Abstract
‘Black List’ published by Czechoslovak Ministry of Culture in 1971, including Ludvík Vaculík.
Czech writer
In April 1988 I wrote an article for Index on Censorship describing my lengthy and all-encompassing experience of censorship under the old regime. I ended it with the view that censorship taught us in that era to write inventively and our readers to read shrewdly. Then, though, I mentioned censorship as concerning people writing or talking to the general public. But limiting freedom can also affect other forms of expression: painting, filmmaking and even music. We saw that with our own eyes. It even affected fashion and hairstyles.
I actually encountered censorship for the first time as a youth at a Bata Shoe Company residential block when I wrote something meant to amuse my friends at a meeting of the collective. I think it was in 1943, the fifth year of the war. Food, clothing and shoes were all rationed. As a result, there were few pairs of shoes to be had, which was felt even by us who helped to manufacture them. At the time I was allocated to leather working boots with rubber soles: I hammered little iron horseshoes into the soles. It was decent work.
In the summer of that year we received an order at the young workers’ hall of residence that we had to wear wooden sandals. They were cheap clogs with straps. Not really bad to walk in. As a rule, instructors stood at the residence’s exit and checked us over: we had to wear a tie or an open-necked shirt, clean boots, a hat (in winter) and a company emblem (B in a circle). We also had to have those wooden clogs. They clattered on the cobblestoned pavements and sometimes they were slippy. I am not sure where I came up with the song:
When the first cobbler was born, a jolly wheeze it was, Everyone rushed to see the wee shoe-making boss. A shoe-making wizard without a doubt Making sure we don’t find some barefooted lout. I then added the following: We Bata-folk make countless sounds shoes to flog, But surprise surprise we toddle off just in a clog. If this carries on we won’t be clattering much longer, We’ll take the bull by the horns, don’t think we’ll linger. And sing: Barefoot across Labour Square you’ll hear our soft taps. After all, we’re no Bata pioneering saps.
The song was in the tune of a Czech traditional folk song. My success was assured! The instructor, though, took me aside and told me I was witty but it wasn’t the right thing to do. I should mull over as to why the order was given. Responsible people are trying to find a solution to the problem of shortages. Clogs are not a shortcoming fashion that deserves to be mocked. Besides which, to take the mickey out of one’s own company? And I shouldn’t take it as censorship. I think that it was that moment that this started to gnaw at me: I’d discovered self-censorship…
Today, when we have an almost unhindered freedom of expression, we see much more in the way of complaints of censorship than when it wasn’t allowed. I receive readers’ letters at the magazine I edit with complaints that a certain newspaper has refused to publish their article. They are always run-of-the-mill and banal pieces of general abuse (sometimes valid) lacking the realisation that the subject is in fact being written about all over the place.
Today’s adorable free speech attracts attention and seduces susceptible people to never-ending babble… I think that too little attention is given to another freedom: the freedom to act. ❒
Translated by Pavel Theiner