Springtime in Prague
On May 6, 1990, we came through Pilsen by train. Enormous American flags hung from apartment buildings. A party of Czech revelers boarded the train actually dressed in U.S. Army fatigues. As our Prague hotel clerk would tell us a few hours later, “Last year we heard it was the Soviet army [that freed Pilsen]. This year we can say it is the American army.”
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What anger your people must feel at the time lost! we said to Jaroslav Veis, an essayist for the distinguished new daily Lidove Noviny (“People’s News”). Surely Czechoslovaks wonder what their country could have become since 1945.
In Poland this year, President Havel recalled visiting that country as a student in 1957. “I admired the freethinking Polish spirit,” he said, “and the special heroism which was radiated by Polish culture and which deep in my soul was dearer to me than the eternal skepticism, and sometimes even the cult of the mediocre and the downtrodden, which so often appear in Czech literature.”
In store windows, TV screens endlessly repeat clips of pivotal moments–the ’68 invasion, the police assault of last November 17 on student demonstrators (which triggered the brief political frenzy that toppled the government).
“It’s a funny time,” mused Ladislav Koppl. “The Party’s gone, but the future’s not arrived. There’s a certain hanging in the air.”
Koppl’s father, an economist, joined the Communist resistance in ’44. He remained in the Party until he died in 1982. “But I don’t expect he had any illusions about the Communist Party since 1956, the uprising in Hungary.” What kept him in? we asked. “It was a sort of commitment,” said Koppl. “A commitment without any illusions. A commitment to his basic belief there should be social justice in society, to the culture represented by left-leaning Czech intellectuals before the war.”
