Now Entering the Gray Zone
By Brian K. Goodman
The Malostranská Metro stop in Prague.
I emerged from Prague’s retro-futurist Metro, looked at my wrist watch, and realized that I was already late for my appointment with a man named Karel Srp. The year was 2004, and I had traveled all the way from California to the Czech Republic to follow the trail of the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg—or at least that’s what I thought then. I thought Srp might help me understand his story.
Ginsberg had arrived in Prague in the winter of 1965, freshly deported from Castro’s Cuba. He ended up staying behind the Iron Curtain for more than two months, and by springtime, he had become a celebrity among Prague’s student underground. Then, on the first of May, Ginsberg was elected Král majáles, or “King of May,” in a massive student festival that had been banned for much of the communist era. Over the next week, Ginsberg was assaulted on the street, interrogated by the police, and deported by the Czechoslovak authorities. His experience—and the poetry it produced—had drawn me to Prague.
Srp had asked me to meet him outside the entrance of the Malostranská Metro stop at the foot of Prague Castle. He was waiting for me when I arrived, an ageless and ebullient character dressed in all black. All I knew about Srp then was that he had been briefly imprisoned in the late 1980s for his role in an illegal cultural organization known as “the Jazz Section,” which had dared to publish some of Ginsberg’s poetry during the post-1968 period known euphemistically as “normalization.” I followed him as he bound through the winding cobblestone streets of Prague’s Little Quarter until we arrived at an old building tucked in the corner of a gated garden. Srp’s cellar-like office was musty but charming: Its bookshelves were crowded with familiar American writers and the walls were covered in jazz posters.
“Music?” Srp asked, pulling from the shelf a record—“Ray Charles in Person,” if memory serves—and placing it on a turntable in the corner. He then poured three fingers of brown liquor into a small paper cup and handed it to me. I sniffed the cup: the familiar scent of cheap American whiskey. “So,” he asked, “Ginsberg has brought you all the way to Prague?”
I explained my project, and Srp’s Cheshire-cat smile broadened. He walked over to a filing cabinet next to the turntable, rifled through some folders, and pulled out a stapled packet of documents. He handed it to me. The cover featured an enlarged, black-and-white photograph of a procession making its way through Prague’s Old Town Square. At first glance, it was difficult to identify the era. The parade was being led by a young man, about my age at the time, his face framed by a white scarf and bowler hat.
Then I spotted the clue. Above the young man a banner proclaimed: GINSBERG KRÁLEM MAJÁLES VÝRAZ PROLETÁŘSKÉHO INTERNATIONALISMU—or, as I later learned how to translate, “Ginsberg for King of May, as an expression of proletarian internationalism!” I opened the packet and discovered even more photos from Ginsberg’s visit, alongside photocopies of official-looking documents stamped with the word “TÁJNE.” These “SECRET” documents were actually from Ginsberg’s file with the notorious Státní bezpečnost, the communist-era security services better known as the StB. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the file that Srp had just handed me would change the trajectory of my life.
“Over time, I realized that Ginsberg’s journey to Prague was just one episode in a much larger history of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain—a history that I’m still trying to write.”
Allen Ginsberg saved everything. After I returned home from Prague, I spent hours digging through Ginsberg’s extensive archives, purchased by Stanford University for over $1 million. On one of my first visits to the archive, a helpful research librarian showed me the pair of cheaply made canvas sneakers that Ginsberg had brought back from Czechoslovakia. (I would later learn that this style of show became a micro-trend among Ginsberg’s young, hip admirers in Prague after his arrival.) As I dug through his personal files, I discovered more miscellany: a fascinating state-produced travel guide; Ginsberg’s train ticket to Moscow; and a typewritten page filled with obscene Czech slang words, most of them sexual in nature, translated into English. And so, my formal education in the Czech language began with me learning that there were at least eight Czech slang words for “cock,” one of those “obscene” words that Ginsberg’s lawyers were forced to defend when “Howl” was banned in the United States in 1957. More importantly, the archive preserved Ginsberg’s travel notebooks, including a typescript of the Prague journal that had been confiscated by the Czechoslovak security services.
Still, I sensed that there was much more to this story than Ginsberg’s own spontaneous impressions could reveal. Over the next decade, I searched for a way to tell the whole story: First, I moved to New York to take a writing workshop with Hettie Jones (the Beat memoirist and ex-wife of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka), then I enrolled in a PhD program in American Studies and I began spending summers in Prague and Brno trying to learn Czech. Over time, I realized that Ginsberg’s journey to Prague was just one episode in a much larger history of literary dissent across the Iron Curtain—a history that I’m still trying to write.
As I continued to dig into this this story and how it unfolded in the decades following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, I found myself drawn back to the very figure who had started me on and helped inspire my journey: Karel Srp.
In the early 1980s, Srp became chairman of a group called the “Jazz Section of the Czechoslovak Musician’s Union” (Jazzová sekce Svazu hudebníků ČSR), which eventually became a target of the state security services. The Jazz Section’s full name better reflects their ambiguous legal status as a renegade chapter of an official state institution. In addition to putting on jazz and rock concerts, the Jazz Section discovered loopholes in Czechoslovak censorship law that enabled them to publish polosamizdat (“quasi-samizdat”) material, including entire books, outside of the state’s sprawling censorship apparatus. By circumventing the censors, their publications became one of the most important sites of countercultural transfer between Czechoslovakia and the West.
I remember the electric thrill of handling one of their lovingly designed publications and discovering a Czech translation of Ginsberg’s “Rolling Thunder” benediction alongside Nat Hentoff’s famous Rolling Stone essay, “The Pilgrims Have Landed on Kerouac’s Grave.” By some estimates, the most popular of the Jazz Section’s publications reached as many as 100,000 readers in Czechoslovakia—an astounding number in a country of just 15 million.
“The idea of the Gray Zone was used in late-socialist Czechoslovakia to describe the ambiguous cultural space that existed between the official communist establishment and the dissident underground.”
The Jazz Section was only able to survive for so long because they existed in what was known in Czech as the Šedá zona, or the “Gray Zone.” The idea of the Gray Zone was used in late-socialist Czechoslovakia to describe the ambiguous cultural space that existed between the official communist establishment and the dissident underground. As I discovered, Karel Srp’s own activities in the late seventies and eighties are a very good illustration of this slippery concept. After the Czechoslovak security services’ archives were opened up in the post-communist era, it was revealed that, from 1978 to 1982, Srp was registered as an agent with the StB. They even gave him a codename: Hudebník, or “the Musician.” But given the unreliability of communist-era secret police documents, it remained unclear whether this was deliberate misinformation planted by the StB to incriminate or blackmail Srp, or if he was in fact a collaborator. Of course, there were many possibilities in between: I assumed at the time that Srp had been feeding the security services useless information to protect his friends.
If so, it didn’t protect the Jazz Section forever. By the start of the Glasnost era in the Soviet Union, Prague’s Gray Zone was rapidly expanding, and the Czechoslovak authorities decided to finally put an end to the Jazz Section’s countercultural activities. In 1986, Srp and other members of the Jazz Section’s executive committee were arrested on trumped-up charges of “economic crimes.” Their trial became an international cause célèbre, drawing protests from some of the America’s most prominent writers, including Allen Ginsberg. Thanks in part to international pressure, Srp was “only” sentenced to 16 months in prison. He was released in January of 1988, less than two years before the start of the Velvet Revolution.
In 2017, during the year-long hangover from Trump’s election, I was struggling to write the final chapter of my book on literary dissent between the United States and Czechoslovakia. I had decided to conclude by telling the story of the U.S.-based literary campaign to save Karel Srp and the Jazz Section from imprisonment. I hoped this would help me close the circle of the story I had been pursuing for more than a decade.
Retracing my steps, I was suddenly curious: What was Karel Srp up to now? I knew that former members of the Jazz Section still maintained a website, which served as a kind of digital museum for Czechoslovakia’s vanished Gray Zone. Over the past few months, it had been an indispensable resource as I tried to reconstruct the shadowy history of the Jazz Section. But, this time, when I clicked on the tab for recent news about the Jazz Section, I saw that a new page had been added. Under the title, “Srp and the 2017 Ethics Commission,” I found the following announcement (in my rough translation):
After a quarter century of our tolerance and awareness of the moral decline of Karel Srp, chairman of the original Jazz Section of the Czechoslovak Union of Musicians (1971-1987), given his proven and active collaboration with the communist-era state security, and aware of how this entire time he has been attacking many of his former colleagues while using the name of the Jazz Section only to further his own political ambitions, we distance ourselves from his preliminary appointment by President Zeman to the Czech Republic’s Ethics Commission for Recognition of Participants in the Resistance against Communism.
Welcome back to the Gray Zone, I thought to myself.
Who was Karel Srp really? Was his collaboration the reason why he had special access to Ginsberg’s secret police file? I still don’t know the answer to these questions. But the news about Srp did help me see my own experiences in Prague in a new light. When I first traveled to the Czech Republic in 2004, the U.S. was a year into its second, disastrous war in Iraq. Coming of age in the conformity of post-9/11 America, I had found it nearly impossible to find meaningful forms of dissent, and so I had gone looking for alternative models of cultural protest, both in the American past and then abroad.
“In my desire to find heroic examples of dissent, I had missed this man’s truth. This realization arrived like a gathering storm….”
At first, this had led me to idolize Ginsberg and the Beats. Then I had crossed paths with Srp, who seemed to combine in my imagination the romantic image of the Czech dissident with the Beat sensibility I was still trying to imitate. In my desire to find heroic examples of dissent, I had missed this man’s truth. This realization arrived like a gathering storm, foreshadowing my current state of disillusionment after four years of “resistance” discourse in Trump’s America.
The day that Srp handed me Ginsberg’s file didn’t only change my life because it set me on my current path of writing and teaching about the literature of dissent. Thanks to my encounter with a “dissident” hero as imperfect as Srp, I am also able to draw a slightly different lesson from the anti-totalitarian movements of the 20th century. Yes, cultural dissent doesn’t need to be an exercise in moral or political purity. Yet at the same time, any meaningful and lasting democratization in the United States will require that we all are much more honest about our own complicity in the unjust systems that surround us.
I’m still trying to figure out exactly what this means in my own life. On my optimistic days, I am hopeful that our collective disillusion is a necessary precondition for what Václav Havel, the dissident writer and first post-1989 president of Czechoslovakia, called “living in the truth.” On most other days, however, I’m just trying to learn how to live in the Gray Zone.
Brian K. Goodman is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University, where he is also an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Jewish Studies and the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, & East European Studies. He is currently writing a book for Harvard University Press about literary dissent between the United States and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.