Bruce Garver speaks at Prague Spring 50

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04/11/2018 Added

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Bruce Garver gives the talk "A Czech-Speaking American Historian Views the Prague Spring in Historical Perspective" at Prague Spring 50. https://praguespring50.unl.edu/speakers#bruce-garver

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[00:00:10.950]Wow thank you for the introduction.
[00:00:12.330]I'm pleased to be here.
[00:00:15.349](speaks in foreign language)
[00:00:33.630]Just wanted to welcome Czech colleagues
[00:00:35.830]here from somebody who's lived in Nebraska,
[00:00:39.140]not long enough to be a true Nebraskan,
[00:00:41.670]as I said I was only hear for 41 years
[00:00:43.530]and seven months, that doesn't quite do it.
[00:00:47.090]You have to be born here to be a true Nebraskan I think.
[00:00:49.860]But anyway, glad to be here.
[00:00:53.520]I did want to run through before I talk,
[00:00:57.630]rather than interrupt the talk with some pictures, just
[00:01:00.310]to give you a little sense of what some people look like.
[00:01:02.830]I have many friends I'd like to
[00:01:05.020]feature more but time is limited.
[00:01:07.880]First I'd like those of the young people in the audience
[00:01:11.140]to know that I was once young myself.
[00:01:14.520]It's been quite a while, but this is mid-November 1967,
[00:01:20.050]my wife Karen and I are atop the famous bridge
[00:01:24.520]built by the Turks in the 16th Century
[00:01:27.810]over the Neretva River in Mostar.
[00:01:31.780]Some of you will know that the Serbs during the Civil War
[00:01:34.750]of 1993 in Yugoslavia demolished the bridge
[00:01:38.930]and thanks to UNESCO funds it was reconstructed in 2004.
[00:01:44.530]I do wanna give some sense of what I remember
[00:01:47.970]of Czechoslovakia and maybe a little bit
[00:01:50.090]of the United States of 50, 51 years ago
[00:01:53.820]is in many cases not the same way I look back on it
[00:01:58.470]and try to understand it today.
[00:02:00.540]That's come out in some of the interesting
[00:02:02.580]talks that we've all heard already.
[00:02:06.000]But who would have though when we were there in 67,
[00:02:10.310]in spite of the many tensions inside of communist Yugoslavia
[00:02:14.090]that it would blow apart in the early 1990s.
[00:02:21.860]My wife earned a Ph.D. in history too.
[00:02:23.680]We were both Ph.D. students, she earned a Ph.D
[00:02:26.470]in history at UCLA in French History.
[00:02:29.130]Our son in the picture is today the Associate Professor
[00:02:36.170]of English at Butler University.
[00:02:37.530]He'll be the Department Chairperson next year
[00:02:39.427]and he specializes in 20th Century British literature.
[00:02:43.040]Our daughter is also a scholar, well-published scholar,
[00:02:46.950]Valerie Garber in early Medieval Europe,
[00:02:51.240]especially the Carolingian Empire.
[00:02:56.730]Let's just quickly pop through the pictures.
[00:03:01.100]Like every student tourist in former Czechoslovakia
[00:03:06.400]we visited among other things, castle ruins.
[00:03:10.460]Here a Yale classmate of mine, Bill Weary and I
[00:03:14.920]are as far as were then allowed to climb on Hazmburk,
[00:03:20.300]the magnificent gothic castle ruin,
[00:03:23.160]in Zahrada Czech, the garden of Bohemia.
[00:03:28.750]My wook took the picture, it was a little circuitous
[00:03:33.630]to haul our son up in a backpack so we didn't do it
[00:03:38.720]and of course this has had great associations to me
[00:03:42.940]with the poet Karl Hynek Macha who wrote
[00:03:48.620]the famous poem, Svaty Hanzburk.
[00:03:52.370]Please the next quickly.
[00:03:55.320]Another fascinating aspect of being
[00:03:57.410]in old communist Czechoslovakia, it was a virtual in 1967,
[00:04:02.760]it was a truly open air, transport
[00:04:07.660]museum of immense size and interest.
[00:04:11.540]I taught Transport History at UNO for years,
[00:04:13.750]that was was always a popular course
[00:04:16.440]and was fascinated by everything that was on the street.
[00:04:19.840]The communists had just relaxed confiscatory taxes
[00:04:23.820]on private automobiles and a lot of them were coming out
[00:04:26.710]of storage since the legislation
[00:04:29.910]had been passed back in 48, or 49.
[00:04:32.660]This is a Tatra 87, some of you will recognize
[00:04:37.120]Tatra introduced the air-cooled rear engine
[00:04:40.660]to automotive world in 1928, aerodynamic design
[00:04:45.300]came as early as 1932, and I mention this because my mentor,
[00:04:51.402]the man who inspired me to study Czech history,
[00:04:53.280]S. Harrison Thomson at the University of Colorado
[00:04:55.620]as I shall relate, owned a Tatra 87.
[00:05:00.150]He performed his own repairs on it.
[00:05:02.070]This was in the late 50s, early 60s
[00:05:04.000]when I was an undergraduate at Colorado
[00:05:05.980]with parts he ordered from Czechoslovakia.
[00:05:10.400]So that car has great meaning.
[00:05:12.180]We students at Colorado in those days used to call it
[00:05:14.430]the bat mobile and it does resemble that.
[00:05:20.970]We often got together with colleagues,
[00:05:22.590]I'll talk about Jusuf Spoor, in 1967
[00:05:29.350]this photo dates from 71 when we were back,
[00:05:32.930]or I was back, my wife wasn't back in 71,
[00:05:37.250]and these are some of the people we knew there.
[00:05:41.030]Historians some of you may know of, modern Romanian
[00:05:43.490]Miroslav Tychmann, I'll say more about him,
[00:05:45.660]his first wife Renata, my sister-in-law,
[00:05:50.720]Libby Goss, I'm, if you can recognize me
[00:05:56.470]the young guy who's standing next to sister-in-law Libby,
[00:06:00.600]then Miroslav Tychmann Sr., who was the sexton
[00:06:04.360]of the church, Miroslaw the scholar's father, and Aldo Vitt,
[00:06:07.687]who was that time a divinity student studying
[00:06:11.140]for the priesthood in the Czechoslovak Church.
[00:06:16.120]More about these people later, I had come in with,
[00:06:20.510]brought in my brother-in-law and sister-in-law
[00:06:23.230]because I was serving as his translator
[00:06:25.890]at the Czech Radio Observatory.
[00:06:28.080]He's one of the first specialists, world specialists
[00:06:31.200]in radio astronomy, and he's now writing
[00:06:33.430]a history of it and retired several years ago
[00:06:35.963]as the head of the very large array in New Mexico.
[00:06:43.770]Once back with friends we had made at
[00:06:46.304](speaks foreign language),
[00:06:47.380]the Czechoslovak church in Prague, I was introduced
[00:06:52.520]to several couples who had fled
[00:06:55.164]to Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion.
[00:06:57.260]Didn't know them there, but my wife and I sponsored them
[00:07:01.310]and if they had a sponsor and a job,
[00:07:03.060]which we obtained through a good friend of the church
[00:07:05.450]who was a manager of iron foundry in Bedford, Connecticut,
[00:07:08.400]we brought them in; one couple Karl Klapp and Vera
[00:07:13.300]nee Krakokvil, Krakokvilova Klapp, had their
[00:07:18.150]young son Pavel baptized in our church
[00:07:22.500]shortly after their arrival in 1969.
[00:07:26.530]My wife's standing alongside them as the Godmother.
[00:07:30.360]This is on Center Church on the Green in New Haven.
[00:07:38.970]I'll make a quick contrast with what I remember
[00:07:42.180]of the turbulent 1960s in the service of the U.S. Navy
[00:07:45.940]and then in one of the great social experiments
[00:07:53.030]of the Johnson administration,
[00:07:54.950]the model cities, in Florence Virtue homes.
[00:07:59.570]I should perhaps just say quickly a word about it here,
[00:08:02.400]it was over a hundred units, designed by architect Johnson
[00:08:07.320]in Stamford, Connecticut, a very noted modern architect,
[00:08:11.790]garden apartments into integrated the black,
[00:08:15.493]predominately black Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church,
[00:08:19.830]recruited Yale graduate students to live there.
[00:08:23.248]There was a down payment of $300
[00:08:26.350]you bought a share in the cooperative
[00:08:27.750]and the rent was like, we ended up with a three bedroom
[00:08:33.460]apartment after we came back from Czechoslovakia
[00:08:37.690]the second time in 73 which was only $125 a month
[00:08:42.237]and we laughed when we went over income
[00:08:44.470]and bought a small house in North Haven, Connecticut.
[00:08:47.550]But there's my wife and the same little boy now
[00:08:50.750]moving on his own, still the same snowsuit
[00:08:53.320]you can see he's pretty well outgrown it,
[00:08:54.930]we were frugal back in those days.
[00:08:57.240]This picture was actually at The New Haven Register
[00:09:01.140]when they were touting the integrated housing project.
[00:09:04.670]That not did turn out in the end
[00:09:06.670]as well as the Johnson administration
[00:09:09.230]and the Mayor Lee administration in New Haven had hoped.
[00:09:13.170]Like a lot of events in the 60s what happened
[00:09:16.330]was different than what a lot of us hoped
[00:09:18.748]would happen and tried to make happen.
[00:09:22.231]Next one.
[00:09:24.740]Joe Svoboda, I'll mention him, here's his picture,
[00:09:28.203]a very nice picture of Joe interviewing
[00:09:31.430]for the Czech Heritage Collection that he founded,
[00:09:34.870]this is 1976, he's interviewing Anton Piskac,
[00:09:40.850]the leading publisher of Czech language material
[00:09:44.810]in Omaha during most of the 20th Century.
[00:09:48.610]I'll have, if time permits, perhaps
[00:09:50.800]a few more words about both of them later.
[00:09:53.260]But Joe is one of the two people to whom I shall,
[00:09:56.200]or I have dedicated that will come out
[00:09:58.998]sometime between December and March of next year,
[00:10:02.490]December of this year, March of next year.
[00:10:05.450]I met both of these people within weeks of arriving
[00:10:08.270]in Nebraska and valued their friendship.
[00:10:12.410]In fact when my wife and I were looking for a family
[00:10:15.160]physician, and sure enough was the name Anton Piskac.
[00:10:21.154]So I said, must be a relative, I called him up
[00:10:22.417]and sure enough he was the grandson
[00:10:25.300]of the Anton Piskac I knew and until he retired a few
[00:10:30.670]years ago he was my wife's and my personal physician.
[00:10:33.640]So you see, if you'll remember the famous words,
[00:10:36.650]I think it's it's Lieutenant Lukas
[00:10:38.070]in The Good Soldier Svejk, being Czech
[00:10:40.140]is like being a member of a secret society.
[00:10:42.980]One of the famous cliches, now cliches in that book.
[00:10:49.847]The Czech Cultural Club of Omaha, I was welcomed into that
[00:10:52.530]right away, still there were many immigrants,
[00:10:55.920]this is 1976, many immigrants,
[00:11:00.140]and children of immigrants who's Czech was excellent.
[00:11:05.450]It was a great club; it still is a great club
[00:11:07.500]and I've been a member now 41 and half years
[00:11:11.700]and served twice as a past President.
[00:11:15.540]Here we're at the former Bohemian Cafe of Omaha
[00:11:17.940]at Christmas in 1979, Frank Smirz on the far right
[00:11:24.070]translated American popular songs, Christmas carols
[00:11:27.920]into Czech as well as leading us in the singing
[00:11:30.250]of Czech songs and wrote the songbook for the club.
[00:11:34.280]Coming to this was like going back to my wife's
[00:11:38.430]and my student days in communist Czechoslovakia.
[00:11:42.690]The same camaraderie, the fellowship,
[00:11:46.460]the singing of songs, Czech folk songs,
[00:11:50.640]more of the modern popular music in Czechoslovakia
[00:11:54.700]than in the United States where the rerpetoire
[00:11:57.780]was largely late 19th Century,
[00:12:00.840]the songs of parents and grandparents.
[00:12:06.540]One of the members was a legionnaire in World War I
[00:12:10.187]and this will remind I do want
[00:12:11.790]to briefly in my talk mention 1918.
[00:12:16.600]But this Joe Schlenich gave a long lecture in Czech
[00:12:21.440]on his experiences as a Czechoslovak Legionnaire
[00:12:23.270]in Siberia to the Omaha community.
[00:12:27.745]We had a great turnout, March 1977.
[00:12:32.430]Joe was a great guy and he told us about his journey
[00:12:40.230]and then Joe Svoboda went back and interviewed
[00:12:42.260]him four times, really his life story
[00:12:45.310]and it's fascinating, for those of you who know Czech,
[00:12:47.480]you can read it here in our magnificent Czech collection
[00:12:52.189]among the more than 55 tapes that Joe made
[00:12:56.430]of reminisces of early Nebraska Czech settlers.
[00:13:02.970]We had occasion here at UNL to invite scholars back twice
[00:13:09.290]from the Czech Republic, once for a conference
[00:13:13.830]on human rights in 1992, and again this conference
[00:13:19.410]also that year Joe Svoboda and I organized
[00:13:24.140]of the Czech-American experience which led
[00:13:27.810]to publication of a double issue of Nebraska History,
[00:13:31.830]with that title now online and available to everyone.
[00:13:37.500]Another group I encountered and I'll explain how
[00:13:39.650]this happened fortuitously was the famous
[00:13:42.974](speaks foreign language),
[00:13:45.167]and this occurred in the Fall of 1990
[00:13:47.440]and I'll talk about that later, great fellowship group.
[00:13:50.550]My wife and I were most recently back
[00:13:52.330]at a meeting of bonako in May of 2013.
[00:13:57.970]Alas like so many of the people I'll mention in the talk
[00:14:02.850]most of these people are no longer with us in this world.
[00:14:10.440]I was honored in early October of 1990
[00:14:17.150]in being inducted as a honorary member of bonako
[00:14:22.310]along with Frantisek Dolstal here.
[00:14:27.810]This is a couple of years later after we became
[00:14:30.820]honorary members, he's the author of a number
[00:14:32.840]of illustrated books with his own photographs
[00:14:36.110]and commentary, for example (speaks Czech)
[00:14:39.414]is one of the books, the other two of the four
[00:14:43.550]inductees were much to my great pleasure
[00:14:49.170]Jiri Suchy, I think he needs no introduction
[00:14:54.650]to the speakers of Czech in the audience,
[00:14:57.900]but one the principals, in fact the principal
[00:15:02.590]founder and advocate of the Semafor,
[00:15:05.525]Sedm Malych Forem in Prague, and then grand old man
[00:15:12.300]of Czechoslovak boy scouts, Jaroslav Foglar.
[00:15:18.140]As a really active scout myself, through my
[00:15:25.584]early adolescence, I was really glad to make
[00:15:30.620]his acquaintance, actually more than his acquaintance.
[00:15:34.330]So, one last one, I went back frequently,
[00:15:38.580]I was back almost every year in the Czechoslovakia,
[00:15:41.860]then became the Czech Republic in the early mid 90s
[00:15:45.200]and I would always bring back, in this case I brought
[00:15:47.500]back a series of art prints from the Joslyn Art Museum
[00:15:51.460]and distributed them to the bonako members.
[00:15:55.970]Okay, that's just a sample of what things used to look like.
[00:16:02.130]Now, shut it down, unless you wanna keep that handsome
[00:16:08.604]Joe Joslyn photo up on the screen, that's fine.
[00:16:15.700]Let me first address the question that puzzled most Czechs:
[00:16:22.450]why an American would show up, an American without
[00:16:28.900]any Czech ancestors, and I recently had my Y-DNA tested,
[00:16:32.790]out of 4,200 markers, only five show up
[00:16:36.540]in Bohemia and they're probably Germans.
[00:16:43.730]Why someone would be have learned Czech?
[00:16:46.470]Which I had learned fairly well at Yale
[00:16:48.100]in two years of intensive study,
[00:16:50.770]would come over to Czechoslovakia?
[00:16:53.000]That puzzled people.
[00:16:56.413](speaks foreign language)
[00:17:02.930]It was really necessary in those days in Czechoslovakia
[00:17:06.010]to think like a secret policeman because those
[00:17:10.020]were our Cold War adversaries.
[00:17:13.410]And certainly when they saw a Czech speaking American
[00:17:18.130]with no Czech ancestors come over (speaks foreign language).
[00:17:53.050]It was perfect cover for the secret policeman's mentality
[00:17:57.130]for Yale to send over a CIA agent
[00:18:03.240]with a wife and a small baby, but of course
[00:18:09.150]the truth is not that, because I never worked for
[00:18:13.073]or ever wanted to work for the CIA.
[00:18:19.427]But I think the closest and most concise explanation
[00:18:23.130]I ever heard of why I studied Czech,
[00:18:27.930]was from another one of my advisors
[00:18:32.057](speaks foreign language),
[00:18:34.860]in communist Czechoslovakia in 67, Milan Svanckovich,
[00:18:40.320]specialist in Russian history.
[00:18:44.610]Milan, (speaks foreign language),
[00:19:02.612]he said any American who learns, he
[00:19:05.933](speaks foreign language),
[00:19:13.740]Bruce you're crazy man, any American who learns Czech
[00:19:18.340]is like a Czech who learns Estonian.
[00:19:23.618]Estonian's spoken by slightly more than a million figure,
[00:19:26.530]now when Milan Swanchovich mentioned this he had no idea
[00:19:29.770]that my ancestry is heavily Finnish, which of course
[00:19:33.370]is close relatives of the linguistic, DNA relatives
[00:19:38.490]of the Estonians across the Gulf of Finland.
[00:19:43.600]But that's probably the best explanation
[00:19:46.320]but it is truly more complicated than that
[00:19:48.060]and here I would like to give a small commercial
[00:19:50.950]to the younger people I see in the audience
[00:19:55.660]about the importance of studying foreign languages.
[00:20:00.080]I studied Czech for two years at Yale; I'd actually
[00:20:03.330]been a French major until I became a History major
[00:20:06.130]at Colorado but let me go back to start
[00:20:11.250]the languages very, very quickly.
[00:20:13.700]And to high school, when I realized and so did my parents
[00:20:18.880]that to gain admission to a good university I would need
[00:20:21.690]to have in those days at least a high school language
[00:20:27.370]on my record, and our local high school had
[00:20:30.267]a choice of Latin, French, or Spanish and I chose French.
[00:20:34.960]I was very lucky to have had an extraordinarily fine
[00:20:38.750]teacher, this is also an argument to support your public
[00:20:42.740]schools and pay the taxes necessary to see that
[00:20:45.430]the younger generation in this country has at least
[00:20:50.010]the same opportunities that their grandparents,
[00:20:52.940]my generation had and their parents had.
[00:20:58.674]Miss Fry, she was then a woman in her early 40's,
[00:21:05.530]very, very strict, now I grew up hard for young people
[00:21:09.510]to believe in an era when self-esteem was a concept
[00:21:13.230]so far as I know had not yet been invented
[00:21:16.490]and in fact I never had about it until I was into middle age
[00:21:20.500]by which time it was too late to
[00:21:22.520]have had any influence on my development.
[00:21:25.740]But Miss Fry insisted that everybody did their lesson,
[00:21:28.450]every day, very important in the study
[00:21:29.960]of foreign language, you don't dare fall behind.
[00:21:34.357]And Miss Fry's technique was if you didn't know the answer
[00:21:37.010]to one of her questions, hadn't studied the assignment,
[00:21:40.650]she didn't pass on to another student,
[00:21:42.450]she asked you another question, and then another question,
[00:21:46.150]and then another question, while I watched this technique
[00:21:49.440]in the second day of class and she reduced my good friend
[00:21:55.020]Tommy Joseph to tears, and I remember thinking silently
[00:22:01.080]to myself, now Tommy Joseph was the first string guard
[00:22:03.640]on the Worthington High School football team,
[00:22:05.510]I was the second string guard,
[00:22:06.720]he was a tougher better football player than I was
[00:22:09.860]and I wasn't bad, and I remember saying to myself
[00:22:14.490]that woman will never do that to me.
[00:22:19.370]So I really did of course what she wanted
[00:22:22.060]which was to learn my lessons very well though I had not
[00:22:24.880]I confess been my original intention.
[00:22:28.490]The other great bonus of learning French so well
[00:22:33.170]was the fact that I learned English grammar
[00:22:35.460]for the first time; I discovered that English grammar
[00:22:38.850]had a logic and it had a fascination to it
[00:22:42.300]and before I had to diagram sentences and memorize
[00:22:46.210]parts of vocabulary which I found dreadfully dull,
[00:22:50.260]and since I could get A's in English without learning
[00:22:53.930]all that stuff I didn't try very hard.
[00:22:56.040]I was not a very good student in that respect.
[00:23:01.010]But suddenly the scales fell from
[00:23:02.620]my eyes and a whole new world opened
[00:23:05.210]and I really learned French well.
[00:23:07.550]I don't think I ever got better than
[00:23:09.694]a B plus but I really learned it well.
[00:23:12.110]And I remember going home that we students used
[00:23:13.980]to call Miss Fry the old battle-ax.
[00:23:17.601]And I remember going home once and grumbling to my mother
[00:23:19.970]after she humiliated another classmate one day,
[00:23:24.310]saying: that Miss Fry's an old battle-ax.
[00:23:26.700]Well my mother got on my case right away
[00:23:29.470]and said: you don't go around calling any adult
[00:23:31.960]those names, you don't walk in their shoes.
[00:23:35.460]And she said, and my mother knew Miss Fry socially,
[00:23:39.690]my mother said: besides she lost her boyfriend in the war
[00:23:44.490]and there in the mid-50s the war meant World War II.
[00:23:49.240]So after that I did look at Miss Fry in an entirely
[00:23:52.000]new light and I dropped the old battle-ax reference.
[00:23:57.070]But she was a great teacher, I went back to her 10 years
[00:23:59.130]after I graduated from high school and thanked her,
[00:24:02.810]by time she was getting ready to retire, saying:
[00:24:04.830]my methods of teaching are no longer acceptable.
[00:24:08.200]The parents and school board won't put up
[00:24:10.510]with them, which was sort of too bad.
[00:24:13.170]Well I went on, Colorado, I met S. Harrison Thomson;
[00:24:17.480]he was the inspiration to me to study modern Czech history.
[00:24:22.600]Some of you as old as I am or maybe a couple
[00:24:25.520]of people here in the audience older
[00:24:27.480]will remember the name S. Harrison Thomson.
[00:24:30.730]I was a French major at Colorado; I was
[00:24:32.930]in advanced composition, conversation my sophomore year,
[00:24:36.400]and teacher Madame Jannene Ochs, asked me and she said:
[00:24:42.100]have you ever taken a class from Professor
[00:24:45.500]S. Harrison Thomson, I said: well no I have not.
[00:24:48.170]She said: well you really should
[00:24:49.340]he's the best professor on campus.
[00:24:53.050]So I immediately went over to the student bookstore
[00:24:55.920]at the university, looked up the reading list,
[00:24:59.530]and lo and behold one of the books was
[00:25:01.960]S. Harrison Thomson, Czechoslovakia in European History,
[00:25:05.950]the Second Edition, so I thought this man's got
[00:25:12.180]a book at Princeton and in the second edition,
[00:25:14.220]and I leafed through it and it looked very interesting.
[00:25:17.150]So I signed up and I became a History major
[00:25:21.350]with a French minor.
[00:25:26.090]Thomson was an extraordinary man, I said he drove
[00:25:28.180]the Tatra 87, did his own repairs on it.
[00:25:31.710]He delighted in brilliant half-truths.
[00:25:35.870]Something I don't think I have the wit or the talent
[00:25:39.590]as an actor to pull off; I always can see, or visualize
[00:25:44.430]my students scribbling down a half-truth
[00:25:47.900]however clever and then thinking perhaps a day,
[00:25:52.080]or a year, or five years later, that
[00:25:55.080]was the gospel truth which of course it isn't.
[00:25:57.940]But Thomson delighted in these.
[00:26:00.450]The first day of class, I still remember, he asked
[00:26:02.890]our class, this is the Fall of 1958 alright,
[00:26:06.740]he said: why have the Germans been
[00:26:08.590]such bad actors in our century?
[00:26:12.960]Now to me, 13 years as a teenager had been an eternity,
[00:26:18.900]practically my whole conscious life,
[00:26:22.300]and I didn't pop up with an answer, nor did anybody else,
[00:26:28.050]and then Professor Thomson said: oh that's very easy
[00:26:31.480]to answer, of course it isn't, German history's
[00:26:33.980]very complicated, I won't go into that
[00:26:36.580]but all know that that's the case.
[00:26:41.080]And finally when no student responded he answered his
[00:26:44.100]own question, he said that's easy, he said:
[00:26:47.557]in the 19th Century all the decent Germans
[00:26:51.320]moved to the United States, now having had a German
[00:26:57.710]great-grandfather who came with eight siblings and parents,
[00:27:02.560]and a niece and a nephew or two, to Ohio
[00:27:08.840]in the mid-1850s I was somewhat flattered.
[00:27:13.690]Buy anyway, this was Professor Thomson.
[00:27:16.380]He called each student in for an individual interview
[00:27:18.380]and I remember he asked me, he asked this
[00:27:20.580]to every student I discovered later,
[00:27:22.560]what foreign languages do you know?
[00:27:24.110]Well I was a French major and I thought I was pretty good
[00:27:26.670]so I spoke back to him in French and explained to him
[00:27:29.812]that I had learned French, and I suppose
[00:27:36.740]I even looked slightly pleased with myself,
[00:27:38.870]which I probably shouldn't have done.
[00:27:41.302]And I still remember he said, he said:
[00:27:43.380]you've been here two years already
[00:27:46.640]and you haven't studied German?
[00:27:49.552]And I said: no.
[00:27:51.480]He said, well, another half-truth, Germans
[00:27:54.910]have written more history than anybody else;
[00:27:57.890]English far surpasses German in that department;
[00:28:00.770]Russian probably equals it.
[00:28:04.240]He said: now most of it's wrong-headed
[00:28:07.850]but you've got to read it anyway,
[00:28:08.970]you've got to understand it, and you need to know German
[00:28:12.130]and if I were you, you're wasting your parent's money,
[00:28:14.770]it turned out it was the Navy's money
[00:28:16.080]'cause I was going there on a Naval ROTC scholarship,
[00:28:18.900]get right out there and study German.
[00:28:20.330]Well I was an impressionable young man and that's what I did
[00:28:22.620]I dropped Geography or something and I signed up for German
[00:28:26.360]and I've never regretted it; so there was a second language.
[00:28:30.690]In the Navy, as an officer I studied Italian,
[00:28:34.940]I hoped to get a posting to Naples that way,
[00:28:38.560]but I met my wife I think while I was in the Navy
[00:28:41.390]in Southern California, married her, and then I asked
[00:28:44.522]my second station to be on a ship in Long Beach,
[00:28:48.380]so I could be near her when she
[00:28:49.750]started graduate school at UCLA.
[00:28:53.110]But I never forgot the Italian and I went back and picked
[00:28:55.230]it up later and I taught Italian history,
[00:28:58.010]and Italian history through film and literature
[00:29:00.820]at UNO for most of the early part of the 20th Century.
[00:29:08.560]One language leads to another.
[00:29:10.910]I think Miss Fry gave me the confidence I could learn
[00:29:13.690]a language and it had never dawned on me
[00:29:15.870]that I ever had the ability and once I got the desire
[00:29:19.272]I knew that I could learn a language if I slogged through
[00:29:22.290]it, patiently, and of course got lot of help.
[00:29:27.710]Well, at Yale of course I was very fortunate
[00:29:32.260]because Yale in those days, it still is,
[00:29:34.040]but especially in those days was a great center
[00:29:36.050]for Czech as well as Slavic studies.
[00:29:41.030]Peter Demetz was one of my advisors, all of you know,
[00:29:44.240]most of you know his book: Prague in Gold and Black.
[00:29:49.930]Marx, Engels und die Dichter, another book
[00:29:52.520]he was a Professor of German but he also grew up
[00:29:56.540]as a young man in the 30s and early 40s in Bohemia
[00:30:03.210]and knew the language and the culture well.
[00:30:06.180]His first, Hanna Demetz was my Czech language instructor,
[00:30:11.410]first year Czech at Yale and she was also as many
[00:30:16.700]of you know, a very talented novelist,
[00:30:21.360]Meine Amerikanische Tochter was the first book;
[00:30:23.930]I think that's been translated, My American Daughter,
[00:30:26.850]but probably most famous for those of us interested
[00:30:29.530]in Czech history, the author of The House on Prague Street.
[00:30:38.400]Well five of us first year Czech at Yale,
[00:30:41.690]all of us graduate students, three of us finished,
[00:30:47.340]but Yale was flush with money in those days
[00:30:50.650]and for the three of us to continue
[00:30:52.640]in second year Czech hired Azvenkha Popisholova,
[00:30:57.300]Professor of Art History at Southern Connecticut State
[00:30:59.460]College to teach the course, so this was another wonderful
[00:31:03.960]thing about being at Yale, the attention
[00:31:08.100]and the help was forthcoming, of course
[00:31:10.650]a very demanding, very, very demanding
[00:31:15.470]curricula in all departments at Yale.
[00:31:20.440]And Yale got their money's worth I think because all three
[00:31:22.600]of the students became professors.
[00:31:25.380]I ended up in UNO in History, Billy Hamilton
[00:31:29.070]at SUNY Buffalo in Slavic Languages and Literatures,
[00:31:34.390]and Joe Lake, who grew up in Tyndall, South Dakota,
[00:31:37.150]just north of here, at the University of Massachusets
[00:31:40.170]as Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature.
[00:31:45.890]The other Czech faculty at Yale Renee Velick
[00:31:48.570]in the comparative literature, the Leopold Pospisil,
[00:31:56.710]Azhenka's husband, in anthropology.
[00:32:00.706]These people were present, plus there were others
[00:32:03.440]who knew Czech well, and speak Czech,
[00:32:05.710]Piotr Vanec, my dissertation advisor,
[00:32:08.990]serving the Polish army in the west during World War II
[00:32:13.900]and went on to a very, very distinguished career,
[00:32:17.880]six books on modern Polish history,
[00:32:21.340]including one general history of Poland.
[00:32:25.360]The Viktor Erlich in Slavic Linguistics, Viktor Erlich
[00:32:31.340]knew Czech obviously and other Slavic languages.
[00:32:39.182]The, and Karl Deutsch also on my dissertation committee,
[00:32:42.290]born in Bohemia, I came in to see him for the first time
[00:32:46.530]for an interview, I never took a course from him,
[00:32:48.540]but I'd read his books and he said: hey,
[00:32:50.787](speaks foreign language)
[00:32:53.223]You know right way and so I knew what that was,
[00:32:55.530]it was a slogan of the Sokols,
[00:32:57.915]Hail Sokols manfully onward, and he was a wonderful man,
[00:33:02.170]he left within a year, he went to Harvard,
[00:33:05.690]Harvard lured him away, but I had lots of encouragement.
[00:33:09.970]Jaroslav Pelikan was born in Chicago of Slovak parents,
[00:33:14.810]his father was a Slovak Lutheran minister,
[00:33:17.100]and Jaroslav Pelikan went on to write
[00:33:19.908]the first comprehensive history of Christian doctrines
[00:33:22.460]since Adolf von Harnack's Dogmengeschichte
[00:33:25.520]appeared in the earlier 20th Century.
[00:33:29.390]So I was instrumental in getting Jaroslav Pelikan
[00:33:33.140]out to receive an honorary doctorate from UNO
[00:33:35.820]back in the early 80s along with another former student
[00:33:39.700]of his at UNO, the late Ron Burk,
[00:33:42.100]then in the Philosophy department.
[00:33:45.220]So this was a wonderful place to be at Yale.
[00:33:49.420]So off we went to communist Czechoslovakia.
[00:33:56.010]Let me go back very quickly to my first impressions;
[00:33:59.160]they're indelible of the place.
[00:34:03.180]Now I'd been inspired by Thomson and I didn't expect
[00:34:07.330]to find Hussites, and I certainly didn't,
[00:34:11.760]but the early impressions are roughly these:
[00:34:18.640]I was struck immediately by the utter squalor
[00:34:23.400]in public places, filth, dirt, apartment stairwells,
[00:34:29.520]restrooms, even parks were not tidily managed.
[00:34:35.520]And then the contrast to this, I went inside of modest
[00:34:39.320]apartments, even in panelaky, the pre-fab,
[00:34:44.330]concrete, high-rise apartment buildings,
[00:34:47.140]and I found a clean, not well-furnished,
[00:34:51.770]but a clean, warm, welcoming atmosphere.
[00:34:56.630]And of course immediately I was struck by the contrast;
[00:35:00.090]this was quite the opposite of what communism was supposed
[00:35:02.960]to produce, it was supposed to produce care
[00:35:05.250]for that which is we have in common
[00:35:08.140]and less emphasis upon that which we have as individuals.
[00:35:11.610]But just the opposite and I never lost that impression.
[00:35:16.720]In fact I was so used to it when I went back after
[00:35:20.370]a 17 year absence, almost 17 year absence in 1990,
[00:35:25.800]in those days you could to this, I carried a small bottle
[00:35:29.070]of Clorox and other cleaning gear, I shipped it through
[00:35:33.220]in my suitcase and when I checked into the hvezda,
[00:35:37.310]the star, the student dormitory (speaks foreign language),
[00:35:42.939]on the west side of Prague, the first thing I did
[00:35:45.800]was strip down, turn on the shower, clean the restroom
[00:35:49.810]from floor to as far up the wall as I could go,
[00:35:55.820]with Clorox, left the apartment, opened the windows,
[00:36:00.050]went out for dinner with friends.
[00:36:03.690]Now that return produced another meeting
[00:36:06.620]with one of my fine student advisors
[00:36:09.970]in former communist Czechoslovakia Karl Pietlig,
[00:36:13.670]the Jarvis Charter 77 man who guided me through much
[00:36:19.100]of my dissertation work in early 20th Century Czech history.
[00:36:25.730]Well I had arranged with Karl Pietlich he said,
[00:36:27.820]first thing he said: I want you to come have breakfast
[00:36:30.290]with me on your first full day in Prague.
[00:36:34.540]He said: I will send the driver from the
[00:36:37.565](speaks foreign language)
[00:36:39.270]I'll spend the driver around to pick you up.
[00:36:41.100]Now Karl Pietlich was dismissed in early 69
[00:36:45.830]from the (speaks foreign language)
[00:36:48.499]where I knew him and other scholars
[00:36:50.890]for the brilliant book he wrote on
[00:36:56.734](speaks foreign language)
[00:37:07.590]his book on the struggle for Czechoslovakian
[00:37:13.070]independence abroad, 1914 to 1918.
[00:37:18.690]Well he was restored after the Velvet Revolution
[00:37:21.850]as the head of the (speaks foreign language),
[00:37:23.790]well he hadn't been the head but he became the head
[00:37:26.549]after the Velvet Revolution as talented,
[00:37:30.740]intelligent, independently-minded,
[00:37:34.020]at least to the degree anybody could be under
[00:37:36.460]Marx-Leninism, scholars were brought
[00:37:38.700]back into positions of authority.
[00:37:41.570]And guess who was driving the institute's automobile
[00:37:47.760]sent to pick me up, anybody wanna come up with this?
[00:37:54.210]Why the man who had fired him back in 1969, now
[00:37:59.174]it was characteristic of I would say the decency
[00:38:04.940]considering all that the communists had done
[00:38:07.574]that was vicious, stupid, and obnoxious to have brought
[00:38:13.340]back a colleague and not forced him into early retirement,
[00:38:17.520]vindictively, but brought him back to perform useful work
[00:38:20.720]at the institute, and this man, we had quite a bit
[00:38:24.280]in common, I'd mentioned that I'd been in the Navy
[00:38:27.320]and he said he'd been in the Army
[00:38:29.570]so we had military service in common
[00:38:31.890]and that was something to talk about in the drive
[00:38:34.260]to the institute, then Karl Pieklig and I went out
[00:38:36.630]to breakfast, I could go on with more Karl Pieklig stories
[00:38:41.760]but we always use to meet when I was back in Prague
[00:38:43.830]in the 90s, we meet at (speaks foreign language),
[00:38:49.755]that was our meeting place, great man.
[00:38:56.810]So now go back to perhaps to some other first impressions.
[00:39:02.810]So clearly I never entertained the notion that the Czechs
[00:39:06.760]are particularly unique, or extraordinarily heroic people.
[00:39:11.100]They are a tough people; they have had a history
[00:39:14.240]in common with small nations that is in many respects
[00:39:17.500]very admirable, but they have also torn each other
[00:39:20.940]to pieces, The Hussite Wars was a civil war among Czechs,
[00:39:26.040]the 30 Years War too, and of course the fighting
[00:39:32.520]in the 19th Century, Karl Sabina
[00:39:34.570]was an Austrian police informant,
[00:39:38.060]who wrote the librettos for Smetana's operas.
[00:39:42.570]So I did not idealize Czechs, although I hadn't expected
[00:39:47.320]communism to be quite as dirty and as incompetent,
[00:39:50.890]and stupid, and I could go on with
[00:39:53.300]some other adjectives but I won't, as I discovered it.
[00:39:58.030]Now the bright side was that Czechs still managed
[00:40:04.980]to create an attractive social life for themselves
[00:40:08.720]and one into which they welcomed my wife and me
[00:40:12.470]as foreigners, now it helped to have our young son Lee
[00:40:16.830]with us, everybody loves babies, toddlers,
[00:40:22.340]regardless of political outlook.
[00:40:27.440]But the first thing we did, we decided since we were
[00:40:31.500]regular churchgoers, we decided we'd show up
[00:40:36.680]at a church on Sunday morning, we did
[00:40:38.730]I think it was the second or third week into the country,
[00:40:43.410]and we picked a close by church that was famous,
[00:40:46.152](speaks foreign language), which had actually been the place
[00:40:49.520]as many of you probably know of the Roslaws,
[00:40:52.090]for the Czechoslovak Uprising against
[00:40:54.880]the Germans in May 1945, and we showed
[00:41:00.460]up there and we were welcomed.
[00:41:06.200]Now the problem was that we showed up with little Lee
[00:41:08.760]and they had no provision to take care of him
[00:41:10.630]but one of the older ladies in the congregation
[00:41:12.550]took him out into some room in the church
[00:41:15.140]and amused him while we sat through the service.
[00:41:20.450]Afterward I was introduced, there were no young people
[00:41:23.140]in the church, the church was people was older
[00:41:26.040]a lot older than we were, but the minister said:
[00:41:29.040]I'd like you to meet some of the youth
[00:41:30.550]and why don't you come to this address tonight,
[00:41:33.030]bring your wife, and your son, and meet some
[00:41:35.560]of the younger people and that I did.
[00:41:37.160]So I met the youth group that met outside of the church;
[00:41:40.810]now their public appearance as regular churchgoers
[00:41:45.300]or devout Christians something that was discouraged.
[00:41:52.660]But we met some wonderful people this way.
[00:41:54.127]And What immediately impressed me about this youth group;
[00:41:57.170]we met in the home of Vladimir and Eugzenia Kuzderowa,
[00:42:05.380]because Dara said they lived in an apartment with
[00:42:07.290]their mother, they just married, they ultimately
[00:42:10.260]had four children, they had a huge great dane,
[00:42:13.340]in a three room apartment, but it was cozy,
[00:42:16.750]and we crowded in and I was impressed
[00:42:20.470]by the way they worked together.
[00:42:22.460]They had officers; they had an agenda,
[00:42:25.210]they moved smoothly through it.
[00:42:27.070]They planned activities, we went on camping trips
[00:42:30.000]with them in the Sumava, and I thought
[00:42:33.034]these are great and normal people, and this of course
[00:42:37.810]what you didn't see as you looked at the dirt
[00:42:41.140]and the slime of the public face of socialism,
[00:42:45.890]which of course, the Czechs had
[00:42:48.720]socialism they were only building communism.
[00:42:51.070]The nirvana had not arrived.
[00:42:54.120]So these were these extraordinary contrasts
[00:42:57.000]that I mention, so I cannot say that when the stirrings
[00:43:01.180]of a different life began in 67
[00:43:05.820]that I was entirely surprised.
[00:43:07.370]We were there during the famous Writer's Conference
[00:43:09.770]of June in 1967 and there was a lot of excitement about this
[00:43:16.890]and ever so, particularly about Vaculik's speech there
[00:43:20.040]to the Writer's Conference which wasn't in the control
[00:43:23.520]of newspapers but was widely talked about.
[00:43:29.870]Then on the anniversary of Masaryk's death in 1937,
[00:43:35.100]the 30th anniversary, (speaks foreign language) published
[00:43:44.358]an article stating that not since Masaryk had anyone done
[00:43:50.270]any positive work toward resolving the Czech question
[00:43:54.370]or addressing constructively the future
[00:43:58.120]of the Czechs and Slovaks in Europe.
[00:44:03.100]So things were astir and I had agreed before we departed
[00:44:06.640]to write a paper and presentation for a celebration,
[00:44:09.768](speaks foreign language)
[00:44:14.886]The Historical Institute of the Philological Academy
[00:44:16.760]of Sciences, was planning for October 1968
[00:44:22.680]to celebrate 50 years of Czechoslovakian independence.
[00:44:25.650]I wrote about Czech politics in the 1890's,
[00:44:29.770]I sent it on time, which was mid-May,
[00:44:34.730]and was planning, I had airline tickets and everything
[00:44:38.440]to back to Prague and looking forward to visit
[00:44:41.478]in October, but of course the Soviet invasion
[00:44:43.220]came on the 20th of August of that year and you could not
[00:44:47.880]celebrate 50 years of Czechoslovakian
[00:44:49.790]independence under those circumstances.
[00:44:52.950]So I had to cancel the airline tickets, but the editors
[00:44:57.980]at the Historical Institute rushed into print
[00:45:01.490]every paper that they received for the anniversary in two
[00:45:04.790]volumes, hastily, but they put
[00:45:07.300]'em out and this was my first publication.
[00:45:10.590]Now it was per the work of a graduate student much in need
[00:45:14.650]of improvement but it was good to get it out in the public
[00:45:18.650]domain because I received criticism of it that helped me
[00:45:21.260]enormously when I wrote my dissertation on the Young Czech
[00:45:25.140]Party and then turned that into a book on the Young Czech
[00:45:28.160]Party and the emergence of a multi-party system.
[00:45:31.120]So that worked well; I sensed strong the disappointment
[00:45:35.220]that occurred, now other speakers have talked about it
[00:45:38.190]and others still will who know the situation better
[00:45:40.950]than I ever did about the experience with reform communism.
[00:45:47.300]At the time it was not altogether certain that it would fail
[00:45:51.300]as it did; I shared the hopes of many who thought well if it
[00:45:56.840]works it would at least be an improvement and step
[00:45:59.570]in the right direction, and I shared if you will those hopes
[00:46:03.650]or illusions though I myself was not very directly involved
[00:46:10.710]in that type of activity; back at Yale in 68 I was a reader
[00:46:17.440]for Wolfgang Leonard who also knew Czech by the way,
[00:46:21.410]who was a visiting professor at Yale every spring
[00:46:24.960]and taught a very popular course on the Soviet Union.
[00:46:30.240]We had over 300 students, they packed the largest hall
[00:46:34.020]at Yale and were eager students; one of the students
[00:46:37.590]whose papers I remember grading was Howard Dean, needs no
[00:46:42.130]introduction to those of you interested in American politics
[00:46:45.330]over the last 35, 40 years, former Governor of Vermont
[00:46:50.450]and then head of the Democratic National Committee.
[00:46:54.880]So I worked for Leonard and of course the big issue with
[00:46:56.980]that course and this was a lively issue discussed was
[00:47:01.450]is Stalinism the antithesis of Leninism, or is
[00:47:11.360]Stalinism the logical continuation of Leninism?
[00:47:15.967]Now this was a debatable question.
[00:47:17.580]I, being a pretty decent student I could argue both sides
[00:47:22.340]of that question and I had to know that students could
[00:47:25.450]take the choice in Leonard's class, that was always
[00:47:28.050]the final question, for the final exam.
[00:47:30.450]He'd ask 'em what do you think?
[00:47:33.455]And then they had to back it up with evidence.
[00:47:35.450]We now know what the answer was, it just was,
[00:47:40.420]Stalinism was the logical continuation of Leninism;
[00:47:43.490]the rot started in the ideology which was arguably
[00:47:46.120]goes back to German idealism if you wanna push it back
[00:47:49.320]as far as Kant, I'm a man who admires Puffendorf not Kant
[00:47:54.350]among those dealt with the political issues
[00:47:59.010]of the Enlightenment Era in Germany,
[00:48:02.790]but I won't go into that discussion.
[00:48:06.330]But all in all it was for my wife and for me
[00:48:08.840]a wonderful experience; now one of the other troubling
[00:48:13.960]aspects, I say probably the most troubling aspects of it
[00:48:17.010]both when we together in nine and a half months in 67
[00:48:22.620]and five and a half months in 1973, and when I was over
[00:48:25.930]for a month in 1971, was the fact that our best friends
[00:48:32.870]were likely to be the ones who reported on us
[00:48:35.570]to the (speaks foreign language),
[00:48:39.740]to the Ustashe, the State Secret Police.
[00:48:45.130]And so I was extremely careful.
[00:48:48.900]Not in my own views about history or about the United States
[00:48:54.600]where I would speak my mind quite clearly but I never,
[00:48:59.170]ever and my wife didn't either, ever talk about one Czech
[00:49:03.330]in front of another because you could not know
[00:49:06.573]who you might you get into trouble.
[00:49:10.990]So I never spoke about anyone's opinions
[00:49:13.510]or about what I did with other people
[00:49:15.700]except if it was in a group and everybody knew
[00:49:18.910]what we were doing, but even each group
[00:49:23.580]had it's, if you will, minder, or informant.
[00:49:32.200]And there were lots of ways to meet people
[00:49:34.010]and I took advantage of them knowing enough Czech
[00:49:36.300]to carry on a decent conversation.
[00:49:41.400]Another group I sought out was a group of model railroad
[00:49:45.440]enthusiasts, this had been a hobby of mine pretty much
[00:49:49.160]in a van since I had gone to graduate school,
[00:49:52.300]but I knew the field, I knew the equipment,
[00:49:55.280]I had built model railroad equipment and operated it.
[00:49:58.200]So I showed up at the Model Railroad Club in Zizkov,
[00:50:00.620]I asked at the local (speaks foreign language),
[00:50:08.940]the store for railroad modelers if such a club existed
[00:50:12.930]and I asked where I lived, and sure enough
[00:50:14.810]he said there's one close by, so I would walk over the hill
[00:50:18.172]to Zizkov, occasionally early in the evening I'd take
[00:50:21.060]our son along, he wasn't speaking yet, but he appreciated
[00:50:25.590]watching the trains run around the layout.
[00:50:27.730]So these people were good modelers and they
[00:50:30.290]knew things well, but they always had the head guy,
[00:50:34.390]I liked him, Peppi Vakta, I was pretty sure he was
[00:50:38.110]a communist party member but he was a decent guy,
[00:50:43.240]very good modeler, but there was another guy who came
[00:50:47.700]around every now and again and gave a pep talk
[00:50:50.190]on Marx-Leninism, and they were embarrassed, but of course
[00:50:55.120]I wanted to stay and hear it, and he goes: you don't have
[00:50:56.870]to stay, and I said no, no, I will stay,
[00:50:58.960]I was interested in what the guy had to say.
[00:51:02.100]So every group was watched and this was true
[00:51:05.090]with stamp collectors, it was true of butterfly collectors,
[00:51:09.730]it was true of anybody that had any interest of any sort
[00:51:14.400]even sort of bizarre interests
[00:51:16.530]like I had like in model railroads.
[00:51:22.270]But that was the way the system worked.
[00:51:24.330]The communists, they were afraid of their own shadow.
[00:51:27.570]They didn't trust anybody to meet anywhere
[00:51:32.090]for fear that someone would bring up probably
[00:51:35.670]what a lousy mess the country was in
[00:51:37.740]and talk about it amongst themselves.
[00:51:41.230]So, those impressions were lasting.
[00:51:47.730]Another very valuable thing, my colleagues, now everybody,
[00:51:51.129]all the students at the university were either children
[00:51:54.240]of communists or their parents were of impeccably
[00:51:57.250]working-class background, I knew this, all of the members
[00:52:01.730]of the institutes where I worked, the faculty
[00:52:04.870]at the university where I studied advance Czech
[00:52:08.160]with Professor Holoub in 1967
[00:52:11.160]were communists or they wouldn't be there.
[00:52:14.340]But I have never been one to let politics interfere
[00:52:18.670]with friendship, that's very important in Nebraska,
[00:52:21.770]believe me, and it was of course especially true over there.
[00:52:28.180]The other habit I had and it's worked out well for me,
[00:52:31.860]I think maybe because I've been lucky,
[00:52:33.720]I would strike up the most casual conversations
[00:52:37.160]with strangers in restaurants where I would go for lunch,
[00:52:43.740]or on trains where I traveled and start talking to them
[00:52:48.180]ah one of my favorite gambits to tell them
[00:52:51.060]what a wonderful country it was and I was interested
[00:52:53.160]in transport history and how I was delighted
[00:52:55.480]to see all the steam locomotives and the different types,
[00:52:57.840]and I knew the types, I knew what they were;
[00:52:59.370]and I would wax eloquently what a wonderful place
[00:53:02.670]Czechoslovakia was, and then if the countenance
[00:53:07.290]of my friend or my casual acquaintance turned to horror
[00:53:12.580]then I knew I was probably not speaking to a communist.
[00:53:16.506]But then they clearly realized what I was up to.
[00:53:21.620]But this generally worked out pretty, pretty well.
[00:53:27.660]Another couple of incidents to illustrate that
[00:53:32.810]in 1971 I spent five weeks in Prague in the late summer
[00:53:40.260]and I went back and met old friends from the church,
[00:53:44.410]Miroslav Tychmann, in fact I stayed with Miroslav Tychmann
[00:53:46.840]and his wife Renata, he and my wife, Renata
[00:53:49.340]in their apartment worked in the State Archives
[00:53:52.800]did not more research in turning my doctoral dissertation,
[00:53:56.060]just completed at Yale, and started turning it into a book
[00:54:01.800]and I was grateful of course in 67, 71, 73 and later
[00:54:08.350]that my Czech advisors, and in some cases fellow students
[00:54:15.120]helped me, for example Miroslav Tychmann in 67 took me over
[00:54:19.660]to the Sokol Archive, I hadn't known about that
[00:54:24.250]and he figured I'd look at that and I'd learn
[00:54:26.650]something and I learned a lot.
[00:54:30.810]Zdenek Sholl, another one of my advisors,
[00:54:32.537]and the foremost Marxists historian
[00:54:35.240]of the Czech labor movement took me out
[00:54:37.640]to the summer home of Erich Maria Rilke,
[00:54:41.520]took me around to various other places
[00:54:43.500]where I would find useful information.
[00:54:46.650]And everybody I talked to admired or professed to admire
[00:54:51.010]T.G. Mazaryk, and I don't think they were saying that
[00:54:53.560]to me because they knew it would please me.
[00:54:55.820]I'm a great admirer of Mazaryk himself.
[00:55:00.260]One of those few world-historical figures I admire,
[00:55:05.350]I don't wanna say without reservation,
[00:55:06.900]but with very, very, very few.
[00:55:09.000]Garibaldi would be another, Abraham Lincoln
[00:55:11.030]in this country would be another.
[00:55:14.280]But they made sure I saw what I needed to see
[00:55:18.390]and it wasn't the approved Marx-Leninist curricula.
[00:55:24.490]Anyway other fortuitous discussions with total strangers,
[00:55:32.110]one was actually very fortunate because when I left
[00:55:36.110]in 71 I came out with two suitcases, in one suitcase
[00:55:42.430]were more than 80 issues of Reporter magazine,
[00:55:46.740]one of the most vigorous of the reform communist
[00:55:51.984]publications criticizing the shortcomings
[00:55:56.010]of the pre-1968 Communist regime.
[00:56:04.380]I also carried out for a good friend, the artist,
[00:56:11.730]Karl Neprasz plans for an abstract sculture that he was
[00:56:16.848]to display at an art exhibit in Munich
[00:56:21.020]but was not allowed to because having done some
[00:56:23.510]political cartooning in favor of the Dubcek movement
[00:56:29.070]in reform communism he had been fired
[00:56:32.722]as a teacher of sculpture at the university
[00:56:38.370]and he was prohibited from showing his artwork publicly,
[00:56:41.870]which is of course a hard, hard, sentence to an author,
[00:56:46.360]much Marta Kudiczowe, whom I greatly admired
[00:56:51.570]was denied public performance of her
[00:56:56.030]interpretation of largely modern rock music.
[00:56:59.470]And also in one of the suitcases I had the only
[00:57:06.392]33 and a third RPM, single large record
[00:57:10.120]that Marta Kudiczowe had produced.
[00:57:13.110]This was a treasure.
[00:57:14.970]I didn't want lose that; I didn't want to lose
[00:57:17.210]Karl Neprasz's plans, the abstract sculpture
[00:57:20.130]was two huge human heads, if you know Karl Neprasz's
[00:57:23.770]work, he's been on postage stamps (speaks foreign language),
[00:57:29.244]for example is on a postage stamp and as a reward
[00:57:34.460]for my smuggling out his outwork he gave to me
[00:57:40.310]and my wife an original print which was called
[00:57:44.070]A Conversation; it shows sort of two inside views
[00:57:49.606]of abstract human heads, they're talking to each other,
[00:57:53.140]this is a Czech conversation by the way,
[00:57:54.910]what do these human heads lack, there's no ears.
[00:58:02.140]It's all mouth, just like his famous postage stamp
[00:58:08.610]picture, we have the museum posterwith it on it
[00:58:12.393]in the house, shows these two abstract figures with nothing
[00:58:17.847]but blaring amplifiers facing each other.
[00:58:25.720]So I'm reminded of the Nebraska Czech saying,
[00:58:30.060]this is in good humor by the way,
[00:58:32.040]you can always tell a Czech, you know the answer to that?
[00:58:37.100]But you can't tell him much.
[00:58:40.540]Now I sort of like argumentative people.
[00:58:43.380]I think fundamentally if it isn't carried to extremes
[00:58:46.940]of the sort that Karl Neprasz satirized in his art;
[00:58:53.520]if it isn't carried to extremes it's a commendable
[00:58:56.160]characteristic, people that have the courage
[00:58:57.750]of their opinions and stick up for them,
[00:58:59.940]even when you're doing your best to convince them
[00:59:01.900]that they're going down the wrong track.
[00:59:05.350]So anyway I had all of this valuable stuff in two suitcases
[00:59:08.350]and heading for the border, 71 the communists were nervous.
[00:59:16.700]I struck up a conversation in the apartment with
[00:59:18.950]a German lady and her daughter who'd been in Czechoslovakia
[00:59:22.820]as tourists, so we were chatting away in German
[00:59:25.030]and I was talking about German relatives I had
[00:59:27.430]in Munich and several other places, third cousins,
[00:59:31.140]and we had a nice chat, but we got to the border,
[00:59:34.660]my mistake at the border was to I think to have spoken Czech
[00:59:37.210]to the border guard; I regretted that immediately,
[00:59:40.730]he got suspicious, and he said:
[00:59:49.580]get off the train and bring your suitcase.
[00:59:53.210]He didn't say bring both suitcases.
[00:59:56.260]So, hoping that he hadn't noticed that there were two
[00:59:59.790]I grabbed the suitcase that had the Reporter magazines
[01:00:02.730]but not the suitcase in was my treasured Marta Kubocziwe
[01:00:07.960]single and my Karl Neprasz's plans for his abstract
[01:00:14.840]sculpture, oh by the way within this vice shaped
[01:00:17.320]like a human head, the museum had been instructed
[01:00:20.650]to place a pile more than a foot high of Rudo Pravo,
[01:00:26.740]the communist party daily, and then crank the vice together
[01:00:29.470]with the part of the Rudo Pravo showing out.
[01:00:34.680]So we had a cover story thought up if the police found this
[01:00:37.360]I would say, since I had an original drawing
[01:00:41.432]of Karl Neprasz there, the cover story was
[01:00:43.260]that I had purchased this drawing, which I hadn't,
[01:00:47.350]from Karl Neprasz, no he gave me the drawing,
[01:00:50.321]that was entirely true and that the plans, were his plans
[01:01:01.420]for a piece of sculpture that he was never going to realize
[01:01:03.440]but when I had admired it, he gave it to me.
[01:01:06.662]That was the cover story.
[01:01:07.495]Well fortunately off the train I went with the suitcase,
[01:01:11.370]well I figure they're gonna look in the suitcase,
[01:01:12.770]they'll probably take the magazines away from me
[01:01:14.520]and then they'll probably get rid of me.
[01:01:16.880]Well I waited, I waited, they were going through
[01:01:18.730]the suitcase, then I saw the train pull out of the station.
[01:01:20.870]It was gone, off to Germany and I was still in there
[01:01:27.120]and they came back, big smile on their face,
[01:01:30.748]they had this pile of Reporter magazines.
[01:01:32.340]Who gave these to you?
[01:01:34.463]And I said I don't the know the man, I had meanwhile
[01:01:37.010]had plenty of time to think up a story.
[01:01:39.640]I don't know the man, I said: he was some old guy.
[01:01:41.800]I'm sure the old guy I had in my imagination
[01:01:46.060]was a lot younger than I am now, but I said:
[01:01:48.280]I was coming out of a bookstore, I explained the bookstore,
[01:01:50.670]it was (speaks foreign language) and this old man came
[01:02:00.600]up to me seeing me carrying out a load of books
[01:02:02.270]and I had those books with receipts, those were in the bag
[01:02:05.070]too so they would have known I would have been at
[01:02:07.323]that bookstore, and I said: this man came up to me
[01:02:09.110]and asked me if I would like some old Reporter magazines
[01:02:11.210]and I said, this I explained to them in Czech,
[01:02:13.767]so he went home, he got the magazines, he brought them back,
[01:02:16.830]I said: I paid him 80 crowns for those magazines.
[01:02:21.623]Well who was he?
[01:02:22.490]I never asked his name, well I wasn't gonna tell 'em
[01:02:25.787]the good friend who gave me the magazines,
[01:02:28.007]that would have been the last thing I would have done.
[01:02:30.250]So they drew up a document in which I said that I had not
[01:02:34.033]obtained these Reporter magazines with the intention
[01:02:38.100]of taking them out of the country and slandering
[01:02:40.800]the good name of the Czechoslovak Socialistic Republic.
[01:02:44.450]That was essentially what it was, I read it very carefully,
[01:02:46.760]and I signed it, then I think I was feeling a little bit
[01:02:50.650]cheeky so I then asked politely in Czech
[01:02:54.590]if I could have the magazines back.
[01:02:57.110]And I said: they're already in American libraries,
[01:02:59.990]these are for my personal use, and I've already signed
[01:03:02.330]the statement that I'm not going to slander
[01:03:05.190]the good Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
[01:03:07.200]So I'm a man of my word.
[01:03:09.540]And they said nah, we're not gonna give you your magazines
[01:03:12.600]back so I was only too glad to get out of there.
[01:03:15.400]I assume in the meantime they called back to Prague,
[01:03:17.670]they checked on my whereabouts, they found out
[01:03:20.360]all they needed to know about it and somebody
[01:03:21.940]in Prague told 'em get rid of him.
[01:03:25.040]So they put me on the next train to Munich
[01:03:28.120]about three hours later; so I could only hope
[01:03:33.420]and I turned to smiles, we crossed the border,
[01:03:36.740]and I came there and there were two of there German
[01:03:39.110]border guards out there smiling and waving,
[01:03:42.470]and then they began speaking to me in German, you're a
[01:03:45.352](speaks foreign language),
[01:03:56.990]your Czech friends he said, called over the border
[01:04:00.000]and asked us if you had left anything else on the train,
[01:04:03.210]if you had left another bag on the train,
[01:04:05.010]and we told them no, of course they had my bag.
[01:04:08.890]The two German ladies had handed my bag over to them,
[01:04:13.810]explained that the communist Czechs had taken me
[01:04:16.680]off the train so that turned out
[01:04:19.610]to be a very fortuitous conversation.
[01:04:21.640]No telling what would have happened to the bags
[01:04:23.260]so I listened Karl Neprasz's plans to Munich was met
[01:04:27.390]by a German cousin there who owned a taxi service, and I had
[01:04:32.100]phoned from the German side of the border to the cousin
[01:04:34.558]to the cousin letting her know that I was on my way late,
[01:04:39.542]and things turned out all right.
[01:04:41.711]But you had to very, very careful around the communists.
[01:04:45.200]Well I didn't know any top communists ever well.
[01:04:53.370]The only one I met and got to know fairly well
[01:04:55.770]was Milan Kusac, (speaks foreign language),
[01:05:01.810]not a nice man if you know anything about his history
[01:05:04.700]but his daughter lived with my wife and me
[01:05:08.050]and our two children in our home in Omaha
[01:05:12.070]for the fall semester when she
[01:05:14.261]was an exchange scholar at UNO.
[01:05:18.270]So I knew her and I looked her up when I went back to Prague
[01:05:22.464]in the Fall of 1990, she'd been there in the Spring,
[01:05:29.840]and met her father who had held various high posts
[01:05:34.900]in the Communist government, when I did meet him
[01:05:38.360]in 1991 he was clearly dying of cancer.
[01:05:41.280]So I was in no mood to have a set to with a dying man
[01:05:49.330]but he very fondly talked about the great idealism
[01:05:54.330]that we communists had, clearly he was disappointed
[01:05:57.610]that it had failed but that's what he talked about.
[01:06:01.400]Indicating that idealism was always a strong part
[01:06:03.960]of communism as it was of Nazism.
[01:06:08.470]But he's the only top Communist I ever knew;
[01:06:11.730]I did have an interview with Professor Krall,
[01:06:13.640]one of the leading Marx-Leninist historians who explained
[01:06:19.220]to me in 1973, he says (speaks foreign language),
[01:06:38.792]and also the Mazaryk Archive which had been up to 1914;
[01:06:42.279]when I was there in 67 it was now closed.
[01:06:46.856]And so Krall's explanation was, he said: you see
[01:06:48.920]Professor Garber some of our historians misused
[01:06:51.100]those archives, that was the mindset of a top
[01:06:54.375]Marxist-Leninist official, fortunately
[01:06:57.640]the historians I knew were otherwise.
[01:07:01.410]Well things didn't turn out quite the way many of us
[01:07:05.880]hoped they might, or as quickly as we hoped they might,
[01:07:09.530]S. Harrison Thomson always told his classes, communism
[01:07:12.270]is unnatural to the peoples of East-Central Europe,
[01:07:15.160]the Poles, the Czechs, and the rest, it will not last.
[01:07:18.500]Professor Thomson died in the mid-70's he didn't live
[01:07:22.160]to see the end of it but he did predict it.
[01:07:28.658]And I look back on the 60s, it was exciting times,
[01:07:32.440]I was just old enough I never shared the illusions
[01:07:36.240]or the delusions of the, in many respects, admirable
[01:07:40.170]student radicals in the United States.
[01:07:43.850]As the picture I showed you of Florence Virtue indicates
[01:07:47.600]my wife and I did share the aspirations
[01:07:49.890]of the Civil Rights Movement, and as I look back
[01:07:53.670]on the 60s, I would have thought at the early 60s
[01:07:56.060]as a very young man, that John F. Kennedy might be destined
[01:07:59.380]to be one of the great figures of my youth, I think not;
[01:08:04.170]not only was his life tragically cut short but for other
[01:08:07.980]reasons he was not the man he pretended to be,
[01:08:11.820]though in many respects, admirable.
[01:08:15.160]And as I look back on it Martin Luther King Jr. was
[01:08:17.760]a great man of my youth, I'm thoroughly convinced of that.
[01:08:22.730]As much as I'm convince that Vaclav Havel was one
[01:08:26.430]of the great men of the late 20th Century
[01:08:29.970]and the second half of the 20th Century,
[01:08:33.190]and I would say the same thing, although I'm not a Catholic
[01:08:36.280]and do not share particularly the conservative
[01:08:39.070]religious doctrines of Pope John Paul II,
[01:08:47.050]he's another man, another great man I greatly admire.
[01:08:51.600]With regard to Kennedy I discovered in 2001 after the wacko
[01:08:57.970]scientist in Pennsylvania mailed anthrax spores
[01:09:01.540]through the U.S. Postal Service and sickened several people
[01:09:04.890]and killed one older lady, the government finally took
[01:09:10.620]an interest in those of us who were exposed
[01:09:13.648]to the germ warfare experiments of J.F.K. in 1963
[01:09:18.260]and I was one of those exposed to a relative of anthrax
[01:09:23.150]on three different occasions in our group of five ships.
[01:09:27.590]We were told at the time we were being exposed
[01:09:29.530]to a harmless gas, we guessed as to what it was,
[01:09:33.400]we thought we might be testing atmospheric fallout
[01:09:35.980]from the blast of the atomic atmospheric tests
[01:09:39.140]in the Southwest Pacific but indeed it was
[01:09:41.910]bacillus globigii, a relative of anthrax.
[01:09:45.040]There was no intention to harm us and here I'm standing
[01:09:48.190]before you in advanced age and proof that the anthrax
[01:09:54.210]didn't get to me, or as when this was announced
[01:09:58.680]to the known surviving veterans of this germ warfare
[01:10:03.430]experiment, that bacillus globigii, coincidentally
[01:10:07.610]my initials, B.G. is not known consistently
[01:10:12.800]to cause illness in healthy humans.
[01:10:16.740]So my view of the American 60s is as nuanced as I think
[01:10:21.663]my view of Czechoslovak Communism was at the time
[01:10:26.640]and I am still very cautiously optimistic
[01:10:33.330]about the future of this country and Europe.
[01:10:38.490]Maybe I have no right to be but I am.
[01:10:41.610]Youth will always look on the bright side of things
[01:10:44.810]and strive somehow to make things better.
[01:10:47.310]I'm going to stop here, I'll leave some time for questions.
[01:10:49.900]I didn't cover all I hoped to cover but the world today
[01:10:54.710]than what it looked like in the 60s and different
[01:10:57.540]than what we anticipated in the 60s; it might turn out to be
[01:11:01.470]but it's by and large in my opinion better.
[01:11:05.930]I've had some arguments with high school classmates
[01:11:08.260]at reunions about this question and of course it's
[01:11:11.520]a question on which everyone has informed opinions,
[01:11:14.910]who takes the trouble to have informed opinions,
[01:11:17.250]will not agree on everything; so I'm gonna
[01:11:18.950]stop here and open it for any questions that you might have.
[01:11:23.650]I may have led you to think I would speak of something
[01:11:27.470]I did not speak of, if so ask me about it.
[01:11:31.471](crowd applauds)
[01:11:43.089](speaks foreign language)
[01:11:46.930]Yes, Mila.
[01:11:58.860]Thank you, my question is you were really
[01:12:03.130]the American in Europe weren't you, not only
[01:12:07.840]in the Czech Republic but also in the other parts
[01:12:10.850]of Europe and you were observing 68 throughout Europe
[01:12:15.430]as well, would you think kind of aloud for us
[01:12:21.110]what were the common traits of the 68 year
[01:12:28.250]between Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, and on, and on.
[01:12:33.890]There are many parallels.
[01:12:36.349]For example one of the equivalents of reform communism
[01:12:43.861]it's a little bit like the burglar who's burglarized
[01:12:45.570]your house and he comes back later and apologizes
[01:12:48.720]and said you know I'm sorry I took all this away from you
[01:12:52.210]and stole a better part of your life,
[01:12:53.860]but I'm really sorry and now we have
[01:12:55.520]to start over and let bygones be bygones.
[01:12:58.710]That's not a very good explanation to a lot of people.
[01:13:02.450]I was also very interested in the developments in Italy
[01:13:05.340]in 68, my wife and I had spent some time in Bologna;
[01:13:09.120]we have a lot of time in Bologna in fact
[01:13:11.650]in the last decade 'cause I work in Italian history too.
[01:13:14.740]And Bologna had a reasonably competent Communist
[01:13:18.610]city government, and the Italian Communist Party
[01:13:21.850]was I think the most independent of the western
[01:13:25.380]Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in comparison let's say
[01:13:30.410]the French Communist Party, the other party I studied
[01:13:32.660]fairly well; Wolfgang Leonard was a great,
[01:13:35.950]in fact he wrote an excellent book on euro-communism,
[01:13:38.470]this was another hope that you could somehow bridge
[01:13:42.080]the enormous differences between the, they were never quite
[01:13:48.200]totalitarian, although they aspired to be totalitarian
[01:13:51.010]governments in the East Bloc and the social democratic
[01:13:54.710]socialists, even communist parties in the West.
[01:13:58.730]So this was a period of shared hopes that there could be
[01:14:01.800]a reconciliation, largely peacefully, and comprehensively,
[01:14:07.530]and we know that hadn't happened.
[01:14:09.670]I always admired the Poles, or as Karl Pieklig my advisor
[01:14:15.010]always (speaks foreign language),
[01:14:18.310]Poles are a courageous people.
[01:14:21.300]I mean who else first stood up to the Nazis
[01:14:24.070]and shot back at them, when everybody else rolled over,
[01:14:29.467]and besides the Poles had to contend with the Red Army
[01:14:31.190]coming in 17 days later from the east, now I don't share
[01:14:36.660]the messianic views of the Polish romantics,
[01:14:40.138]or some of the ugly populist rhetoric
[01:14:44.170]that's coming out of Poland today,
[01:14:46.880]but certainly in 68 the Poles looked like they were
[01:14:51.010]on their way to improving things.
[01:14:52.850]Even the Yugoslavs, we were too short of time in Yugoslavia
[01:14:57.430]and though I followed with interest the reforms
[01:14:59.920]in Tito's Yugoslavia, I had more optimism
[01:15:07.590]about the Yugoslav's and turned out to be warranted.
[01:15:10.030]I knew of the hatreds that emerged in World War II
[01:15:12.880]with the Ustashe and the bloodbath between Serbs
[01:15:17.490]and Croats and the ruthlessness with which
[01:15:20.710]Tito fastened communism on Yugoslavia,
[01:15:23.790]but Yugoslavia whatever else you may say for it
[01:15:28.130]was an independent communist dictatorship in 1968
[01:15:34.420]and so for that reason I had some greater hope
[01:15:37.650]for it than it turned out to be warranted.
[01:15:40.960]This was shared by some of my Czech friends too.
[01:15:43.110]Some of them said and told me in 1990, I've heard this
[01:15:45.484]from more than probably half a dozen well-informed
[01:15:48.820]Czech scholars of Yugoslavia, Romania,
[01:15:52.600]Romania like Miroslav Tychmann,
[01:15:54.910]that it's a good thing that reformed communism didn't
[01:15:59.570]succeed in Czechoslovakia because otherwise we would end up
[01:16:03.160]in a situation today like Yugoslavia, where there had not
[01:16:08.030]been a thorough disillusionment with the communist
[01:16:11.490]government, Tudjman, certainly Milosevic,
[01:16:14.520]these guys were hard-core communists.
[01:16:17.000]I think Putin still is, God knows why Americans, although
[01:16:22.640]a lot of them were taking bribes, were so trusting of him.
[01:16:30.350]But this was a general hope in 68, there
[01:16:32.230]was also this hope in this country.
[01:16:34.360]Now my view as I say of Kennedy given my experience
[01:16:37.670]in the Navy and having been in Vietnam,
[01:16:42.066]and I was very fortunate there I never had to shoot anybody,
[01:16:45.330]I was well prepared to do it, but I'm glad I never had to
[01:16:49.010]much though I detest communism as being the worst system
[01:16:52.780]of government I ever had a chance to observe up close,
[01:16:56.070]personally, I never had any desire to go out
[01:17:02.650]and whack individual communists; and I'm glad in Vietnam
[01:17:07.560]the occasion never arose but again in this country
[01:17:13.620]there was greater hopes for greater achievements.
[01:17:15.830]The Civil Rights Movement did not always come out as well
[01:17:20.210]as those of who supported it had hoped.
[01:17:25.070]So it's a worldwide event; we were in Paris at the time
[01:17:28.160]of some of the first student riots in the Fall of 67;
[01:17:37.190]I was glad our automobile was never damaged
[01:17:40.110]although we were in the student quarter.
[01:17:45.090]Am I getting to your question Mila?
[01:17:49.610]Are there other questions, I guess
[01:17:51.460]we've got time for maybe two more.
[01:17:56.450]Paul did you have a question?
[01:17:59.580]I do, I was curious about the feeling that you had
[01:18:06.155]that your were perfectly situated to be a spy
[01:18:08.400]and were probably being informed on my people that you--
[01:18:13.282]Oh I know I was.
[01:18:14.850]So my question is have
[01:18:16.080]you seen your police archives have--
[01:18:17.770]You know I haven't gone back to look at that yet.
[01:18:20.073]My always hope was as a young man was some day I'm gonna
[01:18:22.930]live long enough to read the police records.
[01:18:26.270]Now I did buy and I have read through for names;
[01:18:29.910]I have gone through Ruda Kravo, that famous expose
[01:18:33.490]of the StB informant's list and I've found a number
[01:18:37.610]of my good friends on that list, including one in Omaha.
[01:18:43.790]And I always thought you had to be kinda careful
[01:18:46.290]even in Omaha, that's one of the things I really hated
[01:18:49.020]about communism that those sons of bitches
[01:18:51.950]were actually controlling to some degree what I said,
[01:18:57.110]not what I published, but what I said over in this country,
[01:19:02.580]under certain circumstances, I'm not going to mention
[01:19:06.290]that person's name because I don't have documentation
[01:19:09.450]independent of the Ruda Kravo list although I always
[01:19:12.020]suspected that this fellow was in cahoots with
[01:19:15.820]communists somehow, probably, mainly in his tour business.
[01:19:20.710]But I'm not gonna say any more than that.
[01:19:23.500]But yes good friend Otto Orban, my best friend,
[01:19:27.100]now this was perfect magic of the secret police;
[01:19:30.200]I never underestimate Czechoslovak intelligence
[01:19:33.320]or Soviet intelligence, they were both very good
[01:19:36.270]and we've just seen how good Soviet intelligence was;
[01:19:39.480]they played the adolescent money-grubbers at Facebook,
[01:19:43.510]played them really well, and I could go on,
[01:19:48.360]but Otto Orban was a perfect match for me, like
[01:19:53.371]a secret policeman matched the dossiers.
[01:19:57.470]We were the same age, Otto was about six months older,
[01:20:00.960]he's a good historian of modern Czechoslovakia,
[01:20:04.330]his book in German on Czech society at the end
[01:20:07.300]of the 19th Century is an excellent work.
[01:20:09.740]Very fine, very knowledgeable historian,
[01:20:12.790]a partisan of Mazaryk from all my private conversations
[01:20:15.730]with him, and I don't think he was just telling me
[01:20:18.420]what he thought I'd like to here.
[01:20:20.500]One night he had a lot of Slivovitz, you see
[01:20:23.697]the Czechs always liked to get me to drink,
[01:20:25.440]I don't drink much, that's probably why I'm still alive,
[01:20:29.103]never smoked, except the occasional cigar,
[01:20:32.860]and I didn't drink much, and still don't;
[01:20:36.997]but they tried to get me to drink.
[01:20:39.150]One night after three o'clock in the morning
[01:20:41.190]we were staying with Otto Orban at his folk's house
[01:20:43.890]in Bilovets, in Moravia, he started playing music
[01:20:50.960]and he started playing (sings in foreign language),
[01:20:54.258]that wonderful Moravian folk song, Mazaryk's favorite,
[01:20:56.560]then he put on some really jittery folk songs,
[01:21:03.030]he said that's Bohemia, that's what the Bohemians like,
[01:21:08.550]he said Mazaryk that was a real Czech.
[01:21:11.004]So I thought maybe the Slivovitz was talking a little bit
[01:21:14.620]but Otto Orban generally like Mazaryk, now Otto Orban's
[01:21:19.450]wife had a Ph.D. in psychology, she was a smart lady,
[01:21:24.950]they had two children a boy and a girl,
[01:21:27.620]about the same age as our children.
[01:21:29.250]Their girl was older the boy was younger.
[01:21:31.490]The son Otto Orban Jr. is a distinguished historian
[01:21:34.550]of modern Czech art we were the perfect match,
[01:21:38.980]I liked them, socially, we saw a lot of them,
[01:21:42.500]if anybody knew me, that's what
[01:21:43.970]I thought at the time, if anybody knows me
[01:21:47.239]and wants to write me up Otto Orban will do a splendid job
[01:21:50.180]and I think he'll give me a good write up.
[01:21:51.910]I don't know but I was careful, never, never, never
[01:21:55.320]talked about another Czech, but I don't think I was,
[01:21:59.550]then I couldn't be sure, even the fellow who gave me
[01:22:01.900]the Reporter magazines, I wasn't sure did he set me up.
[01:22:05.640]I'm not gonna mention his name even now.
[01:22:08.740]He's still alive I hope, I haven't heard from him
[01:22:11.320]in several years, did he set me up?
[01:22:15.400]Well when I was back in 73, I invited him out to lunch,
[01:22:20.810]and in the middle, just an ordinary Czech restaurant
[01:22:24.790]I said in Czech: oh by the way do you know those magazines
[01:22:30.070]you gave me, the border police confiscated the lot
[01:22:32.979]from me, then I watched him turn almost totally white
[01:22:38.600]and a look of terror came over his face.
[01:22:41.610]He had a lot to lose you know if...
[01:22:44.770]I said don't worry I didn't identify you.
[01:22:47.830]They believe my story.
[01:22:50.660]So that's the other thing I hated about the communists,
[01:22:52.630]I mean these were small things to dislike them about,
[01:22:54.980]but they made me lie, I don't particularly like to lie,
[01:23:00.350]I really don't, even to communists who get what they
[01:23:03.910]deserve but that was the system it was a rotten system.
[01:23:08.490]Everybody spying on everybody else.
[01:23:12.610]You've all seen the excellent East German film
[01:23:15.290]about the spy network in East Germany, The Lives of Others,
[01:23:18.890]if not I recommend it; it gives a pretty good picture
[01:23:21.850]of what was going on, glad we in the United States
[01:23:26.200]don't have that sort of thing, we got a lot of problems
[01:23:29.420]in our great country, but I don't think that's one of them.
[01:23:33.860]What you said reminds me of a friend of mine
[01:23:36.510]who was interrogated by the police many, many times
[01:23:39.700]and he was a Catholic, and one of the tactics that the
[01:23:43.580]police used, they said you're a Catholic, that means you're
[01:23:46.880]not allowed to lie, is that right?
[01:23:49.510]He said yes but I can lie to you.
[01:23:54.120]Yeah, we're Calvinist Protestants, we don't like
[01:23:59.790]to lie either, nobody does, but if comes to communists
[01:24:03.310]that's part of the game, you'd be a fool not to.
[01:24:09.330]I didn't like that though, I really didn't.
[01:24:13.731]But we had wonderful friends, wonderful memories,
[01:24:18.573]I'm glad I became a Czech scholar, several times
[01:24:20.380]I wondered if I made the right choice;
[01:24:21.680]you know I really should've studied a heroic people
[01:24:23.380]like the Poles, and in Polish history I would've been
[01:24:26.270]better suited for, and by land of my Finnish ancestors.
[01:24:30.800]They killed a quarter of a million Russians
[01:24:32.520]in the Winter War in the late Fall of 1939,
[01:24:36.790]and you know what Molotov said of the Finns,
[01:24:38.560]that describes me pretty well too, hard-headed
[01:24:48.800]I reviewed a book recently in which the author,
[01:24:51.910]I like the book I recommended publication,
[01:24:53.790]I said it needs to down a little bit the view
[01:24:57.610]that the Czechs are an extraordinarily,
[01:25:00.430]I said they're tough people and they've been heroic
[01:25:02.310]on occasion but let's not overdo this;
[01:25:05.390]other countries, small countries stood up,
[01:25:08.740]and I gave Finland as an example, they stood up
[01:25:10.900]and the Soviet Union, although they had to compromise
[01:25:13.730]their foreign policy, the Soviet Union
[01:25:15.190]did not occupy them after World War II
[01:25:17.780]and under a close relationship left them
[01:25:21.510]pretty much to their own devices.
[01:25:23.700]So, I hope those questions, I think we are,
[01:25:30.138]I see about one minute left on my watch.
[01:25:33.720]So I let my introducer decide what to do.
[01:25:37.970]Any last questions?
[01:25:40.690]Well join me in thanking Dr. Bruce Garver.
[01:25:43.679](crowd applauds)

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Bruce Garver speaks at Prague Spring 50

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