Jan Werich (Czech pronunciation: [ˈjan ˈvɛrɪx]) (6 February 1905, Prague – 31 October 1980, Prague) was a Czech actor, playwright and writer.

Life[link]

Between 1916 to 1924 he attended "reálné gymnasium" (equivalent to high school) in Křemencová Street in Prague (where his future partner, Jiří Voskovec, also studied). He studied law at the Law School of Charles University from 1924 to 1927, from which he made an early departure to begin his artistic career and forge one of the most important partnerships of his life.

They opened on April 19, 1927 with Vest Pocket Revue in Umělecká beseda on Malá Strana in Prague. July 1, 1929, Jan Werich married Zdenka Houskova. 1929 - first show "Líčení se odročuje" of Osvobozené divadlo theatre in main location "U Nováků Palace". In this location they continued until the very end of their theatre in 1938.

His collaboration with theatrical talent Jiří Voskovec and musical legend Jaroslav Ježek lasted for more than 10 years between the two world wars. Their partnership was a platform for their numerous lively left-wing political satires. The trio's work took inspiration from Dada, with its love of the absurd, a reaction against bourgeois values and the horrors of World War I. The two intellectual clowns attacked the inanities of totalitarianism as well as the mistakes of democracy.

In the bitter reality leading to the Second World War and the closure of Czechoslovak theatres Werich, Voskovec and Ježek were forced into exile in the United States in 1938, where Voskovec and Ježek remained for the rest of their lives. But Jan Werich returned to his homeland five years later. Upon his return to Czechoslovakia he started a partnership with Miroslav Horníček and also worked with famous puppeteer Jiří Trnka to write modern fairy tales. With his new partner Miroslav Horníček at his side, he re-staged many of the plays he had created with Voskovec in the 30s but set them in the political content specific to the time.

Jan Werich made his debut in film and television. Movies he starred in have kept their mythic status in Czech popular culture to this day. They include Byl jednou jeden král (English: Once Upon a Time There Was a King), which was released in 1955, and made many political compromises to appease the communist censors. Although Czechs saw the caricatures in the film as nothing more than communist propaganda, the film was colourful and had all the ingredients of a good fairy tale. The 1960s were a peak in Werich's career. From the creation of the ABC Theatre he moved to the City Theatres of Prague and then to the Musical Theatre of Karlin and Nusle. He was the original choice to play the villain Blofeld in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice released in 1967; however, after several scenes were shot, Werich fell ill and was replaced by Donald Pleasence. In the TV documentary Best Bond the director of the film explained that they had to replace Werich because of his poor English and his benign appearance that made people think of him as Santa Claus. Jan Werich signed the pro-reform manifesto 2000 Words in 1968. After the Soviet invasion of 1968, he and his wife immediately fled to Vienna along with many other Czechs at the time. After long deliberations he realized he had to go back, saying that his "home was his castle" and realizing that if he stayed abroad he would never work again. He returned to Czechoslovakia in early 1969. Werich met with Voskovec for the very last time in Vienna, Austria in 1974. He had limited opportunities to perform in public until his death in 1980. His last public appearance was in Prague's Lucerna in 1977.

He did not sign the Charter 77 proclamation, organized by Václav Havel, but in the end he succumbed to pressure from the communist authorities and in order to be able to work again, publicly proclaimed his full loyalty to the regime, by attending "Anti-charta77" meetings and even signing a petition denouncing Charter 77. He later claimed he was tricked into signing and that he did not really know what his signature was for, as the original attendance document signed open entry was potentially substituted for a later "declaration of faith".

Since Jan Werich's death in 1980, he has remained immensely popular, and many of his most famous lines have gone down into popular legend.

Works[link]

Theatre[link]

(in cooperation with Jiří Voskovec)

• Vest Pocket Revue - 1927

• Smoking Revue - 1928

• Si pořádně zařádit (Having a Spree) - 1928; based upon Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen

• Gorilla ex Machina - 1928

• Kostky jsou vrženy (The Dice are Cast) - 1929

• Premiéra skafandr (The Diving Suit) - 1929

• Líčení se odročuje (The Trial is Adjourned) - 1929

• Fata Morgana - 1929

• Ostrov Dynamit (Dynamite Island) - 1930

• Sever proti Jihu (North Against South) - 1930

• Don Juan and Co. - 1931

• Golem - 1931

• Caesar – 1932

• Robin zbojník (Robin Hood) - 1932

• Svět za mřížemi (A World Behind Bars) - 1933 (script collaboration also with Adolf Hoffmeister)

• Osel a stín (Ass and Shadow) - 1933

• Slaměný klobouk (The Straw Hat) - 1933; based upon Labiche's The Italian Straw Hat

• Kat a blázen (Executioner and Fool) - 1934; an anti-fascist work and critique (the German Embassy protested that this play insulted their head of state, and as a result, Werich and Voskovec were expelled from the theatre "U Nováků")

• Vždy s úsměvem (Keep Smiling) - 1934

• Panoptikum (The Wax Museum) - 1935

• Balada z hadrů – (Rag Ballad) - 1935; draws from the works of François Villon .

• Nebe na Zemi (Heaven on Earth) - 1936; based on Fletcher's The Spanish Curate

• Rub a líc (Heads or Tails) - 1936; later made into the Svět patří nám film

• Panorama - 1937

• Těžká Barbora – (Heavy Barbora) - 1937; depicts a conflict between two fictional nations, Eidamští ("Edams") and Yberlandští ("Yberlanders"), the latter attacking the former, the former then employ two soldiers (Werich and Voskovec), that build a cheese canon (Těžká Barbora)

• Pěst na oko – (A Fist in the Eye) - 1938; humans refuse to take a lesson from history and constantly repeat the same mistake

• Divotvorný hrnec - (The Wondermaking Pot) - 1946; a musical comedy based on Finian's Rainbow by 'Yip' Harburg and Fred Saidy

Films[link]

• Pudr a benzín – 1931 (Powder and Gas)
• Peníze nebo život – 1932 ((Your) Money or (Your) Life; a Czech threat used by violent robbers)
• U nás v Kocourkově – 1932 (In Our Kocourkov; Kocourkov is a fictitious "city of fools", Czech equivalent to Gotham)
• Hej rup! – 1934 (the name is an exclamation or command to pull, "Heave-ho", in English also distributed under title Workers, Let's Go)
• Svět patří nám – 1937 (The World Belongs to Us)
• Pád Berlína - 1949 (The Fall of Berlin; as Hermann Göring in a USSR production made in Prague)
• Císařův pekař a pekařův císař – 1951 (The Emperor and the Golem)
• Tajemství krve – 1953 (The Secret of Blood)
• Byl jednou jeden král – 1954 (Once Upon a Time There Was a King)
• Vzorný kinematograf Haška Jaroslava – 1955 (An Exemplary Cinematograph of Jaroslav Hašek; a tongue-in-cheek title)
• Hudba z Marsu – 1955 (Music from Mars; a cameo appearance as one of the people in the audience)
• Stvoření světa – 1957 (The Creation of the World; animated French/Czech classic narrated by Werich in rhymes)
• Baron Prášil – 1961 (a Czech take on Baron Münchhausen)
• Šest otázek pro Jana Wericha – 1964 (Six Questions for Jan Werich)
• Až přijde kocour – 1968 (The Cassandra Cat)
• Pan Tau a Claudie – 1970 (Mister Tau and Claudia)
• Muž, který rozdával smích – 1970 (The Man Who Spread Laughter)
• Pan Tau a cesta kolem světa – 1972 (Mister Tau and the Journey Around the World)
• Hledá se pan Tau – 1972 (Mister Tau Is Being Sought)
• Dva mrazíci (The Two Frosts)

Television works[link]

• Medvěd – 1961 (The Bear)

• Slzy, které svět nevidí – 1962 (The Tears That the World Sees Not)

• Kočár nejsvětější svátosti – 1962 (The Carriage of the Most Holy Sacrament)

• Uspořená libra – 1964 (A Saved Pound); based upon A Pound on Demand by Seán O'Casey

• Král a žena – 1967 (The King and a Woman)

• Magnetické vlny léčí (Magnetic Waves Cure)

Literary works[link]

• Fimfárum - fairy tales not only for children

• Italské prázdniny (Italian Holliday)

• Potlach

• Falstaffovo babí léto

• Lincoln 1933

• Povídky nejen o psech - published posthumunously, a revival of his former wish to write a story book about dogs. There were not enough stories however and so it was renamed and other stories were added - some of them has been previously published and some are originals, from manuscripts and letters.

External links[link]

• Werichovci - fan club website
• [1] Jan Werich about Alexander Dubček (1968, in Czech)

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Alexander Dubček
File:Dubček - fair use.jpg
Dubček during speech with other politicians
First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
In office 5 January 1968 – 17 April 1969
Preceded by	Antonín Novotný
Succeeded by	Gustáv Husák
Personal details
Born	(1921-11-27)27 November 1921 Uhrovec, Czechoslovakia (present day Slovakia)
Died	7 November 1992(1992-11-07) (aged 70) Prague, Czechoslovakia (present day Czech Republic)
Nationality	Slovak
Political party	Communist Party of Slovakia (1939-1948) Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1948–1970) Public Against Violence (1989-1992) Social Democratic Party of Slovakia (1992)
Signature

Alexander Dubček (Slovak pronunciation: [ˈalɛksandɛr ˈduptʃɛk]; 27 November 1921 – 7 November 1992) was a Slovak politician and briefly leader of Czechoslovakia (1968–1969), famous for his attempt to reform the communist regime during the Prague Spring. Later, after the overthrow of the government in 1989, he was Chairman of the federal Czecho-Slovak parliament.

Early life[link]

Dubček was born in Uhrovec, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia), and raised in the Kyrgyz SSR of the Soviet Union (now Kyrgyzstan) as a member of the Esperantist industrial cooperative Interhelpo. His father, Štefan, moved from Chicago to Czechoslovakia after World War I, when he refused to serve in the military for his pacifism. Alexander Dubček was conceived in Chicago, but born after the family relocated to Czechoslovakia. When Alexander Dubček was three, the family moved to the Soviet Union, in part to help build socialism and in part because jobs were scarce in Czechoslovakia. In 1938 the family returned to Czechoslovakia.

During the Second World War, Alexander Dubček joined the underground resistance against the wartime pro-German Slovak state headed by Jozef Tiso. In August 1944, Dubček fought in the Slovak National Uprising and was wounded. His brother, Július, was killed.

Political career[link]

During the war, Alexander Dubček joined the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS), which had been created after the formation of the Slovak state and in 1948 was transformed into the Slovak branch of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ).

After the war, he steadily rose through the ranks in Communist Czechoslovakia. From 1951 to 1955 he was a member of the National Assembly, the parliament of Czechoslovakia. In 1953, he was sent to the Moscow Political College, where he graduated in 1958. In 1955 joined the Central Committee of the Slovak branch and in 1962 became a member of the presidium. In 1958 he also joined the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which he served as a secretary from 1960 to 1962 and as a member of the presidium after 1962. From 1960 to 1968 he once more was a member of the federal parliament.

In 1963, a power struggle in the leadership of the Slovak branch unseated Karol Bacílek and Pavol David, hard-line allies of Antonín Novotný, First Secretary of the KSČ and president of Czechoslovakia. In their place, a new generation of Slovak Communists took control of party and state organs in Slovakia, led by Alexander Dubček, who became First Secretary of the Slovak branch of the party.

Under Dubček's leadership, Slovakia began to evolve toward political liberalization. Because Novotný and his Stalinist predecessors had denigrated Slovak "bourgeois nationalists", most notably Gustáv Husák and Vladimír Clementis, in the 1950s, the Slovak branch worked to promote Slovak identity. This mainly took the form of celebrations and commemorations, such as the 150th birthdays of 19th century leaders of the Slovak National Revival Ľudovít Štúr and Jozef Miloslav Hurban, the centennial of the Matica slovenská in 1963, and the twentieth anniversary of the Slovak National Uprising. At the same time, the political and intellectual climate in Slovakia became freer than that in the Czech Lands. This was exemplified by the rising readership of Kultúrny život, the weekly newspaper of the Union of Slovak Writers, which published frank discussions of liberalization, federalization and democratization, written by the most progressive or controversial writers – both Slovak and Czech. Kultúrny život consequently became the first Slovak publication to gain a wide following among Czechs.

Prague Spring[link]

Monument to Alexander Dubček

Under Communism, the Czechoslovak economy in the 1960s was in serious decline and the imposition of central control from Prague disappointed local Communists while the destalinization program caused further disquiet. In October 1967, a number of reformers, most notably Ota Šik and Alexander Dubček, took action: they challenged First Secretary Antonín Novotný at a Central Committee meeting. Novotný faced a mutiny in the Central Committee, so he secretly invited Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, to make a whirlwind visit to Prague in December 1967 in order to shore up the embattled Novotný. When Brezhnev arrived in Prague and met with the Central Committee members, he was stunned to learn of the extent of the opposition to Novotný, leading Brezhnev to withhold support and paving the way for the Central Committee to remove Novotný. Dubček became the new First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on 5 January 1968.

The period following Novotný's downfall became known as the Prague Spring. During this time, Dubček and other reformers sought to liberalize the Communist regime, creating "socialism with a human face". Though this loosened the party's grip on the country, Dubček remained a devoted Communist and intended to preserve the party's rule. However, during the Prague Spring, he and other reform-minded Communists sought to win popular support for the Communist regime by eliminating its worst, most repressive features, allowing greater freedom of expression and tolerating political and social organizations not under Communist control. "Dubcek! Svoboda!" became the popular refrain of student demonstrations during this period. Yet Dubček found himself in an increasingly untenable position. The program of reform gained momentum, leading to pressures for further liberalization and democratization. At the same time, hard-line Communists in Czechoslovakia and the leaders of other Warsaw Pact countries pressured Dubček to rein in the Prague Spring. Though Dubček wanted to keep control of the reform movement, he refused to resort to any draconian measures to do so.

The Soviet leadership tried to stop or limit the changes in the ČSSR through a series of negotiations. The Soviet Union agreed to bilateral talks with Czechoslovakia in July at Čierna nad Tisou, near the Slovak-Soviet border. At the meeting, Dubček tried to reassure the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact leaders that he was still friendly to Moscow, arguing that the reforms were an internal matter. He thought he had learned an important lesson from the failing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, believing the Kremlin would allow him a free hand in pursuing domestic reform as long as Czechoslovakia remained a faithful ally of the Soviet Union, under Communist rule. Despite Dubček's continuing efforts to stress these commitments, Brezhnev and other Warsaw Pact leaders remained wary.

Downfall[link]

Alexander Dubček in 1989

On the night of 20–21 August 1968, Warsaw Pact forces entered Czechoslovakia. The occupying armies quickly seized control of Prague and the Central Committee's building, taking Dubček and other reformers into Soviet custody. But before they were arrested, Dubček urged the people not to resist. Later in the day, Dubček and the others were taken to Moscow on a Soviet military transport aircraft (reportedly one of the aircraft used in the Soviet invasion).

Despite the inspired nonviolent resistance of the Czech and Slovak population, the reformers had little hope of holding out against Soviet pressure and ultimately were forced to accede to Soviet demands, signing the Moscow protocols. (Only František Kriegel refused to sign.)

Dubček and most of the reformers were returned to Prague on 27 August and Dubček retained his post as the party's first secretary for a while. Indeed, the achievements of the Prague Spring were not reversed overnight, but over a period of several months.

In January 1969, Dubček was hospitalized in Bratislava complaining of a cold and had to cancel a speech. Rumours sprang up that his illness was radiation sickness and that it was caused by radioactive strontium being placed in his soup during his stay in Moscow in an attempt to kill him. However, a U.S. intelligence report discounted this for lack of evidence.^[1]

Dubček was forced to resign as first secretary in April 1969 following the Czechoslovak Hockey Riots. He was re-elected to the Federal Assembly (as the federal parliament was now called) and became its Speaker. He was later sent as ambassador to Turkey (1969–70), allegedly in the hope that he would defect to the West, which however did not occur. In 1970, he was expelled from the Communist party and lost his seats in the Slovak parliament (which he had held continuously since 1964) and the Federal Assembly.

Private citizen[link]

After his expulsion from the party, Dubček worked in the Forestry Service in Slovakia. He remained a popular figure among the Slovaks and Czechs he encountered on the job, using this reverence to procure scarce and hard-to-find materials for his workplace. Dubček and his wife, Anna, continued to live in a comfortable villa in a nice neighborhood in Bratislava. In 1988, Dubček was allowed to travel to Italy to accept an honorary doctorate from Bologna University, and while there he gave an interview with Italian newspaper L'Unità, his first public remarks to the press since 1970. Dubček's appearance and interview helped to return him to international prominence.

In 1989, he was awarded the annual Sakharov Prize in its second year of existence.^[2]

Velvet Revolution[link]

During the Velvet Revolution of 1989, he supported the Public against Violence (VPN) and the Civic Forum. On the night of 24 November, Dubček appeared with Václav Havel on a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square, He was greeted with uproarious applause from the throngs of protesters below, embraced as a symbol of democratic freedom. He disappointed the crowd somewhat by calling the revolution a chance to continue the work he started 20 years earlier and prune out what was wrong with Communism. By this time, however, the demonstrators in Prague wanted nothing to do with Communism of any sort. Later that night, Dubček was on stage with Havel at the Laterna Magika theater, the headquarters of Civic Forum, when the entire leadership of the Communist Party resigned—in effect, ending Communist rule in Czechoslovakia.^[3]

Dubček was elected Chairman of the Federal Assembly (the Czechoslovak Parliament) on 28 December 1989, and re-elected in 1990 and 1992.

At the time of the overthrow of Communist party rule, Dubček described the Velvet Revolution as a victory for his humanistic socialist outlook. In 1990, he received the International Humanist Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

In 1992, he became leader of the Social Democratic Party of Slovakia and represented that party in the Federal Assembly. At that time, Dubček passively supported the union between Czechs and Slovaks in a single Czecho-Slovak federation against the (ultimately successful) push towards an independent Slovak state.

Death[link]

Dubček's grave

Dubček died on 7 November 1992, as a result of injuries sustained in car crash that took place on 1 September on the Czech D1 highway, near Humpolec.^[4][5] He was buried in Slávičie údolie cemetery in Bratislava, Slovakia.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Works by or about Alexander Dubček in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Hope Dies Last The Autobiography of Alexander Dubcek by Alexander Dubcek (Author), Jiří Hochman (Editor, Translator), Kodansha Europe (1993), ISBN 1-56836-000-2.