Professor David Peimer
Václav Havel: A Hero for Our Time: Playwright, Prisoner, and President
Summary
Professor David Peimer discusses the life and writing of Václav Havel (1936–2011). Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992 and, after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a Professor of Literature, Film and Theatre in the UK. He has worked for the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, New York University (Global Division) and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing in New York, UK, Berlin, EU Parliament (Brussels), Athens, Budapest, Zululand and more. He has most recently directed Dame Janet Suzman in his own play, Joanna’s Story, at London Jewish Book Week. He has published widely with books including: Armed Response: Plays from South Africa, the digital book, Theatre in the Camps. He is on the board of the Pinter Centre (London), and has been involved with the Mandela Foundation, Vaclav Havel Foundation and directed a range of plays at Mr Havel’s Prague theatre.
I think he was pretty saddened from what I understand, but he chose to go with it in as peaceful a way as possible. I don’t think he wanted it for a second.
That’s a fascinating question. “I’m sure he would’ve appreciated Orwell’s picture of how language becomes distorted under totalitarianism.” I haven’t read, but I’ll look that up, thank you. It’s a great idea.
I think Havel’s extraordinary ability, which is in a way not so dissimilar. Two things I can say at the moment with Zelenskyy is an understanding of the media and entertainment. Zelenskyy is brilliant with how he understands social media and how to speak to different audiences. I’m not talking about Israel, that’s separate. How to speak to the Congress, British Parliament, EU, elsewhere. And how to take pictures of him as an ordinary guy and using social media and technology today, get the images out A-S-A-P. I think he’s superb with that. And I think Havel was superb in his own way with an entertainer’s instinct, of get the word out through theatre and being a playwright. And knowing the extraordinarily huge influence that playwrights can actually have, if you like, in the soft power way, obviously not the hard power. I think that number one, and I think number two, an understanding of how language can be mobilized. A language can be mobilized to counter the lie and activate people and mostly activate their brain.