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 Some Reflections on the Narrative of Czech History

To set down some easy connections between such a turbulent history and the works we will be studying is, no doubt, rash. But we can, I think, make a couple of observations. The most important of these is the most obvious: this history has been marked by a strong tradition of national idealism and heady new hopes which have been repeatedly broken by the brutal realities of history, a repetitive cycle which has contributed to a strong sense of paradox and absurdity. Hence, alongside the Slav idealism of Mucha, the fervent hopes for a humanitarian and democratic Czechoslovakia of Karel Čapek and Tomáš MasarakMasaryk [sic], and the idealistic socialist dreams of two generations of young people in the 1930s and 1940s, we also see the black comedy of Hasek, the extreme sense of alienation of Kafka, and the bitter ironies of Kundera. The latter are not, as so often in the West, merely a fashionable response to personal angst or a convenient protest against conformity, but earned insights into the realities of the world where the secret police can arrive in the middle of the night and arrest and even execute someone for something which was not only permitted but approved of a short while before, all in the name of some ideology announced in the latest "official" language.

The work of Havel is interesting in this respect. He made his name as a playwright inspired by Theatre of the Absurd (especially Ionesco), and some of his best known plays depict the absurdity of a world in which language itself is constantly invented and re-invented to serve some bewildering and oppressive bureaucracy. And yet Havel's political writings have also made him famous as a spokesperson for an enlightened international humanitarian understanding among all people. That idealistic tradition may be (like Havel's reputation) at present somewhat on the wane, and yet Havel remains, even out of office now, a reminder that, for all the absurdity, one has to keep going and hang onto one's faith in the challenge of taking responsibility for life.

What advice like this amounts to in practice amid the new realities of the European Union remains to be seen. One suspects that the Czechs do not need any special urging to maintain a sense of irony, but as the age of international corporate capitalism sweeps through the country what happens to "vigilance of the spirit" may be quite another story.

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