My Crazy Century

Acclaimed Czech writer Ivan Klíma shares his remarkable personal and artistic life in an intimate autobiography, spanning six decades that faced war, totalitarianism, censorship, and the fight for democracy.

Growing up without religious affiliation, it came as a surprise when, in 1941, Klíma’s family was transported to the Terezín concentration camp—and an even greater surprise when most of them survived. They returned home to a Prague that was scarred, in political turmoil, and falling into the grip of Communism. It wasn’t until Klíma was working as a writer and an editor, and after his father was arrested, that the true colors of oppression became clear to him and many of his peers, among them Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, and Pavel Kohout. Their call for human and civil rights, for free speech, seemed to be answered with the Prague Spring of 1968—but when Soviet troops invaded the country, the hope of freedom was crushed. Klíma’s books were banned, and he was forced to publish samizdat. Yet the dissident movement refused to die, Charter 77 was drafted, and the eventual collapse of the Communist regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 allowed Klíma’s work to be published in his homeland.