Michael Žantovský

"I must not omit the fact, which illustrates the colour of the time and his [Václav Havel's] sense of the absurd, that we always had a meeting of the College in the morning, where we all met, if we could get together. And in January 1990, maybe still in February, Václav Havel would start every one of those collegiums with a question: "Was there a coup overnight?' And it wasn't as nonsensical as it might have seemed, because of course we didn't know at the time, it was still gradually coming out, that the army was ready to intervene in November, there were 100,000 Soviet soldiers, we didn't know that in January 1990 the Moscow Politburo was still consulting about whether to intervene militarily against the reunification of Germany, which would have meant intervening against us, because they could hardly get there except through Poland and Czechoslovakia. We didn't know all that, and the network of State Security and their agents was dissolving very slowly. They did get some kind of order from minister Sacher to disperse, but it didn't seem for a long time that they were dispersing, and something always surfaced somewhere, that they had met at some of their workplaces, and anyway, we had only a very vague idea of where all the documents and archives and these things were, which then gradually came to light. So the first priority, of course, was to stabilize and secure the new democratic power. That's why so much attention was paid to the abolition of State Security, to finding the uncatalogued archives and so on."

"But then there was the other problem and that was us. Because Václav Havel, according to his nature and his interest etc., surrounded himself with people who were experts in theatre and architecture and fine arts and translation and psychology etc. But there was not a single economist and not a single lawyer in that team, which are professions that are crucial to the exercise of any political activity today, nor had any of us ever worked in any state office or government office for reasons that are obvious, so we had a very vague notion of it, but fortunately Madeleine Albright arrived very soon as our sort of guardian angel a little bit, and she had actually worked in three presidential administrations in America in the White House, or at that time only two, because Clinton was before her. And so she explained a lot of things to us, helped us. And we sat down in the Vikárka restaurant and she drew for us there, maybe the little drawings are still there somewhere, what the circulation of documents, the filing system looks like. These sort of terribly important but for us completely esoteric things, so that sort of underpinned the performance of the office a little bit."

"We weren't so much thrown into the water as we were drenched by it. First of all, of course, it flooded Václav Havel, who was the only conceivable person who was supposed to be the head of the state and who, as historians know and as I know, didn't want to and constantly set himself some conditions. And one of those conditions was that he would have a few people with him that he knew, that he trusted, that he thought he could work with, and there were I think nine of us in that first moment. Karel Schwarzenberg, of course, was one of them, and he joined later. So nine, the original so-called College of the President. That was us. But we were counting on finding a more or less willing administrative structure and support in that Castle, and it wasn't there, because it looked like all those officials were hiding in those offices, terrified of what we were going to do with them. We had other priorities. And it was terribly difficult to get that office going at all, because actually politics was never done there under Husák, it was done from the waterfront, from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and protocol things were done at the Castle, like receiving ambassadors, visitors and so on, and then of course the tours and all that tourist stuff. So we started looking around and we found that there wasn't a single computer, not a single electric typewriter. At least we didn't find one. And what was worse, there weren't secretaries or assistants or the manpower for those machines. And so we could think of nothing better to do than to go down to that courtyard where the guides who were showing tourists around Prague Castle were, and who we suspected would know some foreign language, so we did. There we persuaded about three young ladies to be secretaries, and a few others were found among our friends."

"The censorship had many levels, it affected me, especially when he [Pavel Bobek] was making records. At Supraphon or Panton, it went through some kind of screening. We had a few problems. I know there's this wonderful song from a famous American western called My Rifle, My Pony and Me. And I translated it into English as My Body, My Soul and Me. And there came up an argument about the soul, like what's the soul doing there. There's a rifle in the original, so we'd still take the rifle, yeah, but not the soul. Well, but we finally got it through somehow and it's on the record. I don't know if it made the whole thing worse or better, but everywhere at the time and everywhere in Bohemia, there was a lot of „Švejk-like passive resistence" behind it, too. Just as it was said that people pretended to work and the regime pretended to pay them, so also in the culture a lot of people pretended to exyecute the surveillance but got bought with a shot or just got persuaded. I knew it more from the translation field, I was already translating a lot at that time, especially modern American literature. And there was a similar process of proofreading, where somebody had to guarantee that it could be published here, because the censors didn't read in English, so that was an advantage. So there was always somebody who wrote that it was an important anti-imperialist work or something like that. And so we published Vonnegut and Styron and Heller - a lot of people who had no idea that they were writing anti-imperialist works."

"I was expelled from grammar school in my first year. I was attending a grammar school, then the Secondary General Education School, on Velvarská, now Evropská Street. Because I was the "smart one", I was already doing school theatre at the age of 14. The so-called Theater in the Basement, which was in the basement of the Central Army House in the Dejvické Square, where I think the officers' club is today, or something like that. It was just a very interesting little theatre in those days. There were a lot of events like that, Jirka Černý used to be a DJ there there. And we had a school theatre, which I, immediately when I got admitted to the school, I joined. First we did some Shakespeare, which I didn't think was modern enough. So I took it up and started staging a Beatniks´ (Beat Generation authors´) poetry that was starting to come to us: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and so on. And I was living it completely, and I could already see myself as a future director and actor. We were preparing, rehearsing. But, what the hell did not happen? Allen Ginsberg came to Prague. We went to see him at Viola and he drew us a fish and it was just amazing and he was reading Howl at the Faculty of Arts at the time and it was just breathtaking. And then they voted him King of Majáles [students May celebration]. And then he was expelled from Czechoslovakia. Because, according to the communist authorities, he had been allegedly seducing underage boys to some games. At that time we had already rehearsed everything and Honza Zábrana gave me unpublished translations of Ginsberg, which we were read there and so on. And our school headmistress, who was a convinced communist, although three years later she also became a reformer, I think, put it all together and simply realized that our theatre rehearsals in the little theatre and everything we were doing were just a cover for some apparently homosexual orgies and so on. And I was just kicked out of that school. Parents not wanting me there and so on. So I failed in my theatre career. And fortunately my sister, who unlike me was a model student all her life, a pupil and everybody praised her and so on, so she was studying at the Gymnázium [grammar school] Na Dlouhém lánu, today it's the Gymnázium Arabská. And there they took pity on me, on the renegade, and they admitted me there, and somehow I made it to graduation."

"It meant that I had a job for which I was paid and that I would go... I was gathering the latest news from that time, both official news... At that time, at the Government Office, the then spokesman for Prime Minister Adamec's government, Mr Pavel, would sometimes hold some press conferences, so I would go there to ask intrusive questions. But I also had channels and relations or contacts with the unofficial opposition leaders, and I also wrote about that, or we wrote the bigger stories together with my colleague Michael Weiss, who would came from Vienna. But the main thing that my work consisted of - in 1988 and especially 1989 - was running up and down Wenceslas Square, avoiding truncheons and writing about what had just happened that day. I like to recall it, because I say that I never had such a physical condition in my life as that year. And of course it was touch-and-go at times. But we were part of a group of foreign correspondents, and in our group was especially important Jolyon Naegele, the Voice of America correspondent at the time, who still lives in Prague. He was important because he had a transistor radio. We all had that, but unlike us, he also had a very short wavelength frequency on that transistor radio, which was used by the police. So we could listen to the cops. Of course, they were speaking in coded language, but not that complicated, so after a while we knew very well that if we heard 'we are going to the stadium', the stadium was Wenceslas Square, and we knew that we had to retreat to some place where we could possibly get out from. And we were a little bit prepared for them."