-Brandon Bogumil- I walked up to the guy who seemed to be standing there waiting for someone. I was hoping he was Dan, the tour guide I was meeting. The tour had been set up through airbnb experiences. Dan is part of an NGO called politicalprisoners.eu that conducts various tours in Prague to help raise awareness about how people were treated under communism. Luckily, it was Dan, and we started the tour. I met Dan at the Dancing House, though it wasn’t necessarily part of the tour, he told me the site had accidently been bombed during WW2 (the Americans thought it was Dresden). A communist regulation made it very difficult to rebuild, so it was not developed until after the Velvet Revolution with the help of Vaclav Havel, the main focus of the tour.
Right next to the Dancing House was our first stop, the family home of Vaclav Havel. As we walked, and talked, about Havel, I learned that his family was well connected. His grandfather had built the house, and was a real estate developer. His father helped establish a movie studio that became the Hollywood of Eastern Europe, but the Nazis took it over to use for propaganda films. The Soviets did not relinquish control back to the Havel family as they did not like the Havel Family’s capitalist tendencies. The Havels were targeted by the Communist Party in Prague. Vaclav Havel was not allowed to attend university. He could apply, but the Communists had made it very clear that he was not to be accepted. Since he was not allowed to study, as Dan told me, he studied on his own and began writing plays. His father’s connections from building the film studios helped him connect to Divaldo ABC where his plays began to be performed (one of our stops). His plays only brought further attention as they were a critique of communism. He was now seen as a dissident which only encouraged him to work against communism as he started advocating for those who were unjustly persecuted, such as the rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. Dan took me to Wenceslas Square to show me where Havel spoke to the protestors from a balcony during the Velvet Revolution. The sound equipment came from the rock community, in support for Havel’s work in protecting them against communism. The tour was amazing. Dan asked me a lot of questions and we talked a lot about different topics. After finding out I was interested in postmodern buildings in Prague, he showed me a few (like the drn building) and told me about others as well as showing me some of David Cerny’s work and explained its connection to Havel
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |