Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (17 page)

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She was also the only one of the popular stars to sign Charter ’77.

The Charter was born on the initiative of Václav Havel, following the trial of the Plastic People musicians.

Legend had it that they performed sexual acts on stage. In fact, they played psychedelic rock. At one of their concerts, they hung up dozens of smoked herrings on strings, dripping oil onto the audience.

In the neo-Stalinist era, lyrics such as: “Sunday morning, what a gas, I really had to scratch my ass” took on special significance.

Nobody had ever treated the audience the way they did.

The hit of the independent music scene was the one-verse “Zácpa” (“Constipation”).

The band was formed in Prague in October 1968, two months after the invasion. “Nobody’s ever got anywhere …” they sang, and with every performance they infuriated the authorities more and more. They were accused of a lack of respect for the working people, and a series of repressive measures were taken against them.

Special units were even sent to destroy the buildings where they had performed. In Rudolfov near České Budějovice, where they gave a concert in 1974, a motorized militia unit herded a hundred spectators ahead of it like cattle, as the militiamen drove vehicles straight at them. The band and their fans were constantly being charged with hooliganism. A lawyer explained to them that, according to law, hooliganism could only happen in a public place, so, in the 1970s, fans
of the Plastics (as they are generally known) began buying up private houses. These were old, ruined country cottages and barns where they could perform. They recorded their best-known album in the barn at Václav Havel’s place in the country.

A house not far from Česká Lípa was burned down by the Security Service three weeks after the Plastics had performed there. For two years, the authorities did their best to take official possession of a house in Rychnov, which apart from being a site for concerts, was where the Princ family lived. As soon as they had succeeded, a special unit immediately invaded the farm. “We were still carrying out our belongings,” said Mrs. Princová, “and they were drilling holes in the walls for explosive charges. We hadn’t even had time to get around the corner before the house was blown sky-high.”

However, in their attitude towards the regime, the Plastics instantly became the antithesis of Švejk.

In the underground press, Magor announced that those who produced the official culture were criminals: “To play Bach for tourists from West Germany and not protest against the fact that the Plastics are not allowed to play ‘Constipation’ is a crime. To stage Shakespeare when there is no right to stage Havel is a crime.”

They were tried as parasites.

They defended their right to sing whatever they pleased.

The prosecutor recommended not cutting their hair or letting them shave, and then showing them on television in this unkempt state—as public enemies. On the second day of
the trial, Václav Havel left the courtroom feeling upset, and unable to think about anything else. In Malá Strana, he ran into a well-known Czech director, who asked where he was coming from. “From the trial of the underground,” he replied. The director asked if it involved drugs. Havel did his best to explain the essence of the case to him. The director nodded, and said: “So what else is new?” “Perhaps I’m being unfair to him,” wrote Havel years later, as president, “but at the time I was violently overcome by the feeling that people like that belong to a world I wanted nothing more to do with.”

However, he was later to say: “There were various circles where people immediately understood that the threat to the Plastics’ liberty meant that everybody’s liberty was under threat.”

The audience of bold intellectuals who started attending the Plastics’ trials heralded Charter ’77. Rejected by the system, deprived of the opportunity for intellectual development, or even access to libraries, the intellectuals created an opposition. First, in December 1976 and January 1977, the Charter was signed by 242 people, and eventually, over the next few years, by almost 2,000.

The Charter was a manifesto. It came to the defense of people whom the communists had deprived of their jobs, forcing them to work in professions that were humiliating for them.

It was proof of the power of the powerless.

The people who wrote the text called things by their proper names. “The victims of apartheid” was their term for the thousands of people who were refused jobs in their own professions. “Hundreds of thousands of citizens are denied
freedom from fear, because they are forced to live with the constant threat that, if they express their own views, they will lose their job opportunities.”

For all those years, every few days they sent letters, protests and petitions to the authorities within the country and abroad. In 1978, they formed the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted.

The first spokespeople for Charter ’77, who represented it to the outside world and guaranteed the truthfulness of the words published as the Charter’s texts, were the philosopher Jan Patočka, Václav Havel and Professor Jiří Hájek, Minister of Foreign Affairs during the Prague Spring.

Marta, too, was a spokesperson for Charter ’77, and Havel became Kačenka’s godfather.

She knew her child was what mattered most. She had to guarantee her daughter a normal life. At the beginning of the 1980s, she returned to Prague from the countryside. “Quite without expecting to, I found a good job,” she says. She worked as a report writer at the Prague Urban Development Department. For ten years. Her mother sold a few family heirlooms and her brother sent sums of money from Canada, where he had moved in 1968.

There were usually two cars parked outside the house with people sitting in them. It was easy to tell where the best known opposition activists lived, because each of their homes was watched by two cars. In Prague, there was a story about a Professor Hájek, who used to go running in the park each morning among the trees, where no car could make its way.
Until the Security Service banned the professor from taking physical exercise in the open air.

She always took a toothbrush and toothpaste with her when she went out, in case she had to spend the night at the police station. “They often detained me at around two in the afternoon. Because at three, Kačenka came out of classes and they closed the school. ‘Oh! your daughter is just finishing her lessons,’ the smug Security Service agent would say. Sometimes they deliberately kept me there until six, and the poor teacher would spend three hours walking around the school with my child.”

Marta’s eyes are shining.

“Jesus!” she says. “I was always the last mother there. I was half crazy by then. Whenever I couldn’t bear it, I’d say to Havel: ‘You tell them! Tell them I haven’t signed any petitions for ages. And that I want to be left in peace.’ ”

She drags on her eighteenth cigarette of the day.

“Do you know my song ‘Life Is Like a Man’?”

For thirty years, Vondráčková and Neckář have been dogged by the accusation that they kept performing while their friend was “an artist in liquidation.”

According to Helena: “People were outraged that we were working. It takes a bit of imagination: I was eighteen years old, Vašek was twenty-three, and Marta was twenty-seven with a husband. At the age of eighteen, I couldn’t just sit down on the sidewalk and beg. I was so set on being a singer!”

According to Václav: “They say Helena and I did nothing for her cause. It’s not true. We went to all the official places
we could. We even got into President Svoboda’s chancellery. His daughter worked there (she was married to the Minister of Culture), and she said that nothing could be done because the cards had been dealt and that was that.”

Helena, again: “Should we, throughout the communist era and beyond, have pulled out that sheet of paper and shown it to the audience before every single one of our performances, saying: ‘Here is our right to live our lives!’?”

“A sheet of paper?”

“A letter,” says Neckář. “Marta wrote us a letter. She was trying to make our lives easier. In black and white.”

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To weaken the force of Charter ’77, the authorities organized a counter-campaign, known thereafter as the Anti-charter. This document condemned the dissidents, and was designed to scare ordinary people away from wanting any sort of contact with “the enemies of socialism.”

Intellectuals, performers and writers from all over the country were summoned to the National Theater in Prague. Each day for a week,
Rudé právo
announced the names of hundreds of people who had signed the declaration of loyalty. Male and female singers were called to the Music Theater on the Friday, so that everybody could read about them on Saturday, February 5, 1977, in the edition with the biggest circulation. The name of a leading translator or architect didn’t have the same force as the name of a popular singer.

Karel Gott made a speech.

Gott is the Czech Presley and Pavarotti rolled into one.

He’s worshipped in Germany, too. For his single with the German version of the song about Maya the Bee, Karel Gott received five Gold Discs from the recording company Polydor, which represents sales of one and a quarter million copies.

He not only won thirty Golden Nightingales in the socialist era, but went on winning them in the capitalist period too, every year until 2012. He began the 1990s with a triumphal tour which—as the right-wing press spitefully commented—defied reason.

Back then, in 1977, he said that those who had come to the Music Theater “are happier to sing than to speak, yet there are situations where singing is not enough.”

He thanked the authorities for providing “the space for
artists to work.” The performers signed the declaration: “As Czechoslovak artists, through ever more beautiful music we wish to do all we can to contribute to the march towards a happy life in our homeland.”

“In the name of socialism,” 76 “National Artists,” 360 “Distinguished Artists” and 7,000 ordinary ones signed the Anti-charter.

None of them was allowed to read Charter ’77. They were protesting against something they had no idea about.

Nowadays, involvement in the Anti-charter is an attractive topic for the media. They still won’t let performers forget about the past for a single moment. Journalist Renáta Kalenská talked to the singer Jiří Korn:

“Did you ever sign a petition?”

“I did.”

“Which one?”

“The Charter.”

“Seriously? Did you have any problems as a result?”

“No. No problems at all. Quite the opposite. It’s just … When you talk about those petitions, there was one they organized which …”

“Are you thinking of the Anti-charter?”

“Oh yes—yes, I signed it.”

“So you didn’t sign the Charter, but the Anti-charter?”

“Yes, the Anti-charter.”

“Why was that?”

“Because there was nothing else I could do if I wanted to work.”

What accounts for Korn’s statement is not just the absent-mindedness of an artist, but perhaps a typically Švejk-like—and thus conscious—form of forgetfulness. Because Švejk’s attitude is a prescription for survival. In February 2002, the first weekend edition of the popular Czech daily
Mladá fronta dnes
opened up a debate about why the Czechs can’t abide heroes. “Centuries ago, this nation was regarded as a band of armed radicals. Why is Švejk our national symbol now?” asked the editorial, and replied: “Because we know heroism is possible, but only in the movies. And nobody lives in a void.”

The newspaper took the opportunity to remind us of the late philosopher (and editor at Radio Free Europe) Josef Jedlička’s essays on Czech literary types: “Švejk respects nothing but life itself. And ultimately, whatever makes life more comfortable, pleasanter, and safer.” At the heart of this attitude, there is a complete lack of respect for human actions or institutions. This sort of person doesn’t give a damn about how he appears before others. “And so for Švejk no price demanded of him for the opportunity to survive will be too great,” adds Jedlička.

The thinkers insist: “He is not an accidental clown.”

Švejk is the philosopher of cunning acquiescence.

And at the same time, the archetype of adaptation.

“Dear Mr. Husák, why are people behaving the way they do?” Havel asked the First Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee in 1975. He sent him a letter. He spent two weeks writing it, producing in the end an essay about the moral collapse of society.

In it, he replied to his own question: “They are driven to it by fear.”

But not fear in the common sense of the word: “Most of those we see around us are not quaking like aspen leaves: they wear the faces of confident, self-satisfied citizens.”

What Havel meant was fear in a deeper sense. Meaning “the more or less conscious participation in the collective awareness of a permanent and ubiquitous danger”; “becoming gradually used to this threat”; “the increasing degree to which, in an ever more skillful and matter-of-fact way, we go in for various kinds of external adaptation as the only effective method of self defense.”

In the summer of 1968, when Havel was in the US, he had a meeting there with Czech writer Egon Hostovský, who had emigrated in 1948 immediately after the communist putsch. Hostovský told him that he had emigrated to get away from himself.