In the first few years after 1966 I went almost every year with Georg and the children to see my friends in West Bohemia and Prague. I don’t know why we weren’t there in that exciting year of 1968. This year many people wrote to me very euphorically and invited me to experience their new democracy. I never let go of my friends from high school.
I have just read Kundera’s novel “Ignorance”. It is about 1968 emigrants who return to Bohemia - not with pleasure, but because it is expected of them. The Czech friends of yore become a disappointment. Kundera is probably describing his own experiences here: The old friends and relatives are provincial, petty, raw, and sometimes even their language sounds crude to his ears.
Kundera’s impressions are rarely similar to mine. Franta, the only male classmate I continued to correspond with, asked many questions about our lives and politics. Franta came from better circles, was good-looking, was a good student, and wrote poetry. I was impressed that he had married Rüza, who came from a poor background and was not at all pretty, but extremely good-natured.
He was then a slave laborer in Germany, after the war he made his way as a border police officer and studied law on the side. Throughout the years he wrote me letters that were more true to the line than absolutely necessary. It was only when Georg visited him in 1964 that we learned that he hated the regime as much as almost all of my friends. At some point in the 1970s he left Rüza and the children and then lived with a Slovak communist, whom he soon became afraid of because he believed she was spying on him. He was getting more depressed and misshapen. After retiring, he drank loads of beer. When I accused him of ruining his health, he replied that he wanted to kill himself that way, and that’s exactly how it turned out …
I had similar contact with Anita. She graduated from the teacher training college, taught for many years, and married a teacher. I have also visited them almost every year since 1966 - mostly in the village of Temešné pod Primdou, where they spend the warmer half of the year, or in the nearby Bor (Haid), in the more heatable apartment in the prefabricated building. Sometime in the 1970s, Anita and her husband, who had been in charge of a state beekeeping for a long time, decided to significantly increase the number of their own beehives. They came to one of the few large private companies in their communist country. However, Anita did not give up school entirely. When she finally left school, came the velvet revolution and with it various new tasks: teaching adults in the area near the Bavarian border to speak German and helping cross-border commuters find a job “over there” …
Anita is a serene, I would almost like to say: wise person, the good soul of her village. Through her I met some interesting people in her class, e. B. Blacká and her husband in Domaclice, both conscious Catholics who had been in prison for many years for their beliefs during the communist reign. Or Mania Riková, the resolute wife of the long-time manager of Neuhof, which used to belong to us, and many other farms that have been converted to collective farms. He was an avid communist and she did not mince words about her rejection of the regime. Today I am in contact with Maena’s daughter Jana Tomášková, who is very similar to her mother and is now the mayor of Horšovský Týn (Bischofteinitz).
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 293f (translation)