📍Rašínovo nábřeží 78, 120 00 Praha 2, Czech Republic
1936 – 2011“I grew up in Prague under Nazi occupation and then Communist rule, and the city shaped me as a playwright and then as a dissident. I was born in 1936 into a bourgeois family — my father was a businessman and we lost everything after the Communist takeover in 1948. I worked as a stagehand and then a playwright, and my absurdist plays were a coded commentary on the absurdity of life under totalitarianism. I was imprisoned three times. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989 I became President of Czechoslovakia — the playwright-president, a role that seemed invented for a play. Prague's baroque beauty and its grey Communist overlay were the visual language of everything I wrote: the ornate surface and the emptiness beneath.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Havel, V. The Power of the Powerless (1978); Zantovsky, M. Havel: A Life (2014), Grove Press