Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  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.

  He was so terribly afraid of what he might do if he stayed.

  After 1989, the editors of Lidové noviny posed a question to the performers whose names had appeared on the pages of Rudé právo in 1977: “Do you think the fact that you signed the Anti-charter in any way marks you out in public life?”

  Musician Petr Janda replied: “No, I don’t. I don’t think I had to be any kind of a hero.”

  Slovak comedian and actor Július Satinský: “It doesn’t affect me at all. I’m glad there were a lot of us, and we didn’t know what it was about.”

  Oscar-winning movie director Jiří Menzel (who made Closely Watched Trains): “I don’t get that impression. But if Mr. Havel, for example, wanted to judge me, I would feel marked out.”† Of course, there’s a rhetorical device hidden in that answer. Everybody knows that Havel is far from condemning anyone.

  Let’s take a look at Gott.

  To a similar question, he replies: “But the nation doesn’t resent me for having been one of this country’s biggest providers of foreign currency. They say I’m like several factories.”

  He says he was forced to appear at the theater, but he didn’t know what it was all about. It was only later when he watched the event on television that he saw how commentary was added, and the whole thing edited and given a new meaning.

  “Not once was the term ‘Communist Party’ uttered there,” says Gott in his own defense.

  But why did he go? “Of course they didn’t hold a knife to my throat,” he continues. “But, reading between the lines, I realized that I had to go, otherwise …”

  “… otherwise you would never sing again,” added the journalist.

  “But it’s just like today,” replied Gott, “if you don’t follow the only correct line. In other regimes as well, if you don’t keep step with the only correct line, it can end badly, too. We can only guess at the reasons for the deaths of Monroe, Lennon, Morrison and others in the country with the greatest degree of freedom.”

  The Golden Nightingale knows the inside story. Some time ago, he declared that Israel sponsored Charter ’77. There are a lot of things he knows, but he can’t make public, because “if I write it all down, I’ll be run over by a car.”

  A month later, he explained in the press that he isn’t an anti-Semite. All he meant was that the signatories of Charter ’77 were given financial support by the Western powers. “After all, they weren’t able to work normally, they could only get jobs in boiler rooms, or cleaning windows. Do you think they’d have survived on what they earned?”

  “But a few people from the West came along and helped them,” says the woman interviewing him.

  “Yes, and I’m very glad of it,” concludes Gott.

  He has grudges: those who attack him take no notice of the fact that he never sang a single verse in praise of the communist regime. They’ve just harped on about the Charter, the Anti-charter, Husák, Gott and the Party for the past ten years. “Why is it,” he asks, “that the critics, who these days are such heroes, didn’t write all that twenty years ago?”

  “You would have had to read those things in underground publications, because they wouldn’t have made it past the press censorship,” notes another journalist.

  “ ‘They wouldn’t have, they wouldn’t have …’ ” the singer mimics her. “Then why didn’t they say it on the radio, on a live broadcast?”

  Let’s go back to Helena.


  She claims she never signed the Anti-charter. She was on tour in Poland at the time. “They added my name without my knowledge.”

  Helena’s case is strange. She was such a big star that—for propaganda reasons—her name (if she herself had added her signature) would have appeared on the front page of Rudé právo. Yet she turned up six days after her male and female colleagues, the last one on the list, on an inside page. “They forgot she was out of the country, and when they remembered, they added her name at the last moment. Obviously they’d never print a disclaimer for her,” explains one of her colleagues. “We were all young and stupid at the time.”

  Josef Škvorecký, who co-founded the biggest Czech émigré publishing house in Canada, wrote of his own generation: “But were we old and wise then? We too were young and stupid, but with just a tiny bit of bad luck, our stupidity was capable of ruining lives, and not just our own.”

  A lengthy debate about Helena flared up in the Czech press. (Most of the radio channels play her songs once an hour.)

  In letters from readers who defend the star, the same logical argument appears: the general opinion is that the communist daily Rudé právo told lies. After all, it didn’t tell the truth about the Soviet intervention in 1968, or about life in the normalization period. If we agree that it lied about almost everything, then why wouldn’t it have lied about Helena Vondráčková too?

  It was Helena herself who put an end to the debate.

  She told the press that in those days any sort of protest meant career suicide. “If I had been in the country during the mass signing of the Anti-charter, and if the communists had come to me with it, I would have signed it.”

  For several years, journalists have tried hard to get to the bottom of what Marta Kubišová really thinks about Helena, Vašek and Karel. What they would find most attractive would be bitter comments.

  But Marta keeps quiet and doesn’t make judgments.

  She says that Gott is a vocal phenomenon.

  “And what about the people who crossed the street at the sight of you? Can you ever forgive them?”

  “But I don’t know whom I would be supposed to forgive. I’ve always had bad eyesight and I never used to recognize anyone from more than six feet away. Two years ago, I finally had laser surgery, and at last I can see properly. So thank God, I was extremely short-sighted in those days.”

  About Gott, Marta says he is a man with a flawless soul.

  It was he who acted as godfather to Marta Kubišová’s new album of Czech blues in 1996.

  He popped the champagne and sprayed the first CD with it.

  He said that this little disk was just a small payback for the twenty-year debt that could never be repaid.

  He was cheered.

  Karel is a superb public speaker.

  In July 2006, his museum was opened in Jevany, just outside Prague. With a neon sign saying Gottland over the entrance.

  No living artist—at least in the Czech Republic—has ever had his own museum before, with full-time guides giving tours in three different languages.

  Karel Gott is sacred in a desacralized reality.

  A world without God is impossible, so in the world’s most atheistic country, which is the Czech Republic, the sixty-seven-year-old star plays an important role.

  The role of mein Gott.

  On top of that, in recent years it has been possible to commune with him very closely. Every single book about his love life has been a best-seller: When the Lovers Weep (1999); Marika, or How a Young Girl Found Happiness—Three Years with an Idol (1999); In Bed with Gott: A Guide to the Golden Nightingale’s Love Life (2000); From the Secret Diary of Marika S, or There’s Only One Karel Gott (2001); and The Composer of Fragrant Lingerie (2002).

  The Gottland museum is in a villa which Gott bought as his summer holiday home. Even though it’s a weekday, the parking lot is full of tour buses from all over the country. There’s a crowd of old people on the steps. They’re upset because only twenty people are admitted at a time, every twenty minutes. Most of the people here are over sixty. Most of them prefer to stay here propping each other up, rather than stepping aside to sit down at the terrace café. There they stand, nervously waving their tickets in their work-ruined hands. It looks to me as if they want to go inside right away. As if here and now, this minute, they want to confirm that their lives have been all right.

  They loved Gott, and they made it through communism along with him.

  If he “had to keep step with the correct line,” then what were we to do?

  Getting inside Gottland is like obtaining a seal of approval: the past is okay.

  We pass through the “Maestro’s” kitchen (that’s what the guides call him). “He cooked here often, usually fish dishes,” they say. “In the top drawer, you can see the original knives and forks he used when he was already a famous singer.”

  We all peer into the top drawer.

  Let’s return to Marta.

  At the back of the Church of Our Lady before Týn, near the Old Town Square in Prague, one of the oldest theaters in Europe is run in a basement. It is called Divadlo Ungelt—the Ungelt Theater. Dating back to the fourteenth century, it was a little theater for customs officials, who had their office and accommodation next door. Ungelt means “customs duty.” The auditorium has thirty seats; it looks like the smallest theater in Europe as well.

  Marta Kubišová gives concerts there. Milan Hein, the owner, adores her strong alto voice, which isn’t aching to win anyone’s favor. Unlike Helena, Marta is reluctant to sing slad’ky—schmaltzy songs aren’t in her style. She kicks off the evening with a blues number, with lyrics by Pavel Vrba:

  Life is like a man

  Who drives every woman crazy

  I trust him, although he’s a liar

  As twisted as a vine

  And yet I believe him

  Because he’s sent from heaven

  Though the heavens can be cloudy

  Life is like a man

  Who’s no stranger to me

  He’s not a good man

  Why do I love him so

  When his voice frightens me

  He suddenly says “enough”

  And he’s gone

  I’m afraid to see him walk away

  At 10 p.m., the small crowd exits the Ungelt Theater into Malá Štupartská Street and collides with a marijuana-scented cloud. Opposite, there’s a nightclub. There are drug dealers standing around, or sitting in the road and smiling. Through the club’s windows, in the red lamplight you can see the drag queens, lip-synching to playbacks of famous female singers.

  In three of the windows, there are three Helena Vondráčkovás.

  * * *

  * According to Václav Havel, a large cornice fell onto a female passer-by on Vodičkova Street in central Prague in the 1960s. Her death provoked a storm of protest. The authorities channelled the mood by saying in the media that it proved that socialism had made great progress, because the causes of the incident “could be officially criticized.”

  The atmosphere surrounding the woman’s death inspired Havel to write a play called The Memorandum, in which the head of a government office receives a memorandum in a weird, complicated language. He is surprised, since his subordinates have learned, sooner than he has, that a new official language called Ptydepe is in force. It is meant to improve the organization of work by removing inexact words.

  In it, the resemblance between words has been minimized. One of the characters, a Professor Peřin who is a “language activist,” explains: “Words must be formed by the least probable combination of letters.” There is also a logical principle at work: the more common the meaning, the fewer letters. The word “wombat” has 319 letters, while the Party nomenclature’s favourite word, “whatever,” consists of just two letters, gh. Of course, there is a fallback: a word consisting of the single letter f, in case an even more frequently used word than “whatever” should appear.

  Ptydepe is meant to be a s
uper-synthetic language, essentially an anti-language. Its users become mechanical beings who have lost the ability to differentiate between actual language and the situation in which it is used.

  Why the name Ptydepe?

  “Why not?” asks Havel. Ptydepe, just like the word kaflcárna (from Kafka: its meanings include an absurdity that is impossible to explain rationally), has settled in the public consciousness for good. Several times—to keep up the conversation—I’ve asked the drivers of Prague taxis what Ptydepe means, and they all knew it was a sort of Newspeak.

  † One of the few artists who speaks directly about the disastrous results of being involved in the campaign against Charter ’77 is writer and dramatist Karel Hvížd’ala. His reply to Lidové noviny’s question was as follows: “Of course, I disappointed people. At the time I signed the Anti-charter, I wasn’t in the Party, despite which various pressures were applied to a person to get him to shake hands with the Devil. I was aware of my own weakness, and I left the country.”

  BETTER PR

  It’s 2002.

  The editors of the weekly Respekt have received a letter from a reader who was four years old in 1977.

  He thinks that any band that wants to sell well should put some effort into the task. Whenever he goes to a bookstore he can never find anything about Charter ’77. The young reader feels that the performers’ caution and conspiratorial habits are the reason why “the band Charter ’77” has such poor publicity.

  “The band Anti-Charter,” he claims, “has much better PR.”

  HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

  This is about 1968.

  When I’m in the Czech Republic, I like going to secondhand bookstores to look for old annuals and journals.

  On one occasion, I found Dikobraz (“Porcupine”) No. 51, dated December 17, 1968.