Vaclav Havel Walks into a Nightclub

My one night at a rock concert with the Czech dissident, artist, and president.

BY CHARLES HOMANS | DECEMBER 19, 2011

It's a shame that the death of one of the world's most ghastly leaders, North Korea's Kim Jong Il, will overshadow the death of one of its finest: Vaclav Havel, the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic, who passed away on Sunday, Dec. 18, of respiratory ailments -- he was a lifelong smoker and lung cancer survivor -- at his country estate in northern Bohemia. I only met Havel once and wouldn't pretend to know him, and my reminiscence accordingly counts for far less than the rest that will be offered. You can read those if you want to understand why Havel matters to history or art; what follows, for what it's worth, is an account of why he matters to me.

It was six-and-a-half years ago in Washington, D.C., and I had somehow persuaded an extremely indulgent editor friend at a music and fashion magazine to let me write a short squib about a Czech band called the Plastic People of the Universe, which was playing at the Black Cat nightclub on 14th Street. I mostly wanted an excuse to meet "the Plastics," a band whose legend far outstripped its recorded catalog, most of which was out of print and hopelessly difficult to find. The group had formed in Prague in 1968, amid the rush of the Prague Spring, with the intention of playing music inspired by the American experimental rock musicians they adored: the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart. It was a modest aim that, after Soviet tanks rolled into Wenceslas Square the following August, suddenly looked revolutionary. The Plastics were not particularly political, but Czechoslovakia's newly disciplinarian communist regime looked askance at their lyrics -- many of them written by the best Czech poets of the era -- which celebrated sexuality, Catholic imagery, and other taboos. In 1976, after years of government harassment, the band's members and associates were finally rounded up and hauled into court on trumped up "disturbing the peace" charges.

Among the poets whose work had informed the Plastics' records -- which were pressed in sympathetic Western countries and circulated samizdat-style in Czechoslovakia -- was Vaclav Havel. The band's trial inspired him and other dissidents to draft the landmark Charter 77 human rights declaration the following year, a document that laid the foundation of the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The conviction of the Plastics -- which was finally overturned by the Czech Supreme Court in 2003 -- also prompted some of Havel's finest writing. In his essay "The Trial," Havel described how the court proceedings made the band into "the unintentional personification of those forces in man that compel him to search for himself, to determine his own place in the world freely, and in his own way, not to make deals with his heart and not to cheat his conscience, to call things by their true names."

The seven-piece band that was waiting downstairs in the Black Cat's sepulchral green room when I arrived that summer afternoon included only a couple of the members who had founded the Plastics 37 years earlier. One of them, saxophonist Vratislav Brabenec, also happened to be the band's de facto English-language spokesman; after leaving prison, he had spent many years in exile in Canada. Brabenec was 62 and, with his long flowing hair, prodigious beard, and heavy Slavic features, resembled an Orthodox patriarch. Like everyone else in the band, he smoked incessantly as he described the details of the band's visit to Washington. "Oh," he added, leaning back in the cracked pleather chair, "and Vaclav is coming."

A couple of hours later, they trooped down the stairs: not just Havel, who happened to be in town for a reading at the Library of Congress, but also former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the Czech ambassador. They availed themselves of the cooler full of Heinekens, drinking and smoking with the band and listening while the bassist, Eva Turnova, recounted her run-in with Lenny Kaye, the proto-punk guitarist and her hero, on the band's tour stop in New York. Then the band was called up to the stage, and the rest of us followed, settling in the back of the club around a big black plywood table, sticky with stale beer and etched with the names of dozens of past concertgoers.

On the stage, Brabenec let loose an ear-splitting peal of free improvisation, and the rest of the band settled into a heavy, abrasive rhythm. This was not the Fleetwood Mac of Bill Clinton's administration, and I leaned over to ask Albright what she thought of it. "I think it's -- I think it's great," she said after a lengthy pause. "I like it a lot. Now, I can't say I've heard a lot of it -- I've mainly heard about them."

MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/Getty Images

 SUBJECTS: EASTERN EUROPE
 

Charles Homans is a special correspondent for the New Republic and the former features editor of Foreign Policy.

MICHAELGERALDPDEALINO

7:39 PM ET

December 19, 2011

RIP

Mr. Havel is one of my heroes. May he rest in peace in heaven.

 

ISHQSUFFIANA

2:01 PM ET

December 20, 2011

Good reply. He is also my

Good reply. He is also my hero :)

 

ISHQSUFFIANA

1:53 PM ET

December 20, 2011

Hero :)

born October 5, 1936, Prague, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]) Czech playwright, poet, and political dissident, who, after the fall of communism, was president of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and of the Czech Republic (1993–2003).

Havel was the son of a wealthy restaurateur whose property was confiscated by the communist government of Czechoslovakia in 1948. As the son of bourgeois parents, Havel was denied easy access to education but managed to finish high school and study on the university level. He found work as a stagehand in a Prague theatrical company in 1959 and soon began writing plays with Ivan Vyskoil. By 1968 Havel had progressed to the position of resident playwright of the Theatre of the Balustrade company. He was a prominent participant in the liberal reforms of 1968 (known as the Prague Spring), and, after the Soviet clampdown on Czechoslovakia that year, his plays were banned and his passport was confiscated. During the 1970s and '80s he was repeatedly arrested and served four years in prison (1979–83) for his activities on behalf of human rights in Czechoslovakia. After his release from prison Havel remained in his homeland.

Havel's first solo play, Zahradní slavnost (1963; The Garden Party), typified his work in its absurdist, satirical examination of bureaucratic routines and their dehumanizing effects. In his best-known play, Vyrozumní (1965; The Memorandum), an incomprehensible artificial language is imposed on a large bureaucratic enterprise, causing the breakdown of human relationships and their replacement by unscrupulous struggles for power. In these and subsequent works Havel explored the self-deluding rationalizations and moral compromises that characterize life under a totalitarian political system. Havel continued to write plays steadily until the late 1980s; these works include Ztíená monost soustední (1968; The Increased Difficulty of Concentration); the three one-act plays Audience (1975), Vernisá (1975; Private View), and Protest (1978); Largo Desolato (1985); and Zítra to Spustíme (1988; Tomorrow).

When massive antigovernment demonstrations erupted in Prague in November 1989, Havel became the leading figure in the Civic Forum, a new coalition of noncommunist opposition groups pressing for democratic reforms. In early December the Communist Party capitulated and formed a coalition government with the Civic Forum. As a result of an agreement between the partners in this bloodless “Velvet Revolution,” Havel was elected to the post of interim president of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989, and he was reelected to the presidency in July 1990, becoming the country's first noncommunist leader since 1948. As the Czechoslovak union faced dissolution in 1992, Havel, who opposed the division, resigned from office. The following year he was elected president of the new Czech Republic. His political role, however, was limited, as Prime Minister Václav Klaus (1993–97) commanded much of the power. In 1998 Havel was reelected by a narrow margin, and, under his presidency,
he Czech Republic joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1999. Barred constitutionally from seeking a third term, he stepped down as president in 2003.

Havel's first new play in more than 20 years, Odcházení (Leaving)—a tragicomedy that draws on his experiences as president and presents a chancellor leaving his post while grappling with a political enemy—premiered in 2008.

born October 5, 1936, Prague, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]) Czech playwright, poet, and political dissident, who, after the fall of communism, was president of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and of the Czech Republic (1993–2003).

Havel was the son of a wealthy restaurateur whose property was confiscated by the communist government of Czechoslovakia in 1948. As the son of bourgeois parents, Havel was denied easy access to education but managed to finish high school and study on the university level. He found work as a stagehand in a Prague theatrical company in 1959 and soon began writing plays with Ivan Vyskoil. By 1968 Havel had progressed to the position of resident playwright of the Theatre of the Balustrade company. He was a prominent participant in the liberal reforms of 1968 (known as the Prague Spring), and, after the Soviet clampdown on Czechoslovakia that year, his plays were banned and his passport was confiscated. During the 1970s and '80s he was repeatedly arrested and served four years in prison (1979–83) for his activities on behalf of human rights in Czechoslovakia. After his release from prison Havel remained in his homeland.

Havel's first solo play, Zahradní slavnost (1963; The Garden Party), typified his work in its absurdist, satirical examination of bureaucratic routines and their dehumanizing effects. In his best-known play, Vyrozumní (1965; The Memorandum), an incomprehensible artificial language is imposed on a large bureaucratic enterprise, causing the breakdown of human relationships and their replacement by unscrupulous struggles for power. In these and subsequent works Havel explored the self-deluding rationalizations and moral compromises that characterize life under a totalitarian political system. Havel continued to write plays steadily until the late 1980s; these works include Ztíená monost soustední (1968; The Increased Difficulty of Concentration); the three one-act plays Audience (1975), Vernisá (1975; Private View), and Protest (1978); Largo Desolato (1985); and Zítra to Spustíme (1988; Tomorrow).

When massive antigovernment demonstrations erupted in Prague in November 1989, Havel became the leading figure in the Civic Forum, a new coalition of noncommunist opposition groups pressing for democratic reforms. In early December the Communist Party capitulated and formed a coalition government with the Civic Forum. As a result of an agreement between the partners in this bloodless “Velvet Revolution,” Havel was elected to the post of interim president of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989, and he was reelected to the presidency in July 1990, becoming the country's first noncommunist leader since 1948. As the Czechoslovak union faced dissolution in 1992, Havel, who opposed the division, resigned from office. The following year he was elected president of the new Czech Republic. His political role, however, was limited, as Prime Minister Václav Klaus (1993–97) commanded much of the power. In 1998 Havel was reelected by a narrow margin, and, under his presidency,
he Czech Republic joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1999. Barred constitutionally from seeking a third term, he stepped down as president in 2003.

Havel's first new play in more than 20 years, Odcházení (Leaving)—a tragicomedy that draws on his experiences as president and presents a chancellor leaving his post while grappling with a political enemy—premiered in 2008.

Thanks

He was the man of deeds.
I have never seen such a hug perfect person in my life. :)

Thanks

Admin of Agency

 

THE SPECTRE

10:05 AM ET

December 29, 2011

Vaclav Havel

I liked Havel enough to read a couple of his essays. I mailed him Freak Out, Zappa's first album, and got a nice letter from his secretary. It takes a lot of guts to stand up to the secret police. He was a great guy. He made Zappa his cultural secretary to the United States.

 

B3050612

8:48 PM ET

January 9, 2012

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