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Current AffairsFirst post-communist Czechoslovak foreign minister Jiří Dienstbier dies
Czech Senator Jiří Dienstbier, a leading figure of the Czech dissident
movement and the country’s first post-communist foreign minister died
over the weekend at the age of 73. A former dissident and journalist, Mr.
Dienstbier served on many committees and worked as a UN rapporteur on human
rights in the former Yugoslavia, but in people’s minds he will always be
remembered as the man who stood next to the former West German foreign
minister Hans Dietrich Genscher and cut through the barbed wire of the Iron
Curtain. More
MailboxMailbox
This week in Mailbox: The 21st anniversary of the 1989 Velvet Revolution, a
“Czech” week in Denmark, the Czech hard candy Hašlerky. Listeners
quoted: Ruth O'Connor, Hans Verner Lollike, Chun-Quan Meng. More
SpecialNárodní třída: prominent Prague boulevard that has witnessed history
Twenty-one years ago on Wednesday, on November 17, 1989, a student march
was brutally attacked by the police in Prague’s Národní Street; that
event sparked a public revolt against the regime and eventually led to the
fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. In today’s special programme, we
walk along Národní Street, or Národní třída, a remarkable boulevard
which is home to the National Theatre, Prague’s most famous delicatessen,
a jazz club where Bill Clinton played, and some of the city’s greatest
cafés: a street where history was made two decades ago. More
SpecialChildren of the Revolution: politics and writing in today’s Czech Republic
A few days ago Radio Prague and the Czech Literature Portal, this country’s foremost website promoting Czech
literature abroad, got together to hold the first of a series of public
literary discussions. David Vaughan’s guests were two of the Czech
Republic’s best known literary figures, the novelist Petra Hůlová and
the critic and translator Martin Machovec. They were joined by an
international audience at one of Prague’s most atmospheric literary dens,
the Shakespeare and Sons bookshop, tucked away in one of
the ancient houses in Prague’s Lesser Quarter. The subject was politics
and literature; twenty years after the fall of communism, are the two in
any way compatible here in the Czech context?
More
One on OneMisha Glenny - UK writer with close ties to Prague
The English journalist and writer Misha Glenny is perhaps best known for
his work covering the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the hit 2008 book
McMafia. His first book The Rebirth of History, published in 1990, focused
on the post-communist political landscape of Eastern Europe, including
Czechoslovakia, a country with which he had a close association. Indeed,
Glenny had studied Czech in Prague, and remembers with fondness his time
here in the early ‘80s. When we spoke recently at the close of the Forum
2000 conference in the city, he recalled his very first visit, towards the
end of 1980. More
Current AffairsNewly uncovered footage shows how Communists wanted to depict events of ‘89
Historians at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes have
announced they recently uncovered previously unknown video footage in the
archives on the events of 1989. Footage shot – and heavily manipulated -
by the former regime’s secret police, the StB. Carefully presented images
and a propagandistic voice-over in the “documentary” were meant to give
a diametrically different picture of public demonstrations which shook the
country 21 years ago, suggesting they were a provocation and a sham.
Swiftly overcome by events, though, the Communists soon shelved the
material, and it was subsequently forgotten.
More
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