Those who gathered around tiny ‘Venoušek’ from his first day in the world — Monday, 5 October 1936 — had no doubt that he was special. His family luckily believed in the power of recorded images so that, unusually for this period, his first few months are well preserved as black-and-white home movies. Although inexpertly shot by his father, the granular frames leave behind a striking impression of a child swaddled in high expectations — a child whose early months were not only coddled but crowned. At two weeks of age, freshly home from his birthplace at Dr Záhorský’s private hospital on Prague’s Londýnská Street, he appears as a wispy cherub robed in white, crying, showered in words by his proudly smiling, brown-haired mother. A few months later, sitting but not yet able to walk, he appears in various poses: enveloped by admiring, kissing, stroking relatives eager to attract his attention at a summer garden party; propped up on a sofa, cornered by a toy dog that he regards with deep suspicion; seated in a stroller entertained by a moustached man, dressed up in the suave style of Adolf Hitler, clasping young Venoušek’s rattle; and, most strikingly, watched by the Mayor of Prague, sitting in a wooden high chair, enthroned ceremoniously by his father with a crown made of summer flowers, confidently looking straight at the camera, backgrounded by an ivy-clad wall and a bronze plaque of his famous grandfather, himself a friend of T. G. Masaryk, founding President of the fledgling Czechoslovak Republic.
Like all past relics that defy the ruthlessness of time, these photographic images can be interpreted in a dizzying variety of conflicting ways. Havel himself emphasized their absurdity. ‘In those films,’ he once mused, ‘I am a small baby who is constantly the subject of everyone’s attention, a pampered bourgeois child attended by governesses, relatives, friends, even the Mayor of Prague himself Pestering admirers, he continued, made him feel a deep sense of loneliness amidst love. ‘This love is so overpowering and burdensome that the child seems constantly to be petrified and astonished. This I think developed in me at an early age a strengthened sense of the absurdity of the world, a certain distance from it, even a kind of fear of the world.’1
Probably Havel here inflated his earliest powers of perception, as well as understated the ways in which he, like all newcomers on earth, yearned for comforting breasts and chests, exactly because the world is an unintelligible, potentially frightening place. Havel nevertheless correctly put his finger on the unusual cluttering of his early months with admirers. Not many new arrivals on earth were so showered with privileged well-wishers, with adult faces exuding the magic of birth, the excitement and joy evoked by beginners in the world. Many of the curled and scratched photographs in the Havel family albums are additional testimony to this power of beginning — to the human ability to create a being which did not exist before, and so to ensure that the world does not remain at a standstill.
Some beginnings, such as revolutionary upheavals, are of course unplanned spectacular events that take humans completely by surprise. Birth, by contrast, is both a regular and ineradicable — but no less special — feature of the human condition. The human species is naturally bound and gagged in its absolute dependence upon birth for its survival and reproduction. Yet birth is not just a natural event — as if birth is merely a shield against death, or merely the prelude to death. Birth is more interesting than that, and it is little wonder that it is marked with rites of passage — gifts, visits, celebrations, the giving of names — and proverbial turns of phrase about its importance. The beginning is half the whole, some say. Others add: things are always best in their beginning; from small beginnings grow mighty things; and all glory comes from daring to begin. The first yelps and whimpers of blue-eyed Venoušek confirmed all this. They proved yet again that birth is a vital moment of beginning. Here was a single individual — like all other individuals — endowed with unique and unpredictable qualities making his appearance in the world. He weighed only 3.27 kilograms and stretched a mere 50 centimetres, but the world was never again to be the same. His birth, like the birth of all other human beings, was a beginning pregnant with unforeseeable consequences. Venoušek’s arrival might even be said to have been beginning’s revenge upon those who wanted to resist novelty and to keep the world predictably on course. Like all newborns — his first admirers wrote — he had within him the potential power of the newcomer to begin something anew, that is, to act not only within but upon the world. ‘Your Honour, Esteemed Sir’, began the very first correspondence he received. It was a postcard signed by the tenants and servants at the family’s country house called Havlov. ‘We dare to send you our greetings full of respect,’ they continued. The tone resembled that of royal petitioners humbly waiting upon their new king. The conclusion squeezed into the corner of the card was equally deferential. ‘We trust that you are in the best condition of health,’ they wrote, ‘and we hope when we see you that you will show favour on us.’2