ABSTRACT
The Jewish Czech1 writer Ivan Klíma, born in Prague in 1931, spent part of his youth in a concentration camp. From 1941 to 1945, he lived against his will at Theresienstadt-Terezín in the Czech language. Approximately 73,608 people were transported on 122 trains from Bohemia and Moravia to Terezín between November 1941 and March 1945.2 The experience informs all of Klíma’s writing: novels, essays, plays, and short stories dominated by themes of love, freedom, and justice. These works-with deceptive, guised, and often ironic titles like My Merry Mornings, My First Loves, The Ultimate Intimacy, Love and Garbage, Judge on Trial, My Golden Trades, and Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, also feature an inescapable despair and anxiety that, in part, can be traced to the writing of Søren Kierkegaard, a thinker Klíma has alluded to in both his prose and autobiographical writing. Klíma fictionalizes the drama of human precariousness through moralized narratives about failed relationships and alienated human beings pressed to act on behalf of their own freedom-instances of the self trying to preserve the self as an act of freedom. In an essay titled “The Unexpected Merits of Oppression” Klíma meditates on the leitmotif that correlates the scenes and expositions within his own prose:
I was lucky enough to spend my war youth mostly in a concentration camp. The word luck is not a slip of the tongue. From my juvenile experience I gained important knowledge. First of all, if man wants to survive in the situation of immediate threat he must adapt himself, he must accept even the worst circumstances life gives and strive even within this context to continue his human existence. In the camp this meant to maintain my human dignity and mental balance: to save my inner world, my hope, my inner freedom, never to succumb to panic or despair. Those who did not manage this were lost! Secondly, and less importantly, I learned that man accepts these circumstances as
1 Klíma’s parents did not practice the Jewish religion. He describes them as atheists. Klíma attended church as part of the Protestant youth movement, but says he was “not a real believer at any time in my life.” See Rob Trucks, “A Conversation with Ivan Klíma,” New England Review, vol. 20, no. 2, 1999, pp. 77-87; p. 80. 2 The Jews of Czechoslovakia: Historical Studies and Surveys, vols. 1-3, ed. by Avigdor
given but only for a particular moment. He continues to hope the situation will change, that madness cannot be the permanent state of human or social existence.3
