Strong mother, strong son: such was the formula by which Václav Havel survived the onset of Communist rule. Powerful his mother Božena certainly was. She was the daughter of Hugo Vavrečka, who had been co-editor of Lidové noviny, a keen ceramics collector, Ambassador to Hungary and Austria during the First Republic, and (briefly in 1938) Czechoslovak Minister of Propaganda.61 Everyone who made the acquaintance of the journalist diplomat politician’s daughter — even those who didn’t warm to her snobbishness and supercilious kindness — noted her self-confidence, her tendency to impatience with low standards, her methodical approach to everything she took on.
These qualities were certainly applied to her first-born son’s education, for which she took charge. Shortly after the assassination of Heydrich, and a month before his sixth birthday, she had arranged for young Venoušek to attend his first school near Havlov, where the family spent most of the wartime and early post-war periods.62 Throughout those years, not unusually for his class background, a good deal of his early education was carefully conducted at home. Božena closely supervised him, helped along by a succession of au pairs, whose names were Hana, Eva, and one whom Havel respectfully called ‘Slečna’ (Miss). Božena introduced her son to a wide variety of intellectual challenges. Before getting married, she had studied the applied arts, and had begun writing a thesis on footware styles of the medieval Czech nobility. She was a keen artist, and especially tried to get Václav interested in watercolours and drawing — with good success, as the surviving examples in his first scrapbooks show.
Božena also believed in books. The family library was small, but it contained a wide selection of titles, including for instance a six-volume, nicely bound history of the twentieth century in Czech. Václav had a natural curiosity, read much, and sometimes talked to his young brother Ivan about exciting discoveries, like the strange-sounding word ‘metaphysics’. At Havlov, at the age of ten, he read with great excitement a biography of the famous Czech historian, František Palacký, who (Havel noted) read the whole Bible when he was only five years old.63 Like Palacký, Havel proved to be the family bookworm. While young brother Ivan loved to play outside, or stalk through the woods, or play with his parents or the governesses, Václav would sit in his room, reading literature and philosophy.64 He was also enthusiastic about poetry, especially (he told his father) after the day, aged ten, dressed in a navy-blue suit, he had recited before his class a little poem about seasons and politics:
If I were a little boy
I’d bring snowdrops and
the first violets
that bloomed in hiding
and I’d say:
‘Take them, Mr President, I
bring you greetings of spring.’65
He was encouraged to supplement his bookworming with conversations with friends of the family, like the philosopher Josef Šafařik. Václav’s mother also tried to interest him in foreign literature and foreign languages — she spoke French and German from her childhood, and started on Russian and learned good English during the Reichsprotektorat period. She liked to use such skills in front of the children, and after 1945 she took out subscriptions to Time magazine, The National Geographic and Illustrated London News. She encouraged her children to look at the pictures, to learn to recognize foreign words like ‘the’, and told them of stories and news from afar, for instance descriptions of the first Univac I computer, which — young Václav was amazed to learn — could recognize its own errors and, like a proto-human robot, confess them automatically by means of a flashing red light.
A few months before the Communist putsch of February 1948, at the age of eleven, Havel was transferred by his mother to a small private boarding school located at Poděbrady, a spa town straddling the River Elbe thirty miles east of Prague.66 The King George School of Poděbrady was the brainchild of its Director, Dr Jahoda. When in Dachau concentration camp, he had made secret plans with several other prisoners to set up a new type of school aimed at educating a cosmopolitan elite of future leader-citizens who would strive to repair the damage done to a Europe ravaged by war, totalitarianism, and social injustice. Named after a fifteenth-century Bohemian king famous for having written a tract outlining the building of peace in Europe, and housed in his draughty old castle, King George School was a boys-only institution, mainly for boarders. It was sometimes likened to Eton. The eighty boys who had been admitted were by definition special. The school emphasized ruggedness, resilience, high intellectual standards, the ability to survive extremes of temperature, and discipline by severe whippings handed out on long benches in the boys’ toilets. The pupils were pushed hard by their teachers, who included an English teacher, Miss Henry. Stress was placed upon academic excellence, including the learning of languages (Czech, English, Latin, Russian). Failure was frowned upon — poor performance was subject to expulsion — and rule-breaking was not tolerated. Havel never forgot the bellowing that came his way one morning for wanting to go to the toilet before early-morning exercises, which was strictly forbidden. Equally memorable was the moment when he exceeded his quota of detention points and ended up nursing a bruised and bleeding bottom.67 And there was also the day, following a minor misdemeanour, when a petty-minded master forced him to transport a large pile of heavy stones, one by one, across a fast-flowing stream, then to return them to their point of origin, one by one.
Havel the boarder had exeats once a fortnight, but (unlike his younger brother Ivan, who joined him later at the school for a brief, homesick six-month period) he seemed not to mind the separation from his parents. Although his grades were below average — several classmates remember him being near the bottom of his class — he adjusted to the limited free time and strict schedules. There was obligatory study time in the evenings, heavy loads of homework, and rigid lights-out rules supervised by dormitory monitors, who were boys (like Miloš Forman) several years older than those in their charge. Various extra-curricular activities were offered, including drama (at which Václav showed some early talent), typesetting, book-binding, cabinet-making, and metal-working. Sports like ping-pong, volleyball, canoeing, and bicycle-riding also featured. The chubby and bandy-legged Havel wasn’t much good at any of them — his classmates never forgot the day the short-legged, panic-stricken Havel careered recklessly out of the school gates on to an open road on a bicycle whose pedals he was unable to reach68 — and indeed his nickname from this time was chrobák, a type of cumbersome beetle. So Havel concentrated on other extra-curricular activities, like onanism. ‘Mr Havel,’ Dr Jahoda said stiffly to him one day, ‘it’s been brought to my attention that you’ve been immoral with yourself’69. There were the boy scouts, which he joined and whose activities in the ‘Arrow’ group (trips to the mountains, first aid, camping, general-knowledge quizzes) he enjoyed. After the Communist coup, scouting was banned — one of his scout-leaders, Dagmar Skálová, was subsequently jailed for sixteen years70 — and the school troop was forced to operate secretly under the leadership of a master named Mr Hoffhans, nicknamed ‘the long man’ (Dlouhán). Havel admired him, and began, for the first time in his life, correspondence with him during the summer holidays. Unfortunately, the carefully composed letters he wrote to Hoffhans from the age of twelve appear to have been lost.
Before its closure by the Communists for ‘class bias’ — never mind that the school had a policy of funding itself by mixing the fee-paying well-to-do with wartime orphans and a few local village pupils who received free tuition — King George School turned out some prominent people. Among them were not only Havel’s mathematician and philosopher younger brother, Ivan; the film-makers Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer, and Jerzy Skolimowski; the Sesame Street animator Pavel Fierlinger; the politician and General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party Jan Škoda; Ctirad Mašín, who took up arms against the local Communists, and then made a daring escape through East Germany to the United States; the chairman of the Czechoslovak Olympic Committee, Milan Jirásek; and Alois Strnad, a successful businessman whose father had been carted off by the Nazis and then the Communists to concentration camps. Havel was to join the list of future distinguished Poděbrady boys. But his academic or career prospects didn’t seem at all bright in the spring of 1950, when he was expelled from the school after a mere two and a half years there. The reason was made clear by a secret-police agent who visited the school: the building of socialism necessitated the levelling and clearing of forests of privilege, and that meant that some were bound to suffer the punishment and pain of flying splinters.
Labelled officially for the first time as a member of the privileged ‘bourgeoisie’, condemned therefore as an enemy of socialism, Havel was forced to attend several state schools in Prague, in the neighbourhood of the family’s rebuilt home on the Rašínovo (renamed Engelsovo) embankment. There was to be no respite in the Party’s class struggle against his origins and attitudes — against his subjective and objective class treachery, as was said by the Stalinists of the time. His early teenage years began to feel like a merry-go-round of class defeats and expulsions. Alois Strnad, his classmate from Poděbrady who had been expelled from there and (also like Havel) subsequently from several Prague schools, explained that ‘Václav simply couldn’t settle down at school or take the classroom seriously. Formal education, the target of Stalinist reforms and expulsions, resembled a bad joke.’ No doubt, this was why he never completed the first phase of secondary school, and why the two friends hung out in cafés and (prompted by Havel’s mother) went along to dancing classes and balls, where Havel learned to quickstep, waltz, and foxtrot.
For a time, he worked as an apprentice carpenter. Chrobák suffered from dizziness, so his mother, worried that he might slip from a ladder and that the job would reinforce his tendency to coast intellectually, took measures to educate her son in unofficial ways. In 1951-1952, through a friend of the family named Otto Wichterle, the inventor of contact lenses, his parents found him a job as an apprentice laboratory assistant at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague, which Wichterle had just founded. They reasoned that working in a tertiary-level institution might give him a taste for further study. They encouraged him as well to apply for night school at an institution in Štěpánská Street, just off Wenceslas Square, and for several years, four hours a night and five nights a week, he worked towards his final matriculation [maturita] examinations. Not only did he come to consider himself a practising scientist with a serious interest in chemistry, on which he wrote an early paper that proposed an alteration of the Periodic Table. It was at night school that he also came to talk philosophy and politics, thanks to his friendship with a fellow student of equally bad class origins named Radim Kopecký, an apprentice blacksmith/ironmonger and son of a former politician and ambassador to Switzerland, who had been arrested by the Communists, and was at that time still behind bars.
After passing his matriculation exams at night school — his grades were good, but not as good as those of his younger brother Ivan — the eighteen-year-old Havel made two attempts to get into Charles University, but he was rejected, both by the Arts Faculty and the Film and Drama Faculty. He settled eventually for a place at the Technical University in the Economics Faculty to study urban transport. It was not what he wanted to do, but it allowed him to lead a double life.
From around the time he was seventeen, Havel was tutored privately in philosophy by J. L. Fischer, a friend of the family who had helped Václav’s father found the Barrandov discussion group.71 Born in 1896, Fischer is not well remembered today, but his influence on young Václav was considerable. Fischer was an inspired teacher and story-teller. He told Havel that after studying with Masaryk at Charles University, his university teaching career had given him the freedom to play the role of a democrat with a social conscience. So, during the First Republic, he had publicly criticized the policies of Rašín (even after his assassination), which he considered socially divisive, and inimical to the interests of the little man and the middle and lower classes. For that outburst, Masaryk had him transferred to a regional university in Olomouc, where he won a reputation as a gifted teacher with high (‘Oxford-style’) standards. He published furiously, read widely and deeply in several languages, and was the joint editor of the cosmopolitan and most highly respected academic journal in the human sciences, the Sociologická revue. His best-known work (published just after he had pushed himself to the point of physical exhaustion and a nervous breakdown) was the two-volume The Crisis of Democracy (Krize democracie [1933]). He was an honest and independent thinker who published brave attacks on the Stalin trials. He was also a constant target of Communist surveillance.72
During the Reichsprotektorat, fearing for his life, he fled to Holland, helped materially by a generous going-away gift from Havel’s father of a box containing gold, platinum and other precious metals. Fischer left behind a family and flat in Brno. It was repeatedly searched during his absence, although (he told Havel) he later learned that the Gestapo stopped visiting only after one of its officers, rummaging through his library in search of something on Schopenhauer, discovered with joy the very book he had been hunting. Fischer also told the young Havel — it was among his favourite stories — how the Nazis treated him less bookishly in Holland. Bearing down on the frail Czech intellectual wanted for questioning in the Reichsprotektorat, the Gestapo hunted him to the port from which he had planned to sail that day across the Channel to England. He hid for five hours in a barn, crouched and crammed into a barrel of hay. During the search, a Gestapo officer reported that there was nothing inside after poking with his bare hands the top of the barrel of hay in which he was hiding. Later that day, sheltered by a local Dutch family, in the middle of a massage to relieve the painful cramps caused by confinement in the barrel, Fischer heard the same Gestapo officers pounding down the door of the house where he had crawled to hide. They ransacked the house, and before leaving thrust bayonets into a curtained wall behind which he was hiding — stab, slash, stab — narrowly missing Fischer’s body in three places.
Upon returning to Czechoslovakia in 1945, he told the young Havel, his social conscience had led him to join the Communist Party — he liked in conversation to distinguish between Lenin and Stalin — but immediately after the coup de Prague he had handed in his Party card, which cost him the rest of his university career. As the sun of socialism brought dawn to the country, Fischer continued his quest for synthesizing his various thoughts, likening the process to the difficulty of constructing a Gothic cathedral. He also remained gregarious, and was often visited by former students, who sometimes brought him gifts of his favourite forest mushrooms. Yet Fischer’s philosophical interests changed. He focused more on the natural sciences, and at one point worked hard to develop a fourth law of thermodynamics. He also became preoccupied with philosophical categories. He was particularly interested in the possibility of overcoming modernist preoccupations through a new emphasis on quality, for instance through the development of a ‘quality democracy’. Fischer practised the quality he preached. He expected much from his pupils, even though during these Stalinist times he had compulsorily lost all but one of them. Whenever Havel visited him, sometimes in Brno for advice and tutoring, Fischer would present the teenage boy with a long list of books to read, including titles in German philosophy. ‘But, Professor, I don’t know how to read German,’ confessed the young Havel during one session. ‘Well, young Mr Havel,’ replied Fischer, ‘you will just have to apply yourself to learn that language.’