At the road’s end: Václav Havel (1936-2011), dramatist, dissident and president

One of the greatest men of our times has died. It was announced earlier today that Václav Havel died in his sleep this morning at the age of 75, after a long battle against lung cancer. The hero of 1989 and former President of Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic was last seen in public when he met the Dalai Lama nine days ago.
Born in Prague on 5 October 1936, Havel first became known as a dramatist, essayist and poet. His works often had a political message and he became one of the country’s leading dissidents following the Soviet invasion of 1968. He was among the founders of the opposition group known as Charter 77 (from their human rights manifesto) and was consequently imprisoned on a number of occasions.
This only increased his stature as a leading dissident and in 1989 Havel was at the front of the so-called Velvet Revolution, the peaceful demonstrations centering on Wenceslas Square in Prague, which brought down the Communist regime. On 29 December 1989 Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia by the Federal Assembly.
As President he presided over free election in the summer of 1990 and the establishment of multi-party democracy. He opposed the break-up of the country, which came into effect on 1 January 1993, but was elected President of the new republic on 26 January 1993. He was reelected for a second five-year term in 1998.
Havel was an enthusiastic advocate of the eastwards expansion of NATO and saw his country join the alliance during his presidency. Negotiations for EU membership also began during his presidency and the Czech Republic joined the union in 2004, a year after Havel had left office. He was succeeded by his political opponent Václav Klaus.
Despite health problems Havel remained active as a politician as well as an artist in the years following his resignation.
The photo is by courtesy of Martin Kozák/Wikipedia.

New books: 1989 and much else

The 20th anniversary of the 1989 revolutions last year sparked a number of books on the topic. Among them is Nick Thorpe’s ’89: The Unfinished Revolution, published by the new publishing house Reportage Press.
Nick Thorpe is the BBC’s correspondent in Budapest, where he has lived since 1986. He sets out to tell the story of 1989 from a personal perspective and there are some interesting glimpses of life behind the Iron Curtain. But while Victor Sebestyen chose to write a general history of the events leading up to 1989 and Michael Meyer wrote a personal account, it seems Thorpe really cannot make up his mind if this book is a personal account or a history and therefore tries to make it both things at the same time.
The focus is on Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for which the reason seems to be that Thorpe was there during some of the key events. But unlike some of the others who have written books on 1989 he missed several of the most significant events. Occasionally the story is interrupted when he left the scene, such as the war in Bosnia – the account is suddenly broken off when Thorpe himself returns to Hungary because of his wife’s pregnancy.
The parts based on his own experiences are the best, but the mix of first-hand and second-hand accounts is quite unfortunate. Sadly he also manages to get several of the central facts wrong – the Berlin Wall falls a day too early, Germany is reunified a year too late and Gorbachev holds talks with the wrong President Bush.
The events up to and including 1989 fill only about 1/3 of the book, with the rest of it given over to developments in Central Europe and the Balkans during the last twenty years. But this is a confusing mix of a little of this and a little of that – environmental questions, the secret services, the plight of the Roma people, political development in general and much else.
Parts of the book’s proceeds go to a Hungarian organisation advocating home births and there is a whole chapter extolling home births, complete with detailed accounts of the births of some of his children and horror stories about giving birth in hospital, all of which smacks too much of campaign journalism.
The author does not always succeed in making it clear in what ways these topics are linked to the events of 1989, but he states that it all has to do with people’s freedom to make choices about their own lives.
All in all, the book makes a rather confused impression – the author simply tries to pack too many not necessarily interrelated topics into one volume. The fact that there is no table of contents and no index and that the chapters are divided into a myriad of subchapters add to the messy impression.

On this date: The fall of the Berlin Wall

Tonight twenty years have passed since the Berlin Wall came down. The fall of the wall on 9 November 1989 was the climax of the revolutions which swept through Central Europe that year, starting with the near-free elections in Poland in June and the opening of the Hungarian border to the West and ending with Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution and the violent downfall of the Ceausescu regime in Romania in December. Two years later the Soviet Union itself collapsed, changing the world forever.
The Berlin Wall had been the very symbol of the Cold War, making its fall the quintessential symbol of the mostly peaceful revolutions of 1989. During the 28 years the Wall existed, at least 136 people, possibly more than 200, were killed trying to escape over it.
In today’s Berlin you will here and there find a reminder of the divided city, such as a line in the street discreetly showing where the Wall once stood. Scattered across the city are also pieces of the Wall itself.
One of them may be found in Potsdamer Platz (first photo). Before the Second World War this square was, in Timothy Garton Ash’s words, “Berlin’s Piccadilly Circus”. Bombed to pieces during the war, it fell right in the middle of no man’s land when the city was divided into East and West and lay like an empty wasteland for forty years. In the past twenty years Potsdamer Platz has woken up and become the centre of the German capital’s commercial district.
Another slab of the Wall may be found in a bookstore in Friedrichstrasse – on it, President Reagan has written his famous words from his 1987 speech in front of Brandenburg Gate: “Mr Gorbachev, Tear Down – Tear Down – This Wall!” The greatest credit for 1989 should perhaps go to just Mikhail Gorbachev, who, by making it clear that the Soviet Union would not intervene like they had done in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, allowed the revolutions to happen.
In Tauentzienstrasse in the western part of the city stands Brigitte and Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff’s sculpture “Berlin”, symbolising the divided city (third photo). It was erected on the occasion of the city’s 750th anniversary in 1987, two years before Berlin again became one.

In The Guardian today Timothy Garton Ash writes about that memorable night and Victor Sebestyen, author of the excellent Revolution 1989, on the meaning of “the real 9/11”:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/09/berlin-wall-anniversary-celebrations

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/08/september-11-berlin-wall-communism

What to see: Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

Tomorrow the Brandenburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor) will provide the scene for the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which will be attended by 1980s leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa and Miklós Németh and leaders of the 27 EU countries.
They will all join German Chancellor Angela Merkel in walking through the Brandenburg Gate – in itself a simple act, yet it was an impossibility for 28 years. The Wall used to run just in front of the Gate, which was also the backdrop for Ronald Reagan’s famous speech in 1987, where he urged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”. Today the Brandenburg Gate is a symbol of a unified Germany and Europe, but most of all of freedom.
The Brandenburg Gate at Pariser Platz is the only survivor of Berlin’s fifteen city gates – as the name indicates it was the gate towards the province of Brandenburg. Berlin has expanded significantly since then and the Brandenburg Gate is now right in the middle of the city centre.
It was built by the architect Carl Gotthard Langhans between 1788 and 1791, but the sculptural decorations were not completed until 1795. With its Doric columns this neoclassical structure stood in marked contrast to the Baroque mansions which surrounded Pariser Platz at the end of the 18th century. By this design Langhans so to speak brought the neoclassical style to Berlin, a city on which that style came to have great influence.
The quadriga carrying the peace goddess Eirene was done by Johann Gottfried Schadow – the original no longer exists, but the current quadriga is an exact replica. The quadriga has been turned around 180 degrees several time to face either east or west and was even taken to Paris when Napoléon I occupied Berlin in 1806.
It returned eight years later. Originally a symbol of peace, it was thereafter considered a symbol of victory. Karl Friedrich Schinkel added a staff surmounted by the Prussian eagle and the iron crass surrounded by a laurel wreath to the goddess, thus transforming her from Eirene to Victoria.
The Brandenburg Gate has seen victory parades such as that taking place after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the Nazi take-over of 1933. In 1945 the red flag was hoisted above it by Soviet soldiers. The division of Berlin which followed left the area around Brandenburg Gate a wasteland, heavily guarded by East German border guards. On 9 November 1989 the world witnessed how thousands of Germans from both east and west climbed the wall in front of Brandenburg Gate. Today Pariser Platz is again a busy square thronged by tourists and flanked by buildings such as the French and US embassies.

A remarkable reunion in Berlin

In a week’s time the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall will be celebrated. Today the commemorations began with the reunion in Berlin of three of the most important leaders of that remarkable years, now visibly aged - Mikhail Gorbachev, George H. W. Bush walking very stiffly and Helmut Kohl in a wheelchair and having difficulties speaking. BBC has a video of this remarkable reunion: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8335193.stm

What to see: Nikolaikirche (St Nicholas’s Church), Leipzig

Nikolaikirche (St Nicholas’s Church) in Leipzig shot to fame during the 1989 revolution, but dates back to around 1165, making it as old as the city of Leipzig itself. Originally a Romanesque church, it was enlarged and rebuilt in Gothic style in the 16th century. In 1539 it became a Protestant church, but nowadays Catholic services are also held occasionally.
In 1784-1797 the interiors were rebuilt in the neoclassical style by the architect Johann Carl Friedrich Dauthe. The most outstanding results of this renovation are the columns, which are not in the usual Doric, Ionic or Corinthian order, but are built to resemble palms.
Between 1723 and 1750 Johann Sebastian Bach was organist and master of the choir in the Nikolaikirche. Several of his works were performed for the first time in this church, among them his “Johannes Passion”, which was first heard on Good Sunday in 1724.
In the spring of 1989 Nikolaikirche started to hold “prayers for peace” every Monday at 5 p.m. Soon these events drew enormous crowds, making the church the focal point of demonstrations against the communist regime which spread to all parts of the GDR that autumn. The demonstrations led to Erich Honecker’s fall from power in October. Soon the GDR regime imploded and on 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell.
“There was no head of the revolution. The head was the Nikolaikirche and the body the centre of the city. There was only one leadership: Monday, 5 p.m., the Nikolaikirche”, the entertainer Bernd-Lutz Lange later said. Prayers for peace continue to be held every Monday in the Nikolaikirche.

New books: An eyewitness account of 1989

On the heels of Victor Sebestyen’s excellent Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire comes another book on those momentous events twenty years ago. The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall is published by Simon & Schuster and written by Michael Meyer, who is currently a communication advisor to Ban Ki-moon (who may well need one) and was Newsweek’s correspondent in Germany, Central Europe and the Balkans in 1989.
As such, Meyer takes a different approach from Sebestyen, namely that of an eyewitness to many of the key events. He was there to see the border guards at Checkpoint Charlie open the gates between West and East Berlin on the night of 9 November 1989, he was one of the last foreign journalists to interview Ceausescu and he was present during much of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution.
But Michael Meyer also takes a look behind the scenes and argues against what he considers several myths about 1989. One of them is that the revolution came as a result of the long-repressed people of Eastern Europe spontaneously rising against the communist dictatorships. Meyer’s version is that this is only partly true; it happened in some countries, while the events in other countries were the results of a revolution from above.
Meyer places Hungary at the centre of the story and looks at how a few members of the Hungarian leadership “deliberately took aim at the Berlin Wall – and more than any others, it was they who brought it down”. These men played a significant role by opening the Hungarian borders, thus allowing the “Great Escape” to happen, whereby thousands upon thousands of East German citizens fled to the West through Hungary and Austria, a flight which caused a serious weakening of the GDR regime.
Meyer also points out that what happened in 1989 was in no way preordained, although it may seem so in retrospect. He also argues that chance played a significant role – most famously Gunter Schabowski’s misstatement at the 9 November press conference that East German citizens would be allowed to leave immediately.
Michael Meyer also warns against American triumphalism over the end of the Cold War and the dangers of believing that the communist regimes collapsed as a result of hard-line confrontation from the USA. Meyer, like Sebestyen, argues that Ronald Reagan softened his rhetoric and his politics and chose to work with Mikhail Gorbachev “as a reformer, a potential partner in peace”, rather than confront the Soviet Union.
“The history of the revolutions in Eastern Europe was not written in Washington”, Meyer argues. “It had little to do with American military might. It had far more to do with the rise of Gorbachev, coupled with the economic collapse of the Soviet system and the glaring contrast to the dynamism of Western Europe. The preparedness of East European leaders, with the exception of those of Romania, to accept peaceful change was critical. So was the role of sheer accident and happenstance [...]. Above all, it had everything to do with people, individually and collectively, on the ground, deciding for themselves to tear down that Wall”.
Meyer ascribes new roles to several of the participants of this story. His hero remains Gorbachev, who “deserves enormous credit. He was the geopolitical demiurge, the prime mover that set all else in motion. Without him, the history of Eastern Europe and the end of communism would have been vastly different”.
Michael Meyer’s version of 1989 is well worth reading in this autumn of anniversaries.

An interview with Mikhail Gorbachev

Twenty years after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, Ginny Dougary of The Times has interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev, the last (and first) President of the Soviet Union, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for allowing the peaceful revolutions. In the interview, which appeared in yesterday’s edition of the newspaper, Gorbachev talks about the events which brought down the Communist system, his views on Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama and Margaret Thatcher, the Western view of Russia and the loss of his wife Raisa Gorbacheva, who died ten years ago this month.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6816872.ece

Walburga Habsburg Douglas on her role in 1989

In the latest issue of the Budapest Times (volume 7, issue 33-35, dated 10-30 August 2009) there is a long interview with Walburga Habsburg Douglas, youngest daughter of Otto von Habsburg, the last Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince, in which she talks about the role she played in the 1989 revolution.
On 19 August that year, Walburga Habsburg as secretary-general of the Pan-European Union and her father’s representative, arranged a “Pan-European picnic” in Sopron where she symbolically used a wire cutter to make cuts to the fence separating Austria from Hungary, literally cutting open the Iron Curtain. The event had been planned as a symbolic meeting between Austrians and Hungarians by Walburga, her father, Hungarian human right groups and the opposition Hungarian Democratic Forum. The fact that they were joined by Imre Pozsgay, leader of the reformist communists, turned it into a larger event. He persuaded the Hungarian government to let a gate at the border stay open for four hours and that border guards would pretend not to notice those illegally crossing the frontier.
A large numbers of refugees from East Germany were at this time stuck in Hungary and many of them took the opportunity to escape through Austria to West Germany. An estimated 660 refugees escaped through the “symbolic gate” at Sopron that day, while some 1,400 managed to cross the border elsewhere that day. The event has been considered a trial for the general opening of the Hungarian border on 11 September.
In the interview, Douglas rejects the journalist’s suggestion that she may have been concerned that events might get out of hand and turn ugly: “I am not somebody who is afraid. The evening before we considered whether everything could get out of hand. But then we said: ‘Even if it gets out of hand, the main thing is that the broad direction is right.’ Together with other organisers we simply didn’t have the feeling that anything bad could happen. We intuitively sensed that there was no danger. In that respect we relied not least on our Hungarian co-organisers”.
She also claims that it was only later when she heard of the GDR leader Honecker’s rage that she realised the significance of what they had done: “We didn’t realise that our border opening would ultimately lead to the opening of the Iron Curtain. In the concrete situation my primary aim was to help as many people as people [sic, should be: possible] out of their difficult situation. I didn’t anticipate the possibility of doing politics on the world stage. I was happy that I could help people in need based on the principles of my organisation and not least my inner conviction. When I gradually realised what it could all lead to I was even more enthusiastic. For many years my social involvement had been directed towards finally getting rid of the dreadful Iron Curtain. On 19 August I was not yet fully aware of the significance of the events. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. I simply did what my conscience dictated. I only really realised the significance of the event two days later when by chance I heard a German-language broadcast by Radio Moscow. An interview with SED chairman Honecker was being broadcast in which he spoke incredibly angrily and disparagingly about our picnic. That’s when I realised what a major blow the event was to the East German regime and that it must have really hit home”.
Now married to a Swedish count, Walburga Habsburg Douglas was elected to the Swedish Parliament for the Conservative Party in 2006. Her father, the former Crown Prince, will be 97 this autumn. The interview in its entirety can be read here:
http://www.budapesttimes.hu/content/view/12785/27/

New books: 1989 – The fall of the Eastern bloc

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 which brought down the authoritarian communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany and Hungary and trigged the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. To mark the anniversary Weidenfeld & Nicolson some weeks ago published Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by the Hungarian-born British journalist Victor Sebestyen, whose first book, Twelve Days, on the doomed Hungarian uprising of 1956, was met with critical acclaim in 2006.
In this excellent new book, Sebestyen singles out certain key events – such as the election of a Polish pope in 1978 and his momentous visit to his homeland, the strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk and the emergence of Solidarity, the Hungarian “palace coup” directed at János Kádár, the mellowing of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the dynamic Mikhail Gorbachev following a succession of Soviet leaders virtually at death’s door – but also other events less directly related but of some political or symbolical significance – such as Matthias Rust landing his plane in the Kremlin in 1987, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and the Soviet failure in Afghanistan.
The gripping narrative shows how the communist regimes were gradually weakened and binds these events together until climax is reached with the events of 1989 – the round table talks and subsequent almost free elections in Poland, the stolen local elections in the GDR and the protests which drove Honecker from office, the opening of the Hungarian border, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the coup in Bulgaria, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the executions of the Ceausescus on Christmas Day. In the final chapter the Vatican band plays “the Internationale” as the Gorbachevs are received by the Pope and Czechoslovakia’s new president Václav Havel addresses the crowds outside Prague Castle on New Year’s Day 1990.
There are only two things I miss in this book. When dealing with the pro-democracy demonstrations directed at the communist regimes in 1989 I think it could have been of some value to try and see the Tiananmen Square protests in relation to those in Europe. And as the author charts the (long) background for the downfall of the Soviet “empire” in Eastern Europe it would seem natural to me not to end the story in the New Year of 1990, but to take it through all the way to 1991 and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself.
Nevertheless this does not detract from that this is a great book, one of the best of 2009, and warmly recommended to anyone with an interest in recent European history.

From the publisher’s website:
http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/HB-40424/Revolution-1989.htm

Book news: The revolution of 1989

Like 1789, 1989 was one of the most momentous years in history. This year the 20th anniversary of the revolution which occured that year is marked in many ways.
One of them is the book Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by the Hungarian-born British journalist Victor Sebestyen, to be published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson on 30 July, which will deal with the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Some information from the publisher:

http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/HB-40424/Revolution-1989.htm

Several news magazines have already marked the anniversary and in its recent issue (dated 29 June-6 July) Time joins them by publishing 22 articles on the events of 1989. The articles are also available at their website:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,1902809,00.html

On this date: Start of the 1989 revolution

4 June 1989 should perhaps be counted as the very starting point of the momentous events of 1989 which culminated in the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in December 1991. On 4 June 1989 Poland, as the first East Bloc country, held elections which were very close to being fully democratic, with only a few seats in parliament reserved for the Communist Party. On the same day Ayatollah Khomeini died in Iran and in Beijing hundreds or even thousands of peaceful protesters were killed when the ruthless Communist regime crushed the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.
New Statesman had an interesting series of articles on “The Year of the Crowd” in its issue of 12 March:

http://www.newstatesman.com/subjects/the-year-of-the-crowd

The Swedish news magazine Fokus also commemorated the events of 1989 in its latest issue last Friday:

http://www.fokus.se/2009/05/tjugo-ar-senare/