Milan Babík: Heading Havel Library after 30 years in US
When Milan Babík was appointed director of the Václav Havel Library recently his name was not familiar to many. That is in large part because he had spent the previous three decades in the United States, where he effectively emigrated as a teenager, in search of educational opportunity. When I spoke to Mr. Babík at the Library, a stone’s throw from Prague’s Národní, we discussed the institution’s mission and perceptions of Václav Havel today. But our conversation began with his own early life.
Could you please first tell us something about your own story? Your online bio says you “grew up next door to Soviet barracks in Šumperk”.
“That’s right. I’m from this small town in what used to be, or is, the Sudetenland; Jeseníky Mountains. And I was born in a house which had Soviet barracks right next door.
“So that’s my childhood, in the immediate vicinity of Soviet troops – playing with them and collecting pins and insignia and so on.”
I wanted to ask you – how were they seen by the locals? Were they totally cut off?
“It was a town within a town. Basically the neighbourhood around the barracks was known as the Soviet neighbourhood.
“So they lived their own lives, there was not too much interaction.
"But at the same time they were part of the daily life of the town: You saw them all over the place, marching up and down the streets and the tanks leaving the barracks to go to the shooting range. That was quite normal for us.”
Do you remember when they all left?
“I do remember. It was a big deal. It was either 1990 or 1991. And I do remember my parents and my grandparents, who lived with us, standing by the window and taking pictures, very carefully, because we were not allowed to photograph the artillery pieces and the tanks and all of that.
“But it was a big deal and we do have in our family archive a snapshot of the last tank leaving the town.”
What was the situation of your own family in the communist period?
“My grandparents were not favourably disposed towards the regime. My grandfather fought on the Eastern Front, but with the Wehrmacht.”
“My grandparents were not favourably disposed towards the regime. This had to do with deeper background; my grandfather on my maternal side essentially fought on the Eastern Front, but with the Wehrmacht.
“So he hated them. There are many anecdotes of him throwing heads of rotten lettuce across the fence at them and cursing them out.
“My parents I would describe as ordinary normalisation-era middle class; employed at the hospital and so on.”
What was your grandfather doing in the Wehrmacht?
“Well, he was recruited there from the Sudetenland, pretty much against his will. But that was the story around Těšín – that’s what happened in the late 1930s, when the Germans started recruiting aggressively among the populations in that area.”
In the mid-1990s you got a scholarship to go to a boarding school in the US from the Foundation for a Civil Society. It was set up by Wendy Luers, whose husband William, or Bill, Luers had been US ambassador to Czechoslovakia in the mid-1980s.
“That’s right. They had a foundation which they set up, I believe, in the early 1990s, the Foundation for a Civil Society; it is still around today, but it is no longer is active when it comes to Central and East European students and scholarships abroad.
“But this is how I got to the United States when I was 16. I took part in a national – or bi-national, Czech and Slovak – high school students’ competition which they organised.
“There were several rounds, starting at my local gymnazium in Šumperk and then proceeding to Prague and so on. There were about 400 applicants and 20 scholarships to boarding schools in the UK and the United States, and I had one of them.”
And the Luerses had been friendly with Václav Havel [while in Prague]? Or they had some connection with him?
“That is correct. I did not know much about that at the time, but at this point – when I know Wendy quite well from my dealings with the Václav Havel Center and other sort of Havel circles in the United States – there are many images and pictures where they stand side by side, Bill and Wendy Luers and Václav Havel and Olga Havlová, in late 1989 and early 1990.”
Where did you go to school in the States? And how did you find it? It must have been kind of mind-blowing.
“So I didn’t find the school – the school found me. I was simply assigned the school. The schools essentially picked whoever they wanted to invite for that year.
“In my case it was Berkshire School in western Massachusetts. It looked nothing like I imagined the United States would look like: skyscrapers, urban landscapes and so on.
“It’s a beautiful campus – in the middle of nowhere.”
With lots of trees everywhere?
“Lots of trees. It’s in the Berkshires, which I’ve become very fond of by now, of course. It’s essentially a mountain range in western Massachusetts. But it is very, very rural.”
Probably it wasn’t that unusual to go to a school in the States, but what I’m curious about is why you essentially stayed away from Czechia for so long?
“It had to do with two sets of factors. I did not intend to stay at the boarding school longer than one year; those were the terms of the scholarship.
“I fully intended to come back and continue my studies at the gymnazium and then perhaps to join the Foreign Service, to work at the Foreign Ministry here.
“I fully intended to come back and continue my studies. But the schooling system in this country was not well-equipped to absorb us coming back.”
“But as it turned out the schooling system in this country at that time was not well-equipped to absorb us coming back here.
“They wanted us to do all kinds of sort of make-up exams and catch up on the missed work, and they did not have much appreciation for the work we had achieved in the United States.
“So that was one set of factors. And the other was that Berkshire School offered a full scholarship and let me finish high school there.
“Then when it was time essentially to apply to universities the story repeated itself: on one hand, my inability to get my high school diploma and the work done there recognised here – again the proper credentials that would allow me to apply to university here.
“And at the same time there were full scholarships and offers from prestigious universities in the western world.”
What did your family and your friends here make of the fact that you effectively emigrated as a teenager?
“It’s a very unusual situation. As I mentioned, I come from a very sort of middle class background where none of my parents or grandparents speaks any English; there is Russian, as you might imagine, but not English.
“They haven’t travelled much at all. So I strayed. I am the exception in all regards.
“That gave rise to many interesting dynamics, unusual dynamics, later on, once I had children and so on. But that is the situation.”
You also studied in the UK. You went to the London School of Economics and to Oxford. Then you I guess gradually entered academia in the US. What were you teaching?
“My background is in international relations, in international relations theory, linguistic theory, what are called linguistic approaches to international politics.
“So that also sort of defined my course offerings: introduction to international relations, the history of American foreign policy, Central European politics, political theory and so on.”
Now you’re the director of the Václav Havel Library in Prague. Did you come back for the job, or did you come back and then get the job?
“I came back because the job was offered to me at the right time in my professional career and personal circumstances. At a point where I was becoming a bit disenchanted with the way that higher education has been evolving in the United States: the implications of political correctness for freedom of speech and thought, and so on.
“I was becoming disenchanted with the way that higher education has been evolving in the US: the implications of political correctness for freedom of speech and thought.”
“So that’s one set of circumstances. The other is the fact that the Board of Trustees of the Václav Havel Library essentially approached me and started talking to me around half a year ago, Christmas of last year, about the possibility. And that’s how this all came together.”
I presume you visited here quite often, but still how has the adjustment been to living again in this country for you and your family, who I expect didn’t know much about Czechia?
“Actually I raised my children – I have two boys, they are 15 and 16 – bilingual.
“We maintained close contact with the country – every summer for at least a month. And then during the month of January for the last four or five years I have been running a study abroad programme at my last university.
“So I actually maintained a pretty close link with the country throughout, so in that regard the adjustment is not dramatic, no.”
But still there are differences. What are the hardest things to get used to about living here again?
“Negotiating with whether partners or adversaries is not nearly as straightforward as, let’s say, in the United States. I miss this sort of American directness and sincerity in that regard.
“It’s obviously a sort of different cultural background, but other than that it’s in some ways very familiar.
“It’s the country of my birth, it’s my native country, and in some ways I’m really coming back home. Although not as a native any more – really as a kind of a foreigner, because that’s what living abroad for 30 years does to you.”
For people who are not familiar with the Václav Havel Library, what exactly does the organisation do?
“The mission of the organisation is to preserve and spread the legacy of our first post-communist president, Václav Havel. And we do that in a number of different ways.
“We have educational programmes, workshops for schools. We run conferences, we award the annual Václav Havel Human Rights Prize, together with the Charter 77 Foundation and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. So large scale events, conferences.
“We publish works by Václav Havel, mainly in Czech but occasionally also in translation.
“And we of course have an archive, so we function as a documentation centre as well.”
How does the Havel Library compare to presidential libraries in the States? Are they more like actual libraries? I find the word library a little bit confusing in this regard.
“Yes, it’s a placeholder, the term library. They are not typical libraries in the United States or in our instance, when it comes to the Václav Havel Library.
“We are civil society actors. We certainly do more than ordinary libraries do.
“But to come back to your first question as to how the Václav Havel Library compares to institutions in the United States, our budget in comparison is miniscule [laughs], which would be lovely to change.
“But at the same time Václav Havel was inspired in many ways by the American model of the presidential library, so that’s something that certainly features in our background.”
This year the Havel Library has been marking 20 years of existence. The further we get away from Havel’s era, and the further from his death in 2011, does it become harder to generate interest and to keep attracting funding?
“In terms of funding, I have been in my role for only three months, so I can’t yet answer that question. I’m exploring the availability and so on.
“But in terms of interest, that’s a very interesting question in its own right. On the one hand, the generation, or the set of generations, for whom Havel was a known figure and a familiar name is slowly leaving us. So we’re talking about demographic shifts.
“And among younger generations it is not to be taken for granted that they know Havel. In fact they tend not to.
“And that is part of our mission: to make sure that his name and his legacy, what he stood for, his ideals, his principles – that they remain very much part of the conversation.
“Even though many of the things that we experience in our daily lives today – information technology, social media, the rise of AI – he could not have foreseen; but that is how he envisioned the library, as a living place for debate and discussion that would respond to new phenomena as they would come.”
In recent years the name Havel has seemed to become more divisive here in Czechia. For a certain section of society it’s an insult and they have a word, “Havloid”, that they use. What do you make of the fact that for some people Havel has these negative connotations?
“I think it is certainly something that we cannot deny; I am perfectly aware of that.
“I read this development in the larger context of a sort of social and political fragmentation that has been taking place not just here in the Czech Republic but really all over Europe and in the United States: polarisation, the labelling and really kind of flattening of Havel’s legacy and the legacy of others.
“They’re becoming just easy stamps, sort of call words, but not much thinking takes place, not much actual debate – all in keeping with the shortening attention spans cultivated by the rise of social media and a lack of sustained thought and longer expression.”
Clearly you think Havel has something still to say to the modern world, to young people. What is it?
“For me personally Václav Havel played a fundamental role in helping to bring about the sort of changes that then enabled me to do what I wanted to do.”
“Many things. For me personally he played a fundamental role in helping to bring about the sort of changes that then enabled me to do what I wanted to do, which was to explore the world outside the borders of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic: freedom of travel, freedom of speech, and so on.
“But in particular I’m fond of his sort of emphasis on language, that politics in many ways begins with language and with symbols.
“To me his [essay] The Power of the Powerless is in many ways a meditation on the role of symbols and language and how they can either channel complicity and conformity – or can be used to mount some kind of rebellion to the status quo, and so on.”
