„Confessions of a Czechophile.“ Kritický text Edwarda Lucase

25. září 2014

Václav Havel, symbol listopadu 1989.

ČTK

Přinášíme anglický originál článku známého novináře Edwarda Lucase, v němž kriticky hodnotí Českou republiku. / We publish an opinion by Edward Lucas written exclusively for The Reporter Magazine.

I arrived in Czechoslovakia in January 1989 to collect my accreditation, bursting with optimism and ignorance. I was one of only four Western journalists living permanently in Prague – the others were a jovial West German TV correspondent, an incomprehensible Japanese, and a gloomy Frenchman from AFP.

My friend at the British embassy was discouraging. ‘There’s nothing going on here. You’ll starve”. Almost the first news story I wrote was about her expulsion for espionage. But she was right – the pickings were indeed thin at the beginning. I wrote about jazz – the Emil Viklicky Quartet – and a daring Kafka festival. But the political situation seemed as unmoving and unmovable as the Central Committee building.

As I tried to scrape a living, I struggled to find the right framework to understand the puzzling passivity and hopelessness that surrounded me. Was it anaesthesia? Castration? Realism? At any rate, it was disappointing.

I had been reared on heroic tales of the anti-communist resistance. At the age of nine I read ‘All aboard for Freedom’, an American children’s book based on the real-life ‘Vlak Svobody’ (Freedom Train) which crashed across the Iron Curtain in 1951. My father, an Oxford philosopher, travelled secretly to Prague to give underground lectures to other philosophers who were working as stokers and window cleaners. We raised money to buy Vaclav Havel a word processor. When the StB confiscated it, we raised money to buy another one.

I had lived in Poland, and was bewitched by the Poles’ overt contempt for their rulers. I had been a correspondent in East Germany and was fascinated, if repelled, by the number of people there who genuinely believed that their kind of Germany was better.

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