Václav Havel at ninety years old: between the national myth and the trademark

“This year's VIZE 97 Award will be presented in memoriam to Václav Havel – the founder of the Foundation, whose ideas and legacy are inextricably linked to its activities. The award in his name will be received by Mrs. Dagmar Havel.”

I was born into a world in which the old system of Czechoslovak state socialism was visibly coming to an end. In videos from November demonstrations during 1989, my mom is “rocking” me in a stroller, while dad (with long hair typical of the hippie movement) is shouting from the stage. Behind the glass of one of our libraries has always been a photo: I am sitting on my dad’s lap, looking at the portrait of the emerging democratic president. Today marks ninety years since his birth, and when I am about forty, it will be exactly forty years since the so-called Velvet Revolution. It is roughly the same period that elapsed between the communist coup and the fall of the Iron Curtain. And I bet that even then, almost in middle age, someone will say to me: “Be glad you live in freedom.” As if I weren’t. And also someone else who will say: “It takes several generations for a society accustomed to totalitarianism to truly rid itself of its shackles.” I don’t think so.

Viewing the period of state socialism as a monolithic block that burdened our collective consciousness is just as absurd as perceiving the post-socialist development in Czechoslovakia as a straight line from point A to point X. History, like human destinies, does not progress linearly. And Havel, as a person, performer, politician, and myth, is a perfect example of that.

Who wants to hit a dog, will always find Havel

Talking about the figure of a dramatist, charterist, writer, president, public intellectual, and bohemian who shaped a significant part of modern Czechoslovak and later Czech history is rarely without controversy. Personal sympathies always intertwine with political ones, and the same can be said about antipathies.

In the post-1989 perception, Havel was reduced by the public to two positions: Havel the dissident and Havel the politician. While his staunch followers saw both roles as a continuation of the same trajectory, Havel’s critics tended to see his roles as contradictory. One excluded the other, or worse – the second was a betrayal of the first. Both perspectives, from entirely different positions and driven by different intentions, long prevented a comprehensive understanding of Havel’s personality, both the real and the performative.

For some, he was a bourgeois son who, with the emergence of the “Thirty-Eighters,” provoked the stagnant waters of the totalitarian fifties. For others, an icon who maintained his notorious nonconformity and sly rebellion even behind the walls of Prague Castle. For yet others, the best president in our history, for some, a disappointment. A bastard, a drunkard, a dramatist with a sense for absurd details, a tired statesman, and again an active post-president. A person supported by a controversial oligarch and a kind provocateur who always, literally throughout his life, made sure his image was under control.

So that everyone knows

He deliberately addressed his letters to specific people, but always made sure that in them, their recipients only appeared to function: as a transfer of his ideas to the rest of society. When in one of his most important texts he wrote to Gustáv Husák and asked whether the declared calm was not the calm of a morgue or a grave, he carefully ensured that the letter did not reach only Husák himself. He arranged for its transmission via Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

The same can be said about Letters to Olga, which in reality had little in common with personal letters from a prisoner to his wife while free. They can also be viewed through the lens of careful preparation for an eventual performance of real political office. Similarly, today it is possible to interpret the book Remote Interrogation, which is praised as “the most personal confession of Václav Havel.” The five-part interview across the Iron Curtain was conducted by the then dissident Havel with the exiled Karel Hvíždala.

Not only according to historian Pavel Kosatík, but this book was the key to Havel’s later entry into politics. Paradoxically (because if there was one thing Havel was not, it was a feminist), it fully embodied the motto “the personal is political.”

Phenomenology of false modesty

The most significant critique of Havel and his “people’s philosophy” was brought into the public space by the unpleasant student of Jana Patočka, Petr Rezek. Although himself a dissident, Rezek was not afraid to stubbornly attack his own structures. He addressed Havel in his texts several times and always tried to point out the moralistic dimension of Havel’s thinking about freedom and morality.

Rezek’s key work Disent’s Life as “Life in Truth”? debates Havel’s most famous essay Power of the Powerless and offers a somewhat different interpretation of the legendary vegetable seller with a sign. Rezek mainly challenges the thesis about living in truth and living in lies, which Havel built around the whole story. According to Rezek, it cannot be said that dissidents are people willing to live in truth, but rather those willing to live in conflict.

This distinction is fundamental for Rezek. He believes Havel, from a political decision, makes a moral and existential decision at the same time. Those who oppose the system “live in truth,” while those who conform, like the famous vegetable seller, find themselves in a regime of lies. Rezek sees a problem in this: from the fact that someone does not want to risk their job, family, or personal safety, it cannot be deduced that their life is less authentic or morally less valuable.

For Rezek, a dissident is primarily a person willing to step out of the private sphere and enter into public conflict. His character, inner truthfulness, or moral quality, in itself, says nothing. Likewise, a vegetable seller who does not take down the slogan may not be a less truthful person. He may simply be someone who does not want to bear the consequences of political conflict. Rezek thus takes from Havel his main moral hierarchy: opposition to the regime does not automatically mean a higher form of existence.

In Rezek’s view, Havel tends to elevate a specific political stance to a universally valid moral position. The dissident is not just a person in conflict with power, but someone who should have access to a deeper truth. The vegetable seller, on the other hand, ceases to be an ordinary person with commitments, fears, and everyday life, and becomes a figure of life in lies. Rezek defends the dignity of the banal, unheroic life against this.

In another of his texts, A View of Václav Havel from Below, published in the collection Reading about Václav Havel, Rezek further develops these theses. “To make Havel stand out, he developed the idea of living in truth, and to elevate his helplessness, he gave it a purpose of power,” Rezek criticizes Havel. The philosopher was evidently annoyed by Havel’s own conception of apolitical politics, or rather politics as a moral category, which then truly transferred into his presidential role. “Should we read the texts mentioned as Havel’s contribution to the phenomenology of humility?” Rezek asks, and at the end of the text, he fully states: “If Foucault’s words are true, that books are merely tools and the author is not responsible for what they are used for, and if this also applies to the performative texts, then Václav Havel is an innocent intellectual who bears no responsibility for the situation of the Czech nation and opposition. Let’s add: May he not bear it in the future either!”

His wish was not fulfilled, but despite Rezek’s intellectual critique, we can be glad.

The rocker in short pants

Havel adhered to his concept of personal, non-political politics even after 1989, when he became an unlikely leader of the regime’s fall and, in the context of our past and future history, an even more unlikely president.

The stammering intellectual, who almost had the status of a rock star. A person to whom leading figures of normalization culture suddenly gravitated, and he let them stand beside prominent figures of Czech underground and other dissidents from his circle. A lonely and solitary introvert, walking in short pants toward his new historical destiny. An angry dad who, in his first New Year’s speech, unreservedly declared to the rest of the country that they had been collaborators of an undemocratic regime. It’s hard not to get the feeling that his words could – just in a different social context – still apply today.

“Our country is not flourishing. The great creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being meaningfully utilized. Entire sectors of industry produce things that are of no interest, while we lack what we need. A state called a workers’ state humiliates and exploits workers. Our outdated economy wastes the little energy we have. A country that once could be proud of its educated people now spends so little on education that it ranks seventy-second in the world. We have spoiled our land, rivers, and forests, which our ancestors left us, and today we have the worst environmental conditions in all of Europe. Adults die earlier here than in most European countries.”

Master of paradox

Authentic neoliberals cursed Havel as an idealistic weakling, using manosphere language, as a “Beta,” which hindered Chad Klaus from building a market so free that even Liberland might envy us. Genuine radicals from the left projected onto Havel the embodiment of anti-communist liberalism, Western imperialism, and moral kitsch. In the otherwise not very functional concept of politics as a horseshoe, it was not the person but the figure of Havel that became a connecting point of otherwise irreconcilable camps.

The third apex of the imaginary triangle was formed by liberals – the “Right to Love” supporters, whose supposed influence was exaggerated by both sides of the spectrum. In reality, all three groups had a comic tendency to see their role, whether critical or followership, as the only correct one. They thus, quite characteristically, forgot a large part of society that does not perceive these disputes and cannot perceive them because it experiences history from the perspective of everyday life, not from the perspective of bourgeois intellectual chatter. As is often the case, everyone was right.

Havel was a master of paradox, radical yet consensus-seeking, some of his positions were populist, others painfully detached from the majority society. He tended to preach, sometimes precisely, sometimes annoyingly. But his willingness to confront power or herd mentality from his repertoire never fully disappeared. Only sometimes he missed the mark as accurately as he probably thought himself.

The problem Petr Rezek pointed out to him in the late 1980s, but which accompanied his entire post-1989 activity, was that although Havel tried to maintain the continuity of the Charter dialogue in his immediate circle, the reality of the country’s development stopped aligning with that earlier ideal before he could even admit it. The game of apolitical politics hit its real political limits.

Whose side is the state actually on?

There were moments when Havel, as president, had to clearly decide which side he was on, and the category of conscience, on which he based much of his previous reasoning, ceased to suffice as a political measure. A person’s conscience standing against power can be a source of resistance, but the conscience of someone wielding power does not yet explain why a particular decision is correct, whom it harms, and whom it benefits.

Havel still returned to the language of conscience, responsibility, and moral imperative even when deciding on matters with harsh and very material consequences for others. This applied to his support for NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, as well as his support for the American approach to Iraq.

A similar contradiction was visible during the IMF and World Bank meetings in Prague in 2000. Havel publicly defended the right to peaceful protest and criticized the hysteria around expected demonstrations, yet as the host country’s president, he stood on the side of the institutions against which protesters acted, and after violent clashes, he did not adopt their framing of the conflict as his own. For part of society, he could have fallen into the trap of his own thinking.

Someone who once described a vegetable seller as someone who accepts the ritual of the system and does not want to bear the consequences of conflict could suddenly become a similar figure in the eyes of others: a representative of a regime that describes its own position with language of higher responsibility and morality. Rezek’s critique here is almost ironic. A political decision again becomes a moral judgment, but this time not by a dissident against power, but by a person who is part of it, or even its holder. That is quite normal in politics; the problem was that Havel spent his entire career defining himself against politics itself.

On the other hand, Havel repeatedly stood on the side of people who were targets of majority hatred or contempt. The most visible example was his stance towards Roma. Already in the early nineties, he publicly criticized the previous state policy towards Roma as a mix of indifference, misunderstanding, and contempt, emphasizing their right to their own identity. When racist attacks and murders increased in the mid-nineties, he did not see them as fringe problems of extremists but as issues for society as a whole, expressing support for the victims of murdered Roma and Romani women. In 1995, he personally unveiled the first monument to the victims of the Roma camp in Lety u Písku, helping to bring the Roma Holocaust into a space that the state could no longer simply ignore.

He also sometimes opposed the majority ideas about who deserves full civil rights. After Klaus’s veto of the registered partnership law in 2006 was overridden, he openly welcomed its adoption and mocked the Christian Democrats’ and Klaus’s criticism, noting that their idea of family resembled a “calf barn.” Regarding Germans, he rejected the comfortable Czech version of post-war expulsion and insisted on a critical reflection of the expulsion. He later recalled that it was not only a moral issue but also a matter of long-term social and economic devastation of the borderlands and the destruction of the environment left behind after the expulsion.

Havel also never accepted the idea that a person’s social value is measured by their economic success. He supported market transformation but criticized its unchecked form early on, as well as the idea that growth and profit can serve as measures of a good society. In 1997, he spoke of “unqualified liberalism,” which made regulation almost a swear word, emphasizing solidarity, responsibility to future generations, and the quality of interpersonal relationships. He thought similarly about the environment. Ecology was not a side issue for him but part of a broader societal responsibility for the world we leave behind. In 1991, he hosted the first large pan-European meeting of environmental ministers at Dobříš. His political language could sometimes be paternalistic or even moralistic, but the idea that those who failed in the new system are to blame for themselves was always foreign to him.

Pope-like more than the Pope

Of course, part of the problem was also that Havel’s own political activity was interpreted by his admirers in public debate as confirmation of the correctness of post-1989 Czech direction. However, Havel himself never saw it that way. At the same time, it would be inaccurate to reduce his post-1989 role solely to domestic moralizing or symbolic legitimization of the new regime. Abroad, he long and quite specifically supported people facing repression.

Shortly after taking office as president, he invited the Dalai Lama to Czechoslovakia, and he supported the Tibetan issue for the next two decades. He repeatedly supported Aung San Suu Kyi, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, backed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, the Charter 08, and engaged in efforts for the Cuban opposition, among other things through the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba. After leaving the presidential office, he continued publicly advocating for opponents of authoritarian regimes in Myanmar, Tibet, China, North Korea, and Cuba.

In this regard, Havel’s emphasis on conscience and responsibility did not waver. Even in later speeches, he reiterated that a country that has experienced lack of freedom itself cannot remain silent about human rights violations elsewhere, just for economic interests or trade deals.

His foreign policy activity thus had, alongside all the controversial interventionist moments, a second, quite consistent line: active support for dissidents and politically persecuted people where their own states did not allow space for public conflict.

Leaving

The need to keep his image under control did not leave Havel even after his presidential era ended. Evidence of this is the film Citizen Havel, directed by the legendary Pavel Koutecký, which was taken over after his death by the equally significant documentarian Miroslav Janek. Is Citizen Havel a citizen? Or is he still the same Havel, who had no problem letting filmmakers close but mastered the art of subtle direction even in seemingly personal moments?

Havel’s Leaving went even further, not only as a theater play but primarily as a film. When at the end of the film, which the dramatist and author of the original script directed himself, Havel emerges like a water sprite from a pond to tell us: “Truth and love must triumph over lies and hatred,” one almost cannot help but compare it to another similar scene. In 2010, Slavoj Žižek also emerged from the water on the BBC The Culture Show and said farewell to viewers with the phrase: “See you, either in Hell, or in Communism.” While Mickey Mouse of Marxist philosophy remained faithful to his irony, Havel sealed his most famous line with his own life as a moral kitsch. But this time, without adequate distance.

No one disputes that Havel himself was an attentive listener and an extremely interesting debater. I myself had the opportunity to speak with him several times, and each time I was surprised by his shyness on one side and genuine interest in the opinions of a young person on the other. It was not only about people who shared his values to some extent.

At one of the debates during the film Circus Havel, directed by my father (the film was a follow-up to the performance at the Husa na provázku Theatre), we gathered as people born in 1989. Today, that scene is a definition of cringe, but at the time, Lucie Šlégrová also accepted the invitation. She was once a leading figure of the Workers’ Youth. She walked through Romani settlements in a long leather coat, proudly bore neonacist symbols, and her attitudes would be even more unacceptable today in a society heavily infected by the far right. She arrived at the filming with her brother, also a prominent neonacist, and other friends.

We sat in a circle with people more or less raised in the shadow of Havel’s legacy. And at that moment, I realized that even Lucie Šlégrová, a neo-Nazi, is actually a child of Havel. Of course, I had never thought about it before; it mainly says something about me. I had lived in a vacuum, like many others from families, yes, supporters of the right to truth. Despite who Havel faced, he did not lose a second’s attention and maintained a deep interest in Šlégrová’s opinions and reasons for her attitudes.

Trademark Václav Havel

Less than fifteen years after his death, Havel as a brand must also be included among his nicknames. Today, it is often said that if Havel were alive, he would laugh at the absurdity surrounding his name.

Nothing describes the comic and tragic aspects of Havel’s legacy better than disputes over trademarks, objects bearing his name, or even the public appearances of Václav Havel’s last director, Tomáš Sedláček. He is almost a perfect Havel without Havel: a derivative, a root, and proof that for some people, the word Havel has become something similar to Zdeněk Pohlreich’s stickers from the show Yes, Chef!.

The more Havel, the more truth and love. Or the more Havel, the more profit? Commercial exploitation of the figure of a man who, in many ways, was not ideal but still represents one of the more positive lines of our history, is quite repulsive. One almost wonders why the Václav Havel Library, under Sedláček’s leadership, did not turn into a tourist trap with souvenirs, plush Havel in short pants, and wooden bottle openers with his face. Instead, something less entertaining was created: a system of rights, trademarks, and symbolic ownership, in which Havel’s name gradually turns into ptydepe. The term comes from Havel’s play The Memorandum, where it refers to an artificial language created according to strict rules, intended to replace ordinary speech but gradually detaching from people and what it is supposed to communicate. In Czech, ptydepe has become a term for a language enclosed within its own rules and signs, whose meaning is lost along the way.

Seeing what is wrong

Why are we still so attracted to Havel’s person? I will try to find the answer in myself. I have gone through almost all phases of my relationship with Václav Havel, from uncritical acceptance, which resulted from growing up in a “Havel family,” through disappointment, to a more critical distance. Within that, I tended to see Havel as a black-and-white figure, aligning with the history of post-1989 neoliberalism, even as its symbol. But I missed a few small things.

The first is the fact that Havel, after the era of President Havel, did not disappear from politics nor retreat into the role of a dignified former statesman. He continued to publicly support specific political forces, most notably the Green Party, which he repeatedly recommended voting for and positioned against politics reduced to economic growth and technocratic management of the country. As late as 2010, he reiterated his support for the Greens, which was not an automatic endorsement of the entire liberal-conservative bloc: he had reservations about the formation of TOP 09 and the alliance of Schwarzenberg with Miroslav Kalousek. He supported the Greens also because, in his view, they did not disdain civil society, defended minorities, culture, and landscape, and rejected the idea that the only measure of good politics is economic growth.

In the same period, he again emphasized equality before the law, protection of minorities, solidarity, and human rights as issues that cannot be postponed whenever they conflict with economic interests.

He also increasingly distanced himself from Czech party politics, clientelism, and the intertwining of political parties with local oligarchs. In one of his later texts, he even drafted a program for an imaginary new party, criticizing the alienation of politics from citizens, party structures infiltrated by economic interests, and the idea that politics is merely about managing growth and distributing influence.

This does not mean he did not bear some responsibility for the direction the country took after 1989, nor that he managed to correctly perceive, for example, his relationship with Zdeněk Bakala, the patron of the Václav Havel Library. But it does mean that his own political positions gradually diverged from parts of mainstream individualism and capitalism, and that he increasingly recognized the distortions of power emerging in the new system. Thinking that Václav Havel bears most of the blame for all the negative things happening in the Czech Republic today is foolish and dangerous. Compared to his successors, capable realpolitik practitioners, he remains a person with moral responsibility. And that is not little.

Conditions for dialogue

Once upon a time, I dreamed of a completely absurd film. It was about “Havelian dialogue.” On Václav Havel’s benches, which are now scattered across the country, people who would otherwise never have a chance to speak to each other would meet. The idea is almost as absurd as the concept of the benches themselves. Two places facing each other, a table, always with a tree growing through it. A beautiful and appealing metaphor, but also an unrealistic one.

Probably, Zdeněk Bakala and the person who lost their apartment would not sit at such a table. Neither would someone who experienced the bombing of Yugoslavia, nor someone who defended it as a necessary intervention. Neither would a protester from Prague’s protests against the IMF and World Bank, nor a policeman who intervened against them. Neither would someone for whom Havel was a symbol of freedom, nor someone for whom he became a symbol of all the disillusionments of the nineties. In each case, it’s a different kind of inequality: sometimes money and property, other times state power, experiences of violence or loss of home, or a completely different form of individual memory of the same events.

The idea that simply seating people opposite each other, letting them speak, and waiting for reconciliation and understanding is mistaken. Public debate has its own hierarchy, and some voices automatically carry more weight. Havel’s approach to dialogue did not account for this difference. In that, it was not very different from right-wing liberalism, which tends to see people in a democratic society as individually responsible and fundamentally equal in opportunities. Such a view does not match reality.

At one table, there might sit a person backed by capital, an institution, or the state, and opposite them, someone whose experience is primarily personal. Class, education, origin, skin color, gender, and other privileges or capital we possess influence who is listened to and whose experience is considered important. Merely having the opportunity to speak does not mean everyone has an equal chance to be heard.

True dialogue therefore requires more than willingness to listen to another opinion. It requires the ability to perceive inequalities between those who speak and to listen accordingly. With respect, empathy, and awareness that the other’s experience may have greater expressive value than our own assumptions about how the world works.

Societal dialogue is needed, perhaps more than ever. But it must be preceded by reflection on the inequalities embedded within it. Otherwise, it becomes another privilege of those whom society already listens to and considers their opinions as authoritative. Without this reflection, Václav Havel’s Benches will continue to wait for the moment when their true meaning is fulfilled. And similarly, his legacy, almost despite him, deserves more. It simply deserves more.