Czech Republic: Remembering Vaclav Havel

His “first commitment was to common decency and the common good, not to holding power,” said Jiri Pehe at the Toronto Star.

Just as Americans will never forget the day President Kennedy died, Czechs will always remember when they heard the news that Vaclav Havel was gone, said Ondrej Neff in the Prague Lidove Noviny. Havel had been ill for years, suffering from lung problems first contracted during one of his stints in a communist-era prison and exacerbated by years of chain-smoking, so his death was not unexpected. Still, it struck us with pitiless force. He was our moral guide and our easygoing beer buddy. A playwright whose absurdist works mocked the authoritarianism and ugliness of the Czechoslovak Communist regime, Havel became the leader of the dissident movement after a crackdown on the rock group Plastic People of the Universe spurred him to openly denounce the regime. In his most famous work, the essay “The Power of the Powerless,” he explained that he was “thrown into it by a personal sense of responsibility.” Even after he led the Velvet Revolution and became president, he was still best known for his slogan, “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.”

Yet Czechs didn’t always love him, said Jindrich Sidlo in Hospodarske Noviny. “In the beginning there was a certain exotic fascination with the rock ’n’ roll president” who invited the Rolling Stones to the castle and hung out with the Dalai Lama. But over his years as president, his popularity sank as Czechs grew weary of his lecturing us to be better people. He “talked constantly about things that were not exactly easy to hear: the need to live according to morality, conscience, and responsibility, and the dangers of racism and corruption.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More