Václav Havel (in memoriam)

Václav Havel was a writer, playwright and politician, one of the most important figures of the resistance against communism, President of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, and the first President of the Czech Republic.

Václav Havel was born in 1936 in Prague. Under communism he was barred from regular university study because of his “class background” and worked as a stagehand in a theatre. From the age of twenty he contributed actively to literary magazines. Later the Divadlo Na Zábradlí (Theatre on the Balustrade) began staging his allegorical plays, which criticised the totalitarian regime.

After the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 he had to leave the theatre and worked as a labourer in a brewery. At the same time he wrote for the samizdat Lidové noviny. In 1975 he wrote an open letter to President Husák, and in 1977 he published Charter 77, which called for respect for fundamental rights and freedoms in Czechoslovakia. He became one of the first three spokespersons of this civic initiative. In April 1978 he co-founded the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted. He was a co-initiator of the petition “A Few Sentences”, which called for democracy, including the right to peaceful public assembly. For these activities he spent more than five years in prison.

During the Velvet Revolution he led the Civic Forum, which played a key role in the fall of the communist regime. Shortly afterwards he became the last President of Czechoslovakia and, in 1993, the first President of the independent Czech Republic.

Throughout his political career Václav Havel was internationally recognised as a moral authority and a champion of democracy. For his convictions and his lifelong efforts to uphold human rights, he was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize and received the highest state honours of many countries. Václav Havel will forever remain an icon of the struggle for freedom and democracy.