Fifty years ago, Soviet-led invasion of Warsaw Pact armies occupied Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968. Karel Kryl, the Czech protest singer who wrote his famous song "Keep the Gate Closed, Little Brother" at that time, became the bard and the spokesman of the occupied nation.
Karel Kryl (1944–1994) was born in German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and became famous in Russian-occupied Czechoslovakia. The artist, whose Father and Grandfather owned a printing office and printed the most beautiful books of Czech Christian poetry, may be a symbol of Christian culture fighting against the most barbarous regimes of all time. According to Kryl himself, Christ influenced his life in the strongest way in a positive sense, and Hitler with Stalin in a negative sense.
After six years of German occupation and three years of limited democracy after the World War II, Czechoslovak Stalinists came to power in 1948. Before the eyes of Karel Kryl, who was then four years old, the Communists broke to pieces the family printing office in his native Kroměříž. All Kryl's family was persecuted and its life was very hard in the 1950s.
Karel, of course, was not allowed to study at that time. (He could go to university only in exile in the 1970s.) He became a potter, but he started to write songs and poetry in the beginning of the 1960s. He did not become an excellent guitar-player, but the sparse sounds of his guitar served to underscore the message of his lyrics. The lyrics of Kryl's songs are highly poetic and sophisticated, with perfect rhyming and a frequent use of metaphors. His forceful voice gave a hauntingly moving quality to them.
One of the best-known songs by Karel Kryl, "Angel", was written already in 1965, when Kryl worked as a potter in an atheist region of the northern Bohemia, where mostly Catholic population of the Sudeten Germans was expelled from after the World War II. The poet found [a statue of] an angel with broken wings in a wrecked church. His "talking about God" with the angel who could not fly is one of the forceful images with a spiritual dimension in Kryl's lyrics.
Many lyrics by Karel Kryl are "prophetic". He was e.g. "digging a grave in Čierná" in his song "Buffalo Bill" some years before July 1968 when the leaders of the Prague Spring headed by Dubček negotiated with angry leaders of the Soviet Union in the village of Čierná.
When a liberalization of the Prague Spring started in January 1968, Kryl moved to Prague, He worked as an assistant at Czechoslovak Television and in his spare time performed his songs in clubs. His sad glory started after the occupation from August 21 when he wrote the song "Keep the Gate Closed, Little Brother" as an immediate reaction to the Soviet invasion. The [Soviet] wolf hungers for the [Czechoslovak] lamb in this song and the narrator says: "With tears on our eyelids we're looking at each other / stay with me, I fear for you, my little brother."
At the same time, Kryl wrote also a well-known sarcastic song called "Brothers". While after 1945 when the Soviet Union defeated the Nazi Germany and Czechoslovakia was re-established Czech poets wrote poems of thanks to the Soviet "brothers", Kryl was giving thanks to the "brothers of Cain's blood" for their "provocations and shooting children".
The country was occupied but not overruled by Soviets yet. Kryl was a star of the Czechoslovak Radio and he became the best-known singer of Czechoslovakia after releasing his first album "Keep the Gate Closed, Little Brother" in March 1969.
Ordinary people understood him but politicians did not. Josef Smrkovský, one of the main representatives of the Prague Spring, was e.g. amused when he heard Kryl's song "Passage Revolt" with, according to Smrkovský, too pesimistic words "no,... we are not on our knees / we dig dirt with our trap" even though he heard it only a few days before his removal of his office. Dubček and Co. did not want to listen when Kryl sang in his song "Marat in the Bath" that a personality playing a role in the history must be better killed than to retract.
In April 1969, pro-Soviet Gustáv Husák came to power instead of Alexander Dubček who accepted an unimportant post. Freedom of a sort came to an end and Husák's "Gestapo" brutally supressed peacefull protests on the first anniversary of occupation in August 1969. A month later, Karel Kryl decided to apply for political asylum in West Germany.
His albums released in exile were banned in Czechoslovakia. Their coppies were, however, smuggled into the country and circulated widely. The title song of the first one, "Cancer", reflected on the paralysis that brought the society into a new subjugation. There were also two songs about Gustáv Husák on this album from 1969, "Gustapo's March" and "A Strange Prince". The second one was a prophecy that childern of the strange country would cut Prince's head off in the future. (This prophecy was fulfilled in 1989 when the young people overthrowed Husák's Communist regime.)
Czech people who went into exile after 1948 and 1968 were scattered around the world. Kryl played for them on his tours across western Europe, Scandinavia, North America and Australia. A prominent religious exile Anastáz Opasek, who organised famous meetings of emigrants of different political views in the abbey in Bavarian Rohr, became very near and dear to Karel Kryl. (Opasek became an abbot of the oldest Czech monastery in Prague-Břevnov after 1945, was imprisoned for ten years after 1948 and went into exile for twenty years after 1968.)
Karel Kryl worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich and people in Czechoslovakia were able to listen to him through it. Not only his old songs but also the new ones became iconic even though people listening to them were persecuted by Communist regime. Kryl wrote songs for persecuted people not only in Czechoslovakia but also in other countries (some of them in Polish). There was e.g. a song called "The Hand Is a Bridge" on his album "Masks" released in 1970 with these lyrics: "It's winter, little rabbit, predators are dumb / my friend, little man in a neighboring country, / do they beat you up too?"
The Communist era was connected with atheism, while many Kryl's songs were a confession of faith or lamentations over lost faith. He released a very important album with a Latin title "Carmina Resurrectionis" (Songs of Resurrection) in 1974. There is e.g. a song called "Denial of Peter" on this album with a lamentation "We are too weak in faith, even though Christ is dragged to the cross". The best-known song of this album is "Thank You", a beautiful thanksgiving to the Lamb of God "for the pain that makes me to ask why", "for the frailty that learns me of humility", "for the thirst which revealed the weakness" etc. (After 1989, a Czech sociologist Zdeněk Nešpor wrote books about Czech religiosity and Czech folk music called "We Are Too Weak in Faith" and "Thank You for the Pain".)
Beautiful, even though frightful religious subjects are connected also with the lyrics of the songs from the album "Floater" released in 1983. The title song is a sad paraphrase of the biblical story about the birth of Moses. While Moses was as a baby boy rescued from killing in a basket placed among the reeds along the bank of the Nile, the basket with a floater is destroyed by Russian frigates in Kryl's song.
Karel Kryl wrote sad songs even after the fall of Communism. There is e.g. a song called "Pack" on his album "Monologues" released in 1992. The pack of wolfs or gangsters (that is, the Russian army) leaves Czechoslovakia in this song, but human souls are already destroyed after many years of spiritually and morally devastating regime.
Kryl returned home to his Mother's funeral in the days of the Velvet Revolution in November 1989. He was in Czechoslovakia for the first time after twenty years, but all the people knew his songs. Czech people of all generations were singing them with him in those enthusiastic days. He was happy to read a slogan "Karel Kryl, we dig dirt with our trap no more". Kryl who was a symbol of the year 1968 became a symbol of the year 1989, too.
After the Velvet Revolution, however, once again ordinary people understood Karel Kryl but politicians did not. It was in vain that he protested against nationalism which led to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and against the "economic transformation" which enabled Communists to become millionaires and to be mighty people once more.
Kryl wrote many other protest songs at that time. He wrote also touching verses about his beloved country, Czechoslovakia, which was dying. The poet himself died of a heart attack on March 3, 1994, a year after demise of Czechoslovakia and a month before his fiftieth birthday.
Kryl's confessor Anastáz Opasek buried him at the Břevnov cemetery at St. Margharet. The old abbot preached about the songs from the album "Carmina Resurrectionis" which would suffice for Karel to stand before the face of Christ.
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