To jaro v Praze - That Spring in Prague: Bilingual Czech-English edition - Softcover

Wills, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798376069295

Publisher: Independently published, 2023

Synopsis

I took the photographs in this little book during late March and early April 1968, when I was one of a party of a dozen students from Edinburgh University who travelled by Channel ferry and train to Prague for a three-week exchange with the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. The trip was arranged as part of the ‘Edinburgh Conversations’, established to keep academic contacts open between the West and the Communist East during the (first) Cold War.
We arrived to find many university classes suspended. In their place there was an endless tumult of seminars, meetings and teach-ins, where students, staff and politicians debated ‘Socialism with a Human Face’, the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s brave but doomed attempt to loosen the dictatorship that had stifled all dissent since the coup of 1948.
When we weren’t at meetings we were at the theatre, seeing politically provocative productions by playwrights such as Vaclav Havel that would have been impossible a few years earlier. There were also films (notably ‘Closely Watched Trains’ by Jiři Menzel) and exhibitions by painters such as František Kupka, who had been out of favour for decades.
In the evenings there was a lot of pivo [beer] in the student bars as well as private parties where we foreign visitors were welcomed into the family homes of our student hosts – something unthinkable under the dictatorship before (and for a long while after) the ‘Prague Spring’.
In among it all I found time to wander the streets of Prague, taking pictures with the old Zeiss-Ikon Contina camera my father had given me. There are a few shots of Marxist students from the West who were trying to convince our Czech student colleagues that reformed ‘Euro-communism’ was a wonderful idea. But mostly I just tried to record the ordinary life of this beautiful city in the midst of political upheaval.
We made good friends and promised to write, but four months after we left the Prague Spring it withered and died in the August invasion by ‘fraternal’ Soviet tanks. Edinburgh University advised us that contacting our new Czech friends might put them in danger, so we didn’t.
Many years later, when my son married a Czech, I went back to Prague and met again one of the students I’d known in 1968, Katia Paderlikova. These days I visit Prague as often as I can, to see my grandsons. Katia and I sometimes have coffee in a café near the Clementinum, to talk over old times and what has been achieved, and not achieved, since those momentous weeks over 50 years ago.

Czech translation by Alfie Wills:

Fotografie v této malé knížce jsem pořídil během konce března a začátku dubna 1968, kdy jsem se jako jeden z dvanácti studentů Edinburské univerzity vypravil nejprve trajektem přes La Manche a poté vlakem do Prahy na třítýdenní výměnný pobyt na Filozofické fakultě Univerzity Karlovy. Zájezd byl zorganizován v rámci „edinburských konverzací” (“Edinburgh Conversations”), které měly zajistit akademické styky mezi západem a komunistickým východem.

Po příjezdu jsme zjistili, že se značné množství hodin na fakultě nekoná. Nahrazovala je nekonečná vřava seminářů, schůzek a neformálních přednášek vedená studenty, vyučujícími a politiky, v rámci kterých se vedly debaty o „socialismu s lidskou tváří,” odvážným ale neúspěšným pokusem Komunistické strany Československa uvolnit poměry v diktatuře, která od převratu v roce 1948 potlačovala veškeré náznaky disentu.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798376069295
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 46