Richard Fidler: The lie that toppled a regime
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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A well-placed lie can bring down a whole government. Don't believe me? Well, imagine right now you are standing in the city of Prague and all around you it is absolute chaos. There are thousands of student protesters in the streets.
By Prague standards, it was a massive show of anti-communist party people power, the likes of which has not been seen here for over 20 years.
These protesters, they are being beaten by police and the military.
When the riot police began clubbing demonstrators, the crowd took instant revenge.
Wielding their truncheons, hammering people with it, hitting people. People are being picked up and thrown through the air.
And in all of this crush, something terrible happens.
A nice boy called Martin Schmidt had been killed. That was the body people saw being dragged off the street.
This chaos would trigger one of the fastest political collapses in modern European history. But there is a twist. My name is Mark Finnell, and you and I, we're about to play a game. You're about to hear a story of violence, an epic upheaval in a magical city, but there's going to be a lie in it. One that would change history, but will you see it coming?
I've often called it a liminal city because you often feel like you're on the verge of some other world. There's something otherworldly about the place, particularly in the middle of winter, very late at night. This is Richard Feidler. I'm one of the presenters of Conversations on ABC Radio, enormously popular podcast. Perhaps you've heard of it.
I have not. It sounds really great, though.
And I'm also the author of several history books, including a book called The Golden Maze, which is a history of the city of Prague.
At this moment in time, Prague was in a country known as Czechoslovakia, which, when Richard rocked up, was a communist country wrapped up in the Cold War. But it has an incredible history.
The city's about 1,200 years, 1,300 years old. It grew up as this medieval capital in the early phases of the Holy Roman Empire.
What event in Prague does this episode open with and why did it matter?
And as a result, its inner core is pretty much very medieval. Nothing's at right angles. Everything twists and turns. It's as an Australian or as an American or a Canadian coming to such a place when we live in big modern cities, there's this odd feeling of homecoming because you can't quite put your finger on until you realise that Prague is that city we have in our childhood imaginations from the Grimm's Fairy Tales where we're given as children. So there's this feeling of odd familiarity in these strange twisty turny streets. And, you know, famously, it's the city where Franz Kafka wrote his story Metamorphosis, where his main character transmutes into a human cockroach. It's that kind of a place, Mark.
And so there was a kind of glorious, slightly dingy romanticism. And on top of that, it had the best beer in the world. So what more do you want, Mark, in a place?
I'm sold. So when did you first fall in love with Prague? Where does that begin?
I was there during its glorious Velvet Revolution. Remember, right at the end of the 1980s, late 1989, there was a wave of democratic revolutions in the former Soviet satellite states, and one by one they went down. It was Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and eventually Czechoslovakia in November 1989. And to arrive at Prague in this kind of beautiful, stunningly beautiful, the most beautiful city in the world, I think, to find it in this utterly joyful state... It was one of those things where the regime ended not with a bang or a whimper, but the sound of a champagne cork popping.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:11
2
What event in Prague does this episode open with and why did it matter?
3:11–11:21
3
How does Richard Fidler describe Prague’s atmosphere and history?
11:21–13:26
4
What was Czechoslovakia’s political background leading up to 1989?
13:26–25:45