"Students against totalitarianism" is the theme of this year’s annual Mene Tekel festival, which aims to draw attention to the crimes of communism and Nazism. The high point of the festival will be a commemoration on 25 February of the march on Prague Castle in 1948 when students called for democracy and freedom.
Contemporaries involved in all of the student demonstrations from 1939 until 2012 (when representatives of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia made it into the governments of several Regional Authorities in the Czech Republic) will participate in the commemoration. Just as they did 66 years ago, the marchers will deliver a message to the president at Prague Castle – not to the current president, but to the statue of former Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk on Hradčanské Square, according to the Vice-Chair of the Senate, Přemysl Sobotka (Civic Democrats – ODS).
Sobotka did not want to reveal ahead of time what message would be delivered to the current political elite during the event. In 1948 the students pledged to defend parliamentary democracy and not to be deterred by what happened in the wake of their previous resolution to do the same during the Nazi occupation of 1939.
"Totalitarianism has always arisen and always arises stealthily. It is solely the indifference of others that gives it enormously fertile ground. We must not only recall the past, but also warn against some of the features of totalitarianism that are now manifesting themselves in this country," Sobotka said.
The festival includes 30 events ranging from concerts, conferences and exhibitions to film screenings and theater performances. Jan Řeřicha, director of the Mene Tekel project, notes that there will be documentaries about Jan Palach, Jan Zajíc, and also about Sándor Bauer who, like his Czech predecessors, set himself on fire in 1969 to protest the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Řeřicha also highlighted the screening of a Latvian documentary called "The Soviet Story", which draws from the archives of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, to describe the Soviet regime’s part in the Holocaust. The festival will also include a dramatic reconstruction of the trial of the leaders of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz and another reconstruction of a political trial of students in 1949 which resulted in the execution of two of them.
As is traditional, the festival will end on 2 March with an ecumenical service at St Vitus Cathedral for the political prisoners who were executed, tortured, or otherwise put to death during the communist totalitarian regime from 1948 – 1989. The festival program is available at http://www.menetekel.cz/en/program/
