The "Prague Spring,' 40 years later

Prague and its survivors, 40 years later:
Free expression, cherished above all else

PATRICK D. HAZARD

Weimar, Germany

Returning from the Prague Writers Festival to this Bauhaus University town (pop. 60,000) where I have been for ten years, researching and writing a negatively revisionist book on Walter Gropius, I'm in a ruminative mood. Forty years ago my former wife Mary and I had just finished a harrowing year in London, teaching my new rubric of International English Literature (pairing, for a start, American and Brit look-alikes, viz., Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Twain and Dickens, and— a stretch— Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman), backed up with public readings from the likes of Aussie poet A.D. Hope and Brit essayist Marcus Cunliffe).

This sober intellectual innovation emerged against the harrowing background of that double assassination of King and Kennedy. We parked our three teenage children Michael (then 16), Catherine (14) and Timothy (12) in a summer camp in late August, after the Warsaw Pact military destroyed the so-called Prague Spring. Carey McWilliams had published in The Nation my report of our brief two-week encounter with the political realities of the then Czechoslovakia.

In a Prague hostel, I met for the first time an Eritrean, who discussed with passion his nascent hostilities with Ethiopia. We wandered from the High Tatra mountains on the Polish border in the west to Bardejov Spa on the Ukrainian frontier. There, on the Sunday before the invasion, we watched, stunned, as Communist functionaries solemnly paraded, sucking sulfur water for a cure. Their arrogance made us nervous, as we kept an ear tuned to BBC radio, fearful of an ominous future so near.

In Bratislava, walking along the Donau, we fell into a conversation with two young architecture students. I had just been hired by Time-Life Films to advise them on which BBC TV films to distribute on PBS. I asked the how the Prague Spring had affected TV news coverage. A tough question, they countered. Come home with us, and watch the evening news with us, and judge for yourselves. Alas, their mother spoke French explanations into my left ear as her husband expatiated in German into my right. I was confused, not to say amused, by their generous spontaneity.

A Bahaman Londoner in New York

Forty years later, the Prague Writers Festival opened with a round-table featuring the Czech critic Petr Kral, the dean of Canadian lit Margaret Atwood, San Franciscan Beat playwright Michael McClure, and the "baby" (at 61!), the Brooklyn novelist Paul Auster. Charged with mastering this ungainly foursome at the Minor Theatre was Gary Younge, who declared his limited competence by reminding the SRO audience that he was born in London in 1969.

In a breakfast interview with Younge I learned that this Bahaman-derived Londoner had been at this, his first and only job out of college (majoring in French and Russian at a minor college in Stevenage) for 14 years as an op-edifier for the London Guardian. I had read him religiously during my ten-year tenure at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar— every day but Sunday I begin with a hoovering of the International Herald Tribune and the Guardian. Only Bob Herbert at the New York Times is more perspicacious on American racial ambiguities.

I was astonished to learn that Younge is based in Brooklyn with his American wife, and that their 15 month first born is named Osceola. Isn't that an Indian moniker?

"Yep," replied Gary. "Seminole."

Where were you in ’68?

Tonight Younge posed a simple but penetrating charge to his 1968 Prague observers: What was the most affecting experience you recall of the tragedy of 1968?

Atwood revealed that she had become isolated in Edmonton, Alberta at the deathbed of a close friend. His deathbed counsel: Get out of this town! She did, and Ontario has never been the same. But the My Lai massacre was Atwood’s Rubicon. Ditto with McClure, who first discussed semantic hassles over never-before-openly-discussed sexual experiences in his new play. But that was merely personal. My Lai was a global disaster.

In 1968 Auster was a 21-year-old Columbia student whose baptism by fire was his participation in the student occupation of university buildings. He riffed on the lethal adaptability of American capitalism, which has sleekly morphed to occupy even leftist movements. He was not optimistic. Our Czech participant counseled the three outsiders on how much more complicated it was to live and die within the Prague Spring than even the horrors of My Lai.

That had been evident in the brief improvisatory skit that preceded this palaver: A beautiful woman prances onto the stage with an armful of white flowers, strangely transferred bloom by bloom to a grossly galvanized bucket— the Prague Spring personified, with all of its confusing ambiguities evident. The next persona represented the ideologues who softened up Czechs for a soft compliance with leftwingedness. He brandished a bizarre loudspeaker on an expandable pole (straight out of an I. Tatlin cartoon of the early 1920s). The third persona was a man wearing humungous square guitars for shoes, shuffling awkwardly because of his portable impedimenta. The woman dancer responds to his acoustical overtures by shuffling more and more awkwardly until the two corrupters join her in a triune spectacle of self-subjugation. It brought tears to our eyes, with not a few suppressed sobs in the comprehending audience.

She protested and survived

The next item was as elevating as its memory was depressing— the presentation of the first Speros Freedom of Expression Award to 72-year-old Natalia Gorbanevskaya. Speros, an Athenian poet born in 1945, directed the 2005 Prague Writers Festival (he died in Prague in May 2008). Natalia was one of the seven who quietly protested the Warsaw Pact invasion in Red Square. She was not arrested and jailed like the others because she just given birth to her first child. But the following year she was put in a Moscow psychiatric institution and subjected to experimental drugs. International outrage forced the Soviets to release her to a Parisian exile.

Natalia looked like anybody's gramma, in a nondescript dress. In her acceptance remarks, she spoke only of her colleagues' sufferings in psychiatric institutions, or camps, or in ruined lives. Read her poems on the Internet. Nary a whimper! Only the ideal: freedom of expression.

We all drank champagne to her nobility of character, the sole weapon that can't be defeated. Ever. Anywhere. Anytime. We love you, Natalia. For setting so Empyrian an example.

The world’s highest level of urbanity

But how about Prague the city today? It has become an inexhaustible panorama of the liberating effects of freedom at work. Begin at the City Art Gallery, where we see Prague blooming in 1958 at the Brussels World Fair. We see just how much was lost in 1968! Then take the 14 tram to the National Gallery. There is a centennial photo display of Oscar Niemeyer's century of creativity. What caught my over-Gropiused eye was his advice to young architects: Read widely, so you can identify with the millions who live wretched lives because architects have abandoned them. A requiem for Starchitecture.

Downstairs is a panorama of world-class painting and sculpture unknown to the rest of the world because of its Picasso/Andy Warhol provincialism. One could even risk hyperbolism by arguing that as you walk the stunning Jugendstil streets of Prague you’re relishing the greatest urbaneness in the world today. I proved it to myself by buying two new books from the concierge at the festival Hotel Josef: Rostislav Svacha's Czech Architecture and Its Austere Future: Fifty buildings 1989-2004 and Tereza Bruthansova's Czech Design.