- Observer.co.uk,
- Sunday November 24 2002
But then Vaclav Havel has always had to have things differently.
I first learnt about Vaclav Havel when I was twelve. My parents were loyal members of the ruling communist party and brought home the official communist broad sheet Rude Pravo (Red Right) which contained a huge article on this dissident Havel. Of course the article was far from flattering. Havel was portrayed as an alcoholic and a junkie - an evil enemy of public service and everything our society stood for. But this was the best free publicity Havel could hope for. He was no doubt delighted to be introduced to a wider Czechoslovak public for the first time. People were used to reading between the lines and got the message. He must be rattling the authorities for them to respond in this way.
But I was just twelve and I was scared. This dangerous guy was being sponsored by enemies from the western world who would do anything to destroy what my parents have worked for their whole lives. I doubt that my parents - though they held party cards - had ever heard much of Havel themselves before the article appeared. Yet they impressed on me that Havel was the son of privilege - an intellectual kid from a bourgeois and wealthy family. No wonder, they said, he cared so little for ordinary Czechs. My parents had been taught all their life people should not be rich or superior to one another. People should be equal, they always told me.
I first saw this dangerous man for myself a few months later. This was 20th November 1989. Havel was on the balcony of Melantrich publishing house and he was talking to half a million people. He encouraged the great crowds gathered at the Vaclavske Square in the very centre of Prague to keep on demonstrating and strengthening their hope that this time, the Communists would be beaten: "The truth and love will always beat the lie and hatred", he said to the crowd and people could not stop applauding.
Now I had another reason to be confused. This shy and funny guy who couldn't even articulate properly who was supposed to be the dangerous man in the country? He spoke slang instead of proper Czech. He wore old jeans and sweaters instead of suits. He was smiling and had no bodyguards around him. He would bow with respect every time he was introduced to someone, no matter who the person was. He smoked cigarettes (and not only ...), drank beer and liked rock music.
And the people now loved him. Not everyone, of course. Not my parents anyway. Havel was becoming the most potent symbol of all of the fundamental changes that were turning our lives upside down. And some people simply don't like change. So many people in Czechoslovakia had never been allowed to decide or to speak up for themselves. They had always been told what to do. All of a sudden, they were to be free and had no idea how to deal with it.
As the Communist government finally gave up, and simply melted away, it was obvious that he was the one. Havel the dissident simply had to become President. In late December 1989, when the official inauguration was taking place at the Prague Castle, hundreds of thousands people gathered at the Castle to watch the inauguration. Experiencing feelings that we hadn't had for almost seven decades, Czechs and Slovaks felt proud of their president.
And then we saw him. How insecure he looked as he walked past the fully armed soldiers saluting him. How uncomfortable with all of the fuss, fame and horses. The whole world was watching the pictures of him becoming the first President of a free, independent and proud Czechoslovakia. And so the whole world must have seen that most embarrassing fashion faux pas. The "presidential" trousers were a good ten centimetres shorter than they needed to be. His ankles and his socks were showing. "I was so nervous! I kept hitching up my trousers all the time," he explained some time later in a television interview, once he was able to make fun of his "style scandal".
But then Havel has always had to have things differently.
No President in Czech history has ever achieved such popularity. For the next five or six years, he would regularly get more than 80 per cent support in the polls. He led the Czech nation through an exceptionally peaceful separation from Slovakia, when many feared that divorce between nations would prove deeply traumatic or worse. Havel would wait for Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones at the Ruzyne airport to welcome them when they came to perform in Prague - and when he spoke English to them, we Czechs couldn't stop laughing. He could make Frank Zappa the cultural atache for the Czech republic and then write an obituary for the New Yorker when Zappa died.
Havel invited the Dalai Lama to Prague and spent hours meditating with him. This was something that the atheist Czechs with our forgotten Catholic background couldn't really understand but we definitely liked the spirit of it. And he could even make Hillary Clinton sip on a hallucinogenic, rather green alcoholic drink called Abisinthe, banned the world over, at the famous artist cafÀ Slavia in Prague. Havel's plays were presented all over Prague. Few could understand his passion for absurdity but the theatres were crowded: it was considered very cool to say that one had just been to see Havel's plays or was just currently, as it happened, reading one of his books.
And Havel received much sympathy when his wife Olga, a deeply moral, humble and intellectual woman immensely loved by the nation, died of cancer in 1996. But so much of that evaporated, to be replaced by criticism and disrespect when he remarried less than a year later to a second-rate actress famous for acting in the Communist's movies. Havel left his friends and the Czech republic breathless and upset by marrying Dagmar Veskernova at the same Zizkov Tower Hall he had married Olga 33 years ago - and making it a private ceremony to which not even his brother was invited. All four Czech TV stations, showing symbiosis for the first and only time in their history, immediately started showing the terrible movies in which Veskernova acted. "The Naughty Girl" became the most popular one.
As Olga was loved, Dagmar was hated. Olga had shied away from the media circus - she hardly ever accompanied Havel on his travels around the world and rarely showed up at official VIP parties. Dagmar, it seemed, would do anything to be seen by Havel's side with the world politicians. She changed traditional protocols at the Prague Castle according to her needs. She wouldn't let anyone help with her image - she wore her hair too long and her skirts too short. She even got rid of Olga and Vaclav's dog Dula and moved her two dogs into the presidential villa.
As the criticism mounted Havel maintained his uncritical adoration for Dagmar. Above all, he claimed she'd saved his life. He suffered pneumonia at the end of 1996 and almost died. She, horrified by his poor state had no hesitation. She sacked his doctor, a close friend of Havel's since before the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and hired a faith healer. The Czech media were up in arms. The television cameras and newspaper photographers would follow Dagmar any time they could. Yet seeing her spending nights and days at Havel's hospital bedside, and her enthusiasm for saving Havel's life, this becaome the first time the nation was partly willing to forgive her for replacing its beloved and distinguished Olga.
Until the infamous whistling! As Havel campaigned to be re-elected as President, an opponent from the radical right stood up in parliament and made the most critical of speeches. Dagmar, in the parliamentary gallery for guests, got more and more upset. And then she stood up - and whistled. With fingers in her mouth and eyes falling out of her face, the picture of the whistling first wife was all over the newspapers the next day. The Czech public was officially horrified - was this how the first lady should behave? But was that what we really felt? Many Czech women hoped that their hot Slavonic blood would make them fight for their husbands with the same courage as she did. Havel knew Olga would never do anything like that - she was far too refined, intelligent and proper. But his young, beautiful wife fought for him, risked her image and couldn't care less about it.
Yet Havel's troubles didn't stop there. Even as the nation seemed to have accepted Dagmar, he got himself into more trouble. Havel has always been generous with amnesties. Central to his deep Christian faith has been a belief in the power of forgiveness and redemption. He abolished the death penalty shortly after becoming President and he never banned the Communist Party as some other post-Communist nations did. But he would give amnesties to people who would then commit another crimes and Czechs, one of the most atheistic nations in Europe, just could not understand or get over it.
It was, ironically, one amnesty that Havel would not give that was to cost him a great deal more popularity. The elder son of a powerful Czech media mogul Vladimir Zelezny, was convicted of two rapes and sent to jail. Havel decided not to grant a pardon. Zelezny runs the most popular and powerful commercial TV station in the Czech Republic. His station's news coverage unremittingly attacking the presidential couple from every angle. Within a year, Havel's opponents could celebrate the results. Only 52 per cent people had faith in his ability to rule the country in December 1998, down from 82 per cent two years ago.
Havel may remain the world's darling. But the Havel that the world sees is not the Havel that we Czechs know. And for us Czechs, the world's Havel - the dissident turned President, the artistic and and philosophical force, the historic icon to be bracketed with Mandela or Gorbachev - is a rather one-dimensional figure, more symbol than human being.
For us, Havel is also the old, ill man locked up in the Castle. The romantic aura surrounding him for all those years seems to have faded. He has had to endure plenty of criticism from his own. When Prague suffered from dramatic floods earlier this year, Havel was slow to return from Portugal and to be with his people in times of trouble. Can one imagine any proper professional politician - Bill Clinton or Germany's Gerhard Schroeder perhaps - not realising immediately the urgent need to get there at once, to share the pain and to look sad for the cameras?
And yet that unworldiness remains a central part of Havel's appeal. That is something which we are only just fully realising now as the President prepares to leave the Castle in January. Just the idea of someone else on the "throne" shakes people up. The subtle nervousness is sensed everywhere: when people chat in a pub, when politicians in the parliament discuss introducing a direct election for the post, when we look over the list of potential presidential candidates. There is nobody like Havel there. And how could there be? After 1989, others thanked their dissidents and protestors and allowed them to fade again into the background. It was we Czechs who decided to put our first dissident into the highest office in the land. But that era is over.
The frontrunner for the succession now is Vaclav Klaus, among Havel's fiercest critics and a prime example of the economist as politician. We know Klaus well - he has already been our Prime Minister twice during the 'nineties. We Czechs liked to grumble about his focus on often unpopular economic reforms even as we realised that some of the bitter medicine was probably necessary. What helped to sugar the pill was that our hard-headed Prime Minister was balanced by our intellectual, artistic President. We can expect in the years ahead see many more politicians like Klaus. These pragmatic, professional politicians will promise us much. But we are only now realising what we will lose when we no longer have a romantic icon as first citizen - and it suddenly feels as though we are losing something quite central to the national spirit.
Because we Czechs always have to have things differently.
Jana Ciglerova is a journalist with Lidove Noviny (www.lidovky.cz), a leading Czech national newspaper.
Send us your views
You can write to the author of this piece at jana.ciglerova@lidovky.cz.
Email observer@guardianunlimited.co.uk with comments on articles or ideas for future pieces.
About Observer Worldview
Observer Worldview contains the best of The Observer's recent international commentary and reporting, along with exclusive online coverage each week. The online pieces are also trailed in the newspaper. Please get in touch if you would like to offer a piece
