Václav Havel went from brewery worker and prisoner to president
Barred from university for his family's wealth, Václav Havel became a playwright who mocked communist bureaucracy, then a dissident who rolled beer barrels at a brewery and spent nearly four years in prison. In December 1989 the Federal Assembly voted unanimously to make him president of Czechoslovakia.
Prague was home to the family Havel was born into on 5 October 1936, a clan famous for business and culture; his grandfather built an entertainment complex on Wenceslas Square and his father developed the Barrandov Terraces. Under the communist state that background counted against him. In the early 1950s he apprenticed as a chemical lab assistant while studying at night, was refused entry to humanities programmes, and left an economics course after two years. After military service he found work in Prague theatre.
Absurdist plays such as The Garden Party and The Memorandum made his name by satirising the system. During the first week of the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion he broadcast commentary on Radio Free Czechoslovakia from Liberec, and after the Prague Spring was crushed he was banned from the theatre and took a job at the Krakonoš brewery in Trutnov. He co-founded Charter 77, and his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless described citizens forced to live within a lie. Watched by the StB secret police, he was jailed several times, longest from 1979 to 1983, and Samuel Beckett dedicated his 1982 play Catastrophe to him.
His Civic Forum helped drive the Velvet Revolution, and he became president on 29 December 1989. Free elections in 1990, the first in 44 years, gave Civic Forum and its Slovak partner a sweeping win. Havel opposed splitting the federation but lost a 1992 re-election bid for lack of Slovak votes, then led the new Czech Republic as its first head of state for a decade, 1993 to 2003, helping dissolve the Warsaw Pact and extend NATO eastward.
Some choices divided Czechs, including a general amnesty for prisoners of the communist era and condemning the expulsion of Sudeten Germans, and by the end he was more popular abroad than at home. He backed the Czech Green Party from 2004 and died on 18 December 2011. Prague's airport took his name in 2012.
Source: Václav Havel
