The dissident president
18/12/2011 · Václav Havel united in his person many roles, one of whom was the president of its largest. Man came to the politics of theater in an attempt to dignity and self respect to stand up to a regime that invited them to life in a lie.
Karl-Peter Schwarz
Vaclav Havel as a presidential candidate during an interview in Prague on 19 December 1989
ince November 1996, when he a malignant tumor and half of the right lung had to be removed, led by Václav Havel, a constant battle against his illness. Any inflammation of the airways it could take days or weeks of the stage on which the man of the theater since December 1989 as president of the ideal successor of the first Czech president Tomas Masaryk played a large role in his life.
Havel was born on 5 October 1936, grew up in Prague as a child of upper-class parents, united in his person many different roles - the writers and playwrights, dissidents and political prisoners, the president and visionary of another, "better world".
The gymnasium was him because of his "bourgeois origins" was forbidden, he worked as a laboratory and put the Abitur at a night school. His first public appearance was as a twenty-year-old at a meeting of young writers in Dobris. In politics led him to the test, dignity and self respect to stand up to a regime that invited them to life in a lie. In 1968 he joined the "club of dedicated non-party", which fought against the Communist monopoly on power.
Vaclav Havel, then speaker of the Czechoslovak dissident group Charter 77, 26 May 1978 in his home in Hragecek
After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact, Havel repeatedly publicly turned against the so-called "normalization", including in 1975 in an open letter to President Gustav Husak. He was one of the founders of the "Charter 77", in 1977, 1978 and 1979 sentenced to prison last four and a half years in prison in 1983 he was released early for health reasons. He was last arrested in January 1989 after a rally in memory of Jan Palach self-immolation in Prague.
The "velvet revolution" of November 1989 brought Havel at the forefront of the anti-communist movement. At the turn he was already in the circle of his friends at Prague Castle. The sudden transition from dissident to president zeitigte adjustment problems, which he subsequently reduce it, but could never quite overcome. Two measures of the first days of his presidency, a general amnesty and an apology for the displaced illustrated the difference between ethical standards and political reality.
2003 drew his biggest opponents of the Prague Castle
Painful learning made the block opponents and pacifists to a supporter of NATO, were the convinced Tschechoslowakisten destroying experience of the Federation, on whose existence he had first linked his political fate - appear to be in 1993 as president to the forefront of the Czech Republic.
A broad interpretation of its powers Havel led to an ongoing conflict with the government and parliament, he again appealed to the Constitutional Court appeal against laws. The fight against the normality of a parliamentary democracy has lost Havel. 2003 ended his last term. At the Prague Castle Václav Klaus moved his greatest political opponents. On 18 December Havel died at the age of 75 years in the vicinity of Prague.
