Ivan Klima, the renowned Czech novelist who courageously endured and brilliantly chronicled life under both Nazi and communist totalitarian regimes, has passed away at the age of 94 in his beloved home city of Prague. His unique perspective made him one of Eastern Europe’s most insightful observers of the human spirit in oppressive societies.
His son, Michal, confirmed the news of his passing.
With a literary career spanning over 40 books, Klima was not only a prolific writer but also a defiant dissident, an insightful teacher, and a keen critic. A pivotal event in his early life profoundly shaped his work: his internment as a child by the Nazis in the Terezin concentration camp, just north of Prague. From 1941 to 1945, he lived under the constant shadow of deportation to Auschwitz. These harrowing years provided the raw material for some of his most powerful short stories and novels, including the impactful “Judge on Trial,” which unflinchingly explored the atrocities he witnessed.
However, it was the communist era that predominantly informed his literary focus, particularly the period following the Prague Spring of 1968. This brief moment of liberalization saw Klima and fellow intellectuals rally behind leader Alexander Dubcek’s vision of “Socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia. Tragically, their hopes were crushed later that year when approximately 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops invaded to suppress these reform efforts.
In contrast to many fellow dissident writers like Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, and Pavel Kohout who either fled or were exiled, Mr. Klima deliberately chose to return to Prague in 1970 after a sanctioned sabbatical in the United States. His return marked the beginning of his crucial role in the underground literary scene, where he published clandestine texts and even managed to smuggle some to Western publishers. He courageously challenged the authorities by hosting an influential and often wine-fueled secret literary salon, a gathering point for other prominent dissident voices, including the future Czech president, Vaclav Havel.
Jiri Pehe, director of New York University in Prague, once declared, “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.” Pehe added, “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, Klima was forced to take on various manual jobs, a common fate for those who resisted the regime. He worked as a street sweeper, a bricklayer, and even a hospital orderly. These experiences profoundly influenced his collection of stories, “My Golden Trades,” where his characters were portrayed not as heroes, but as individuals who, in various ways, had to compromise with the authoritarian systems ruling Czechoslovakia for fifty years. Many of these stories first appeared in clandestine “samizdat” copies, shared discreetly among friends in Prague.
Klima’s international standing was solidified by a 1990 cover story in the New York Review of Books, penned by his friend, American novelist Philip Roth. Roth, who had visited Klima multiple times in Prague, famously described him, with his distinctive pageboy haircut, as “a much more intellectually evolved Ringo Starr.”
Following the collapse of communism in 1989, Klima turned his attention to the lives of individuals who had compliantly served the dictatorship, only to discover themselves disoriented and lost within the burgeoning freedoms of a newly democratic nation. Post-1989, his works “My Merry Mornings” and “Love and Garbage” quickly went to print, each selling over 100,000 copies. His impactful writing has since been translated into numerous languages worldwide.
Born Ivan Kauders on September 9, 1931, in Prague, Klima grew up in a secular Jewish family. His father, Vilem, was an industrial engineer, and his mother, Marta, cared for him and his brother. His childhood was abruptly shattered when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia when he was just seven years old.
Reflecting on this traumatic period, Klima once stated, “When I had to wear the yellow star, I felt that I was somebody who was hunted, an outlaw. 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 within the confines of Terezin that Klima first found solace in writing, using his imagination as a refuge from the pervasive terror. He and his family managed to survive the camp, likely due to his father’s role in managing the camp’s electricity, which rendered him an “essential” figure.
As he later penned, “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. That life can be snapped like a piece of string — that was my daily lesson as a child.”
These profound experiences became a cornerstone of his later literary output. In “Miriam,” a story from his 1988 collection “My First Loves,” a young narrator living in a ghetto forms a poignant connection with a girl working in a Nazi-occupied Prague soup kitchen. Their fragile bond is tragically severed when the deportations of Jews to the death camps commence.
In his teenage years, Ivan adopted the surname Klima and, in 1953, joined the Communist Party—ironically, around the same time his father was incarcerated for political reasons. After earning his degree from Charles University in Prague in 1956, he spent five years working at a publishing house. His debut novel, “An Hour of Silence,” published in 1963, delved into the complex space between idealism and disillusionment. From 1964 to 1967, he served as editor of Literarni Noviny, a prominent platform for liberal Communist intellectuals, before moving to Literarni List.
During the 1967 annual assembly of the Czechoslovak Literary Association, Klima boldly addressed the attendees as “respected friends” instead of the expected “comrades,” directly challenging censorship. He meticulously highlighted that the Czechs had enjoyed guaranteed press freedom as early as 1867, effectively demonstrating how Communist law constituted a regression of fundamental rights.
In response, Jiri Hendrych, the party secretary for ideological matters, infamously declared, “Now you writers have crapped on yourselves.” The assembly erupted in jeers. Klima fondly remembered it as “a beautiful noise,” stating, “What we demanded then was the most normal thing in the world.”
Just two months later, Klima was expelled from the party and faced a publishing ban that would tragically last until 1989, when the country underwent the peaceful transition known as the Velvet Revolution.
Having made the principled decision to return to Prague in 1970 after his sabbatical in the United States, Klima became a signatory of Charter 77, a powerful manifesto penned by over a thousand Czech and Slovak intellectuals against state repression. He subsequently immersed himself as an active and vital member of the Czech literary underground.
His novel “Judge on Trial,” widely regarded as his magnum opus, was crafted during his two decades of forced literary silence. Completed in 1986 and initially circulated as an underground “samizdat” publication, it finally saw official print in 1991.
This gripping narrative, a blend of thriller and domestic tragedy, presents a dual biography of Adam Kindl, a low-ranking, rigid, and puritanical judge. He confronts the moral quandary of prosecuting a double murderer despite his personal opposition to capital punishment. Instead of resigning, Kindl delves into his own past, using the case as a catalyst for self-exploration.
The story serves as a potent reminder that the Czech people perpetually grapple with the profound weight and enduring consequences of their historical memory.
During this same era, Klima’s acclaimed novel “Love and Garbage” followed an out-of-favor writer compelled to work as a street cleaner. Through his character, Klima mused on life’s fundamental contrasts: “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.”
Following 1989, Klima largely retreated from public life, dedicating the subsequent two decades primarily to his literary endeavors, including his two-volume memoir, “My Crazy Century.” In this memoir, he powerfully condemned Communism as “a criminal conspiracy against democracy.” Paul Berman, a journalist and author, described the memoir in The New York Times as a ferocious work, imbued 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 Helena Mala, a psychotherapist, and together they had two children. A full list of surviving family members was not released at the time.
Despite his writings often being steeped in existential angst, Klima once noted that an underlying optimism tempered his work. After the publication of “Judge On Trial,” he commented, “My books may seem somewhat depressing, but they always offer a little hope. I could not write a book without hope.”
David Binder, a former European correspondent for The Times and one of the authors of this obituary, passed away in 2019.