By Martin Butora, January 10th, 2012 
Martin Butora co-founded Public Against Violence, the major democratic movement in Communist Slovakia, in November 1989, and served as Human Rights Advisor to Czechoslovak President Václav Havel (1990–1992). Between 1999 and 2003, he was Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the US. He is the honorary president of the Institute for Public Affairs, a public policy think-tank in Bratislava. His most recent books are Druhý dych (Second Wind), 2010, and Skok a kuk (Jump and Look), 2011.
Everyone knew it would happen one day and many sensed it was going to be soon – and yet, speaking about it, every word weighs a ton. The fact that he stayed with us this long was a miracle. Right until the very last moment, with extreme effort, he made sure his voice was heard wherever human dignity was at stake, wherever hope needed to be instilled. He did so with his characteristic sense of duty and responsibility.
As someone born into a wealthy family, he was ashamed of his position and privileged upbringing and longed to be like other children: he felt “an invisible wall” between himself and the others. His family background heightened his sensitivity to inequality, his distaste for undeserved advantages.
Hope as an orientation of the heart:
Vaclav Havel understood hope as an anthropological quality that pertained not only to politics. Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world, he used to say. Either we have hope within us or we don’t: “It is a dimension of the soul. It’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.” Hope is not prognostication, he emphasized, “it is an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”
In this sense, hope for him was not synonymous with optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of the outcome. This is an extraordinarily strong message in a . . .
Read more: Vaclav Havel: The End of an Era
By Kacper Szulecki, December 22nd, 2011 
He never was a politician. He never wanted to be one. In this, he embodied the post-communist dream of an anti-political politics. Many, very many Czechs could not forgive him just that. When they put him at the Prague Castle, when they saw him in the legendary president T.G. Masaryk’s seat – they wanted him to play a statesman. And play he did, throughout his life he was a man of the theater. But he was a playwright, not an actor. As time went by, voices were heard that he is not fit for the position he holds. When people now say “he was an intellectual, a playwright, and a politician – in that order” it sounds more like a judgment than a description. Yet, little of that domestic criticism seemed to trickle through the borders of the Republic, and so the discrepancy between the international appreciation and the domestic disenchantment grew. Disenchantment is a good word. It was not Havel that changed. It was the Czechs who changed their expectations. He enchanted them with his charisma, his life-story and charm. And they (many of them) later did everything, to escape and deny that enchantment, as if they were ashamed of it. Inarguably, they owe him a lot. And so do the other nations in the region, because to our luck it was him and not any other former oppositionist that became the face of Central Europe in the early 1990s.
Havel appeared in Czechoslovakia’s public life in the 1960s as a writer – a young, avant-garde playwright. He was a declassed bourgeois, a descendant of a great Prague family. His grandfather – Vácslav Havel – was an architect, a leading representative of Czech modernism. His uncle Miloš established the famous film studios on the Barrandov hills. The father, Václav M. Havel, a friend of Masaryk’s, apart from building houses was also building institutions – the Czech Rotary and YMCA. If for the Czechoslovak Communist Party there ever was an . . .
Read more: Citizen Havel Leaves
By Hana Cervinkova, December 21st, 2011 
While I cannot claim the privilege to have been one of Václav Havel’s friends, he loomed large in my life, first in my teenage years when I was coming of age in Communist Czechoslovakia and later through my extended sojourns abroad – in the United States and now in Poland. Václav Havel is profoundly irreplaceable. Together with millions of other Czechs, I owe him my freedom.
The season’s first snow was falling heavily last Sunday afternoon when I was making my way to Wrocław along winding, mountainous roads returning from my family house on the Czech side of the border. The going was very slow as the line of cars, mostly with Polish tags, headed back toward Poland after spending a weekend in the Czech mountains. My small son was sleeping in the back seat. In the quiet of the ride, I listened to Václav Havel’s voice recorded five years prior when he spoke on Czech National Radio about the place theater held in his life. Czech radio stations were responding to the news of the former President’s death with rebroadcasts of past interviews, as if they wanted to extend his presence among us.
In this moment of deep sadness when time seemed to have stopped altogether, my thoughts turned back to an important moment in my childhood. I must have been eleven when I decided to take part in a school recitation competition. To help me prepare, my mother taught me a poem by the Czech Nobel Prize laureate, Jaroslav Seifert. In the poem, Seifert commemorated the day when the first Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garyk Masaryk died. Masaryk, like Havel, died in early hours of the morning. The poem, which I still remember, is entitled, To kalné ráno – The Grey Morning. My mother read the poem out loud to me repeatedly until I knew the words by heart, stopping to take breaths before each softly sounding refrain: “Remember my child, that grey morning.” Thanks to Havel, I realize today that my mother’s choice of Seifert, . . .
Read more: What Václav Havel Meant to Me
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