up participants in a Catholic rally seeking religious freedom and turned water cannons on them...
...The most salient of these dates is 1968...
...Ever since," writes Kundera, "Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone...
...remove a few street signs and many parts of the cobble-stoned Old City could pass for 18th-century Vienna...
...Milan Kundera begins The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a funny and chilling story about Vladimir dementis, one of the founders (and an early foreign minister) of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia...
...That this is a different world than our own is apparent to an American visitor in the most casual and obvious encounters...
...The position of those belonging to the Jazz Section, who have been declared "hostile elements," provides a preeminent example...
...He and his colleagues in the Jazz Section are determined to resume their work...
...Nonetheless, 1988 should be a banner year for Czechoslovakia's historians and nostalgiacs: It appears that virtually the whole of the country's political history has occurred in years ending in 8, and most of the key events have a familiar phrase to help bring them quickly to mind...
...No doubt they were unhappy that many bands took their names from the Mississippi River Basin whence comes their music, calling themselves "The Dixieland Quartet," "Jazz Fiddlers," "Steamboat Stompers,' and the like...
...And it is 70 years since the union of Czech lands with Slovakia that led to the creation of the modern Czechoslovak state (one of the "small nations" for which President Woodrow Wilson had us fight "the war to end all wars...
...I resolved that when we got out we would become more active than before, rather than less...
...Husâk's replacement by Milos Jakes has thus far not produced any discernible change in these policies...
...and the 40th anniversary of the Communist takeover ("40 years of Socialist achievement" is ironically apt...
...Asked about the significance of the Party leadership change, Czechs furrow their brows and, nodding, thoughtfully respond: "It used to snow more under Husâk...
...The planes overhead are MIGs, and nobody thinks that's interesting...
...When its officers nevertheless continued its activities-organizing concerts, urging better wages and working conditions for musicians, publishing magazines and books related to the arts, and collecting membership dues-they were arrested in September 1986 and put on trial for "economic crimes...
...A TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Czechoslovakia 20 (and 40 and 50) Years Later BY THOMAS O. MELIA Prague One of Czechoslovak Communism's few accomplishments has been its keeping intact much of Prague's fin de siècle architecture and ambience...
...We will do the same things regardless...
...FORTY YEARS LATER, the Cap is still there and Clementis-despite a posthumous rehabilitation (can there be any more unsatisfying vindication...
...One longtime resident of the capital claims the 60 per cent divorce rate is due to the fact that so many couples are obliged to live with at least one set of in-laws...
...All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head...
...That was the year the Soviet invasion bloodily ended Dubcek's brief experiment in Communist liberalism and brought to power Gustâv Husâk, who until his retirement last December imposed strict central Party control over just about every aspect of life, public or private...
...Where Clementis once stood, there is only bare palace wall...
...In this climate curiosity is no less tempered by caution than is memory: A dancer old enough to recall the heady days of early 1968, and secure enough to mingle easily in the diplomatic community, simply declined to discuss anything concerning the United States...
...I couldn't help thinking of the irony of my situation when I was in the cell at Plzen-Bory...
...forsome, to incur risk...
...Unscathed by World War II and largely unimproved since, the heart of this city remains a kind of full-scale monument to the European world that ended for Czechs sooner than others, in September 1938...
...When paramount Party leader Klement Gottwald announced the 1948 coup that ended the country's brief experiment with democracy (the elected government had dared inquire about joining the Marshall Plan), he spoke from a balcony in Prague on a cold, snowy February day...
...To remember is to assert one's politics, totakeastand...
...Chairman Karel Srp spent 16 months in a miserable incarceration, paying the equivalent of six dollars a day for room and board...
...A very few just-painted facades excepted, the lovely old buildings and handsome statues are all gritty and gray, thanks to the use of soft coal and a regular acid rain rinse...
...The historical abundance notwithstanding, nostalgia too seems a silly, and perhaps even reckless, sort of indulgence...
...the crowd dissipated soon after the national anthem was played, before the dignitaries could unleash the latest revisions of the national history in their speeches...
Vol. 71 • April 1988 • No. 6
