With a Passion for Freedom

"Pavel Hroch’s photographs capture the revolutionary period springing from November 1989 as well as the era of transformation, the start of the 1990s, when things happened in Czechoslovakia that had previously been impossible and unimaginable, a period of joy and carnivalesque festivity, a period of visions, hopes and a great and perhaps somewhat naïve belief in the future. Twenty-five years later, the photographs hold a mirror up to the manner in which those dreams and visions have been realised and to where we find ourselves today."

Jáchym Topol, With a Passion for Freedom, 2014

On 27 Oct. 1988, a “gathering celebrating the 70th anniversary of the establishment of Czechoslovakia” took place on Wenceslas Square. Among the sparse crowd of employees of various state companies who had been ordered to attend, the trained eye could sense the uncommonly large number of state security officers in “inconspicuous” street clothing.

Also attending the Velvet Revolution with their children and baby carriages were the members of Prague Mothers, an organization founded in May 1989 by a group of women dissatisfied, among other things, with the city’s awful smog. They also demanded the closure of the cable car on Sněžka Mountain.

“The photographs were not taken by a ‘man of the events’, but are an authentic expression of the interest felt by a beginning photographer, a young man dazzled by the sudden turning point when the crust of the Soviet empire cracked as if under the pressure of natural laws, a student demonstrator quite certainly possessed with a passion for freedom, an anthropological constant unique to homo sapiens living under the most compassionate as well as most insidious regimes.“

Jáchym Topol, With a Passion for Freedom, 2014

During the November revolution, a student delegation met at the riot police headquarters at Jarov with the commanders of the police crackdown on Národní třída. As they looked over a diagram of the incident, the officers tried to sound remorseful, uttering sentences such as “We didn’t mean for it to be like that” and “We have kids your age, too.”

On 21 November 1989, Václav Havel is preparing to give his first speech to demonstrators on Wenceslas Square from the balcony of the Melantrich building (in the foreground is Václav Malý, today an Auxiliary Bishop at the Archdiocese of Prague).

A general strike was held on 27 November 1989.

During November 1989, sculptor Olbram Zoubek symbolically donated Jan Palach’s death mask to the students of Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. Zoubek had made the mask secretly in 1968, and had kept one copy hidden in his basement throughout the post-1968 period of “Normalization”.

On 25 November 1989, a mass was held at St. Vitus Cathedral in honor of the canonization of St. Agnes of Bohemia. The mass was celebrated by Cardinal Tomášek.

“Hroch’s personal and ‘student’ photographs of that revolutionary time overflow with emotional force and betray a sharp, unsentimental eye. For those who were there, they breathe fresh life into and help to reinforce important memories; for the new generation, they can serve as a tunnel into history – a gateway to a time so recent that it is still happening even through it is a legendary time, material for textbooks. Joy and hope were the era’s most common mantras, while Hroch delves into the strangest underground pits in order to capture even the moist and frightening shadows dripping into the emerging reality.”

Jáchym Topol, With a Passion for Freedom, 2014

In May 1991, the legendary American alternative theater ensemble Bread and Puppet Theater performed Columbus: A New World Order at the Realistic Theatre (today the Švanda Theatre) and in the surrounding public space.

On 20 January 1990 Frank Zappa arrived at Ruzyně Airport (today Václav Havel Airport). He was met at the airport by several hundred fans, and was very surprised that a country about which he knew next to nothing was home to such a large fan club. When asked what impressions he took home from his meeting with the legendary figures of the Czech underground, he answered that it was very nice, but that he didn’t understand why those nice people drink so much.

On the morning of Friday, 11 January 1991, uniformed and plainclothes police officers took over the ‘House of the Wild Man’ on Sněmovní Street in the Lesser Town. The building, which is owned by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, was being used by the Society for the Development of Culture and Society / Linhart Foundation, despite the fact that the organization’s temporary lease had expired. The relatively tense situation ended the same evening with an agreement that the building would be cleared by 14 January 1991. Thus ended the attempt to acquire the building for the alternative Czech cultural and art scene; thus ended an attempt at creating a genius loci befitting Hašek and Kafka.

President Václav Havel’s amnesty released 23,000 inmates from Czechoslovakia’s prisons. Many of them quickly returned to the world in which they had spent most of their lives.

In October 1990, the 6,000 m² underground spaces beneath the former Stalin monument hosted the “Totalitní Zóna” festival, which was attended by 200 artists from 17 countries. The labyrinthine spaces, which were empty except for a few fragments of the Stalin statue, had been fitted with a bar and a stage for theater performances, and all manner of materials had been assembled for making works of art.

On 8 December 1995, at a questionable-looking garage near the Vltava River, an auction was held in order to sell off Husák’s former government fleet. For sale were one-of-a-kind ZILs and Chaikas.

In the spring of 1995, a hermit settled into one of the caves on Petřín hill. He spoke German and when journalists asked him what had brought him here, he declared that he had to meet with the country’s new ruler, Václav Havel, in order to initiate him into the art of ruling.

In the early 1990s, various evangelical and pentecostal churches, primarily from the United States, started appearing in Czechoslovakia.

“The first few years after the revolution were simply one big party. But there was a lot at stake.It was necessary to prove to the world and to ourselves that we were not some remote Soviet guberniya, but a nation securely anchored in the spirit of Charter 77 and in its recent democratic tradition, capable of immediately ridding itself of party bosses and secret police officers, of leaving the Warsaw Pact or abolishing it outright, of sending off the Soviet army, of identifying and where possible rectifying the crimes of the past, of coming to terms with Stalinism and the executions and concentration camps of the fifties, of transforming capital, again making friends with the Germans and the rest of the world, no longer harassing the Gypsies/Roma, breaking peacefully with the Slovaks (since that’s what they wanted), massively investing in culture and science, showering and smiling every day, letting our agriculture blossom and also our healthcare system, industry and small trades, of fostering social life and local clubs, including musical ensembles, amateur theater and beautification societies, of shrinking the nation’s obesity to a minimum, of learning English, never ever again oppressing women, living environmentally, joining NATO and the European Union, and so on.”

Jáchym Topol, With a Passion for Freedom, 2014