Ivan Klima, the acclaimed Czech novelist who profoundly explored the human condition under two oppressive totalitarian regimes—Nazi occupation and Communist rule—has died at the age of 94. His son, Michal, shared the news via social media, though further details were not immediately provided.
A prolific author of over 40 books, Mr. Klima was also a steadfast dissident, an insightful teacher, and a sharp critic. A defining experience of his youth was his incarceration by the Nazis at the Terezin concentration camp near Prague from 1941 to 1945. During those harrowing years, he lived with the constant threat of deportation to Auschwitz. The terror of this period inspired some of his most impactful short stories and novels, including ‘Judge on Trial.’
However, much of his literary focus was on the Communist era, particularly the aftermath of the 1968 Prague Spring. This brief period of liberalization saw Mr. Klima and other intellectuals championing the reform efforts of leader Alexander Dubcek, who envisioned a ‘Socialism with a human face’ in Czechoslovakia. This hope was tragically crushed later that year when an estimated 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops invaded to suppress the reforms.
Unlike many fellow dissident writers such as Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, and Pavel Kohout, who either emigrated or were forced out, Mr. Klima chose to return to Prague in 1970 after a sanctioned sabbatical in the United States. He became a pivotal figure in the underground literary scene, publishing clandestine texts and even smuggling some works to Western publishers. He courageously defied the government by organizing an influential—and famously wine-fueled—secret literary salon, a gathering point for other dissident writers, including the future Czech president, Vaclav Havel.
“Ivan Klima is one of the greatest Czech writers and, having experienced concentration camps and the communist period, is a walking symbol of what our country endured in this century,” stated Jiri Pehe, director of New York University in Prague. “He was more than a literary figure; he played a crucial role in publishing banned works and challenging the communist regime.”
During his time as a dissident, Mr. Klima, like many others, was forced to take on non-literary, often menial, jobs, including street sweeper, bricklayer, and hospital orderly. These experiences inspired his story collection ‘My Golden Trades.’ His protagonists, far from heroic, often made compromises with the dictatorial systems that ruled Czechoslovakia for half a century. Many of these stories were circulated secretly in ‘samizdat’ copies among friends in Prague.
His international renown grew following a 1990 New York Review of Books cover story by his friend, American novelist Philip Roth, who had visited him in Prague multiple times. Roth famously described Mr. Klima, with his distinctive Beatle-esque pageboy haircut, as a “much more intellectually evolved Ringo Starr.”
Following the fall of Communism in 1989, Mr. Klima turned his attention to depicting the lives of those who had conformed to the dictatorship, only to find themselves disoriented by the new freedoms of a democratic nation. His books “My Merry Mornings” and “Love and Garbage” were swiftly published after 1989, each selling over 100,000 copies. His works have since been translated into dozens of languages, cementing his global legacy.
Born Ivan Kauders on September 9, 1931, in Prague, to secular Jewish parents, Vilem, an industrial engineer, and Marta, a homemaker, Ivan’s childhood was irrevocably altered at age seven when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. “When I had to wear the yellow star, I felt that I was somebody who was hunted, an outlaw,” he once recounted. “The German children were shouting ‘Jew! Jew!’ at me, and the feeling I had was shame. From this point of view, I felt better in Terezin than in Prague because there the insults stopped.”
It was in Terezin that he first discovered writing, finding solace in imagination amidst the terror. He and his parents survived, likely, he believed, because his father’s role in managing the camp’s electricity rendered him an “essential” figure. “Anyone who has been through a concentration camp as a child, who has been completely dependent on an external power, which can at any moment come in and beat or kill him and everyone around him — probably moves through life at least a bit differently from people who have been spared such an education,” he later wrote. “That life can be snapped like a piece of string — that was my daily lesson as a child.”
These profound experiences fueled his literary work, notably in the story “Miriam” from “My First Loves” (1988), where a young narrator in a ghetto is drawn to a girl working in a soup kitchen in Nazi-occupied Prague. Their friendship ends abruptly with the commencement of Jewish deportations to the death camps.
Ivan changed his surname in his teenage years. After graduating with a degree in philosophy from Charles University in Prague in 1956, he spent five years at a publishing house. His debut novel, “An Hour of Silence,” exploring idealism and disillusionment, was published in 1963. He served as editor of Literarni Noviny, a leading publication for liberal Communist intellectuals, from 1964 to 1967, before moving to Literarni List.
In 1967, at the annual assembly of the Czechoslovak Literary Association, he controversially addressed attendees as “respected friends” instead of the customary “comrades” and demanded an end to censorship. He highlighted that Czechs had enjoyed press freedom since 1867, implicitly arguing that Communist law represented a regression. Jiri Hendrych, the party secretary for ideological questions, famously retorted, “Now you writers have crapped on yourselves.” Mr. Klima remembered the writers’ jeers: “It was a beautiful noise. What we demanded then was the most normal thing in the world.”
Within two months, Mr. Klima was expelled from the party and blacklisted from publishing, a ban that persisted until 1989 and the peaceful Velvet Revolution. Upon his return to Prague in 1970, he bravely signed Charter 77, a manifesto by over 1,000 Czech and Slovak intellectuals protesting state repression, and became a central figure in the Czech literary underground.
His novel “Judge on Trial,” widely considered his masterpiece, was conceived during his two decades of forced silence. Completed in 1986 and circulated clandestinely, it was not officially published until 1991. This work, a blend of thriller and domestic tragedy, presents a dual biography of Adam Kindl, a moralistic, low-ranking judge grappling with the dilemma of presiding over a double-murder trial while personally opposing capital punishment. Rather than resigning, the judge embarks on a journey into his own past, compelling readers to confront the enduring weight and consequences of memory.
Another celebrated novel from this period, “Love and Garbage,” portrays an out-of-favor writer working as a street cleaner, meditating on life’s inherent contradictions: “At one end of the spectrum ubiquitous rubbish and the frequent reduction, in our time, of people to disposable waste; at the other, the longing for transcendence and the saving union of love.”
After 1989, Mr. Klima largely receded from public life, dedicating the subsequent two decades almost entirely to his writing. This period yielded his two-volume memoir, “My Crazy Century,” in which he famously condemned Communism as “a criminal conspiracy against democracy.” Writing in The New York Times, Paul Berman lauded the memoir as ferocious, filled with “a bellowing anger at what has happened to many millions of people, himself included, victims of the serial horrors that used to be known, and maybe still are known, as totalitarianism.”
In 1958, he married psychotherapist Helena Mala, and they had two children. A full list of survivors was not immediately available. Despite the existential angst permeating his work, Mr. Klima maintained an underlying optimism. “My books may seem somewhat depressing,” he once said after ‘Judge On Trial’ was published, “But they always offer a little hope. I could not write a book without hope.”
David Binder, a former European correspondent for The Times, passed away in 2019.