“A Tale of Two Václavs”: Rhetorical History and the Concept of “Return” in Post-Communist Czech Leadership

Abstract

This article examines the ways by which former Czech president Václav Havel and former Czech Prime Minister Václav Klaus approached their rhetorical roles in the postcommunist climate of a splintering Czechoslovakia. The main argument revolves around how Klaus and Havel divergently employed national memory to make historical arguments about the Czech past and how these symbols could be marshaled to navigate the uncertain waters of postsocialism. Ultimately, Klaus employs a rhetorical strategy of “rupture” with the Czech communist past, while Havel attempts a strategy of “repair.” The tensions between such rhetorical strategies evidence the ways in which Czech intellectuals-turned-public officials vied for the position of chief public historian and national storyteller for the Czech nation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Trevor Parry-Giles for his invaluable advice and edits, Mari Boor Tonn for her encouragement of this research from a very early stage, John Lampe for his historical expertise and insight, Noemi Marin and Cezar M. Ornatowski for their stewardship of the article, and, not least, Robert Gaines for his support of this project.

Notes

1. For a representative work on the development of a new “geographic imagination” in postcommunist Eastern Europe, see Hagen (2003).

2. By ideology, I would subscribe to rhetorical scholar Michael McGee’s (1980) claim that “ideology in practice is a political language, preserved in rhetorical documents, with the capacity to dictate decision and control public belief and behavior” (2, 5).

3. A fascinating look at the strained interpersonal relationship between Havel and Klaus can be seen in Pavel Koutecky’s excellent 2008 documentary, based on thirteen years’ worth of his collected footage of Havel’s presidency (see Koutecky and Janek 2008).

4. For an interesting treatise on this notion of communism and its “hold” on Eastern Europe during the aftermath of the Cold War, see Rosenberg (1995).

5. For an excellent survey of this entire period of post–World War II development in Czechoslovakia, see Abrams (2005).