For the first time I stood face to face with a public which tore at my heart. That beloved, dirty, piteous public in their striped uniforms, whose eyes, full of understanding, shone on me in place of spotlights. It was a sad pantomime I improvised that day.101
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iv liberation, victorious february, and what became of the avant-garde
brief window: 1945–1948 “Say what you will,” wrote Milan Kundera of the period after 1945, “the Communists were more intelligent. They had a grandiose programme, a plan for a brand-new world in which everyone would find his place.”102 When in 1945, in a deal between Stalin and the Western powers, the Red Army liberated Czechoslovakia by advancing from the east,* the Communist politicians, led by Klement Gottwald, came back from Moscow with high aspirations and the knowledge that they had an obedient and lethal network on the ground. President Beneš and the government-in-exile, on the other hand, returned from London bruised and exhausted by their struggle to get Czechoslovakia’s rights recognised by the allied powers. Beneš entered his country from the East, via Moscow, in the wake of the Red Army, and for several months the government sat in Košice in eastern Slovakia. Fearful still of the German presence in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (and under pressure from Moscow), Beneš obtained Western approval for laws ordering the expulsion of the historic German-speaking population.† Czechoslovakia had not suffered bombing raids like those in Germany, nor was her capital city razed to the ground as in Poland. Nevertheless, the war had been brutal. Armed (and unarmed) resistance had been crushed early on. Blood-red posters listing the names of those executed were regularly * †
American troops could have liberated Prague from the west, but were under orders to stop at Pilsen. Over a hundred acts passed by the government-in-exile and in Košice became known as the “Beneš Decrees,” although the term is often applied only to the acts on the German expulsions. The decrees were approved by parliament when it regathered on the significant anniversary of 28 October 1945.
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pasted up around Prague. In retreat, the German soldiers took their revenge on Czech civilians, including children. In retaliation, stray Germans and collaborators were caught and lynched by the Czechs. The Soviet liberators, meanwhile, had their own lists and abducted members of Russian families who had settled in Prague in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as selected Czechs and thousands of Slovaks.* Most notorious of all were the “wild expulsions” of German-speaking inhabitants between May and August 1945, carried out by the local authorities, police, and zealous volunteers with the complicity of the higher authorities. After the Potsdam Conference the expulsions were carried out under the aegis of the Allies, but still in conditions of immense deprivation, violation, and suffering.103 The brutality of war was carried over into peacetime. Beneš was anxious to conciliate the meft, and through them the USSR. Right-wing parties were banned—not simply the far right, but centre right parties such as the Agrarians, an important force in the First Republic. The Beneš Decrees included a Nationalisation Act that came into effect in October 1945, confiscating without compensation all businesses with over five hundred employees. The theatres had been nationalised even earlier; whereas, after World War I, the cultured, intelligent, and wise Jaroslav Kvapil had been appointed head of the Ministry of Education and Culture, in April 1945 President Beneš appointed the no less cultured and intelligent, but unfortunately not very wise, Zdeněk Nejedlý (who had spent the war in the Soviet Union). One of his first actions (June 1945) was to cancel all the licences and permits granted to private entrepreneurs and impresarios and take the theatre as a whole under his own control.† The Communists were riding high, and in the 1946 elections won 38 per cent of the vote. It entitled them to some of the key ministries—fatefully, the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of the Interior. The theatres were already in a critical condition; ordered to reopen two days after the liberation in May, they had to rethink their purpose and their repertoire, until now determined by wartime conditions. Morover, Nejedlý’s abrupt withdrawal of concessions from private theatres left many actors and technical staff unemployed. One rich current of theatre life was gone forever: the German-language theatre. Dominant until the late nineteenth century, it had been pushed into second place by demographic and cultural changes. Back in November 1920, a band of Czech nationalists had forcibly taken over *
†
The Soviets had lost millions of young men and needed to replenish their labour force. Technically, Slovakia had been an enemy country, so they could justify exporting entire villages of able-bodied males to fill the gap. Many of them never returned from the Gulag. Jindřich Černý points out that although Nejedly’s action had no legal basis, it was not challenged in the courts.
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