A Scandal in Bohemia

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/opinion/a-scandal-in-bohemia.html

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PRAGUE — A MIDDLE-AGED man sits in a cafe, sipping absinthe, the newspaper before him untouched. He stares at a shapely young woman perched mysteriously on the corner of his table. Naked as Eve, she is a translucent green. A waiter hovers nearby. Painted in 1901, Viktor Oliva’s “Absinthe Drinker” hangs in the venerable Cafe Slavia, which opened in 1884 and was a redoubt of dissident artists, from Vaclav Havel to Jiri Kolar, during the Communist era. Its temptress seems a fitting muse for a city where the absurdities of the public realm have often encouraged a retreat into the alcoholic and the erotic.

Last month, Czechs were thrust back into the world of the surreal. On June 12 and 13, some 400 police officers raided the offices of Prime Minister Petr Necas, the Defense Ministry, Prague’s city hall, other government offices, and several banks and homes. Stores of gold, and some $8 million in cash, were carted off. Nine senior officials — including the prime minister’s chief of staff, Jana Nagyova, and the present and former directors of military intelligence — were arrested and charged with corruption and misuse of power.

Four days later, Mr. Necas, leader of the center-right Civic Democrats, resigned. This week, prosecutors asked Parliament to strip him of legal immunity, a signal that he would face corruption charges. His closest aide, Ms. Nagyova, has been accused of ordering military intelligence agents to spy on her boss’s estranged wife and of offering jobs at state-owned companies to three lawmakers who had opposed a government austerity plan. President Milos Zeman has named Jiri Rusnok, a former finance minister from the opposition Social Democrats, to run a caretaker government until the next election.

Some observers are calling it the most serious crisis since the toppling of Communism in 1989. But taking the longer view leads to a different impression.

Just 30 years ago, waiters at Cafe Slavia might well have been working for the secret police, whose headquarters were just five minutes away. In 1968, after Soviet tanks crushed Alexander Dubcek’s short-lived Prague Spring, the writer Ivan Klima was interrogated there. He recalled how an earlier writer, Jan Neruda, had described it as “a run-down, destitute, gloomy place.” Mr. Klima was strangely comforted by the fact that the premises had not changed since the days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

Prague abounded at the time with unusually well-educated furnace stokers, window cleaners and garbage collectors. The Communist dictator Gustav Husak had purged the professions and universities, shunting the intelligentsia into manual jobs that left them plenty of time for dreaming. With a Czech eye for deadpan irony, the policy was officially known as “normalization.” A contemporary joke ran: “Why do Czech policemen go in threes? One to read, one to write, and one to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.” Most Czechs took Voltaire’s advice from “Candide”: they tended their gardens, assuring anyone who asked that it was the best of all possible worlds. Others, like the characters in Milan Kundera’s novels, turned to the private consolations of the erotic.

This was an Alice-in-Wonderland landscape in which art exhibitions were staged in abandoned quarries, plays presented in homes, and seminars held in cafes. Members of the Devetsil — the astonishingly prolific group of writers, artists, architects, composers and dramatists who populated Prague’s avant-garde scene during the 1920s — used to drink at Cafe Slavia, too. “We used to sit there by the window facing the embankment and drink absinthe,” recalled the poet Jaroslav Seifert, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1984. “It was a little flirtation with Paris, nothing more.”

Czech governments were not in the habit of falling during the periods of German and Soviet control. The moments when governments did collapse were turning points: the 1938 Munich Agreement, which gave Germany control of the Sudetenland and forced President Edvard Benes to flee to the England that had deserted him; the 1948 Communist coup, which put Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain; the 1968 Soviet invasion, which ended Dubcek’s attempts at reform; and the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which swept Mr. Havel into Prague Castle and made the Slavia’s absinthe-fueled dreams come true.

As serious as Mr. Necas’s situation is, what’s striking is that it is only a government that has collapsed — not a political system, nor an ideology. The democracy established in 1989 by Havel’s improbable cast of dissidents has now outlasted the storied interwar republic of the philosopher Tomas G. Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s founder. The Czech Republic (it and Slovakia parted ways, peacefully, in 1993), has become just another member of the European Union, just another country in Central Europe. In light of Czech history, the latest scandal should be celebrated for its banality, its absurdity. It might just as well be happening in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy.

One nagging detail, though, reminds us of times not so long past. The disgraced Ms. Nagyova, the prime minister’s adviser, may also, rumor has it, be his lover. And she evidently used her authority to order surveillance of his wife — a discomfiting (if bungled) maneuver. Prague may no longer be a mirror in which we watch European dreams unravel, but it has not wholly surrendered its surreal charms.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p> Derek Sayer, a professor of history at Lancaster University, is the author, most recently, of “Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History.”