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By Root 951 0

won the Indiana primary, securing his place as a contender for the nomination. Peace talks opened in Paris. Investors went on a buying spree. Competing with these stories was a rumor that huge numbers of Soviet troops stationed in East Germany and Poland were heading for the Czechoslovakian border. Reporters who attempted to go to the border region to confirm this were stopped by Polish roadblocks. The day before, Bulgaria’s Zhivkov, East Germany’s Ulbricht, Hungary’s Kádár, and Poland’s Gomułka had met in Moscow and issued a communiqué on Czechoslovakia that was so intricately worded and evasive, even by communist standards, that no one could interpret what it was attempting to convey. Had they decided on invasion?

The following day the Czech news agency reported that these were normal Warsaw Pact military maneuvers about which they had been forewarned. No one inside or outside the country completely believed this, but at least the crisis seemed to be over—for now.

With the new freedom in Czechoslovakia came an explosion of culture. Thin young men in blue jeans with long hair sold tabloids with listings of rock, jazz, and theater. Prague, which had always been a theater city, had twenty-two theaters offering plays in the spring of 1968. Tad Szulc of The New York Times asserted enthusiastically, “Prague is essentially a Western-minded city in all things from the type and quality of its cultural life to the recent mania for turtleneck sweaters.” He observed that not only artists and intellectuals but bureaucrats in the ministries and even taxi drivers were wearing turtlenecks in a wide range of colors.

May Day parade in Prague, 1968.

(Photo by Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos)

It is true that Prague, with its blend of Slavic and German culture, has always seemed more Western than other central European cities. It is the city of Kafka and Rilke, where German is a common second language. This has always been one of its profound differences with Slovakia, whose capital, Bratislava, is not German speaking and is clearly central European.

The leading jazz club in Prague that spring was the Reduta, near the sprawling green mall known as Wenceslas Square. The Reduta was a small room that could comfortably seat fewer than one hundred but always had more crammed into it. Before the Dubek era, this club had been known for the first Czech rock band, Akord Klub. Havel used to go there and wrote, “I didn’t understand the music very well, but it didn’t take much expertise to understand that what they were playing and singing here was fundamentally different from ‘Krystynka’ or ‘Prague Is a Golden Ship,’ both official hits of the time.” When Szulc went there in the spring of 1968, he reported a group doing variations on Dave Brubeck “with a touch of bossa nova.”

Among the theater offered that spring was Who’s Afraid of Franz Kafka?, which had first opened in 1963 when the works of Kafka, previously banned as bourgeois, had become permissible again. The title was intended to resemble that of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Another theater presented Frantisek Langer’s long-banned work, The Horseback Patrol, about Czech counterrevolutionaries fighting Bolsheviks in 1918. Another drama appearing that spring was Last Stop by Jiri Sextr and Jiri Suchy, considered two of the best playwrights of this 1968 renaissance. Their play is about the fear that the Dubek reforms could be undone and Czechoslovakia could go back to the way it had been before January.

There was a great deal of excitement about the international film festival at the spa of Karlovy Vary because the Cannes Film Festival, three weeks earlier, had been closed by directors Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Lelouch, Louis Malle, and Roman Polanski to show sympathy for the students and strikers. It was hoped that some of the Cannes films, including Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime, would be shown at Karlovy Vary. When Cannes had attempted to show Je t’aime, je t’aime against Resnais’s wishes, actor Jean-Pierre Léaud had physically held the curtains