Ivan Klíma, the celebrated Czech novelist, playwright, and anti-communist dissident whose work chronicled life under Europe’s totalitarian regimes, has died at 94. His son, Michal Klíma, told the Czech news agency ČTK that he passed away Saturday morning at home after a long illness.
Born Ivan Kauders in Prague on September 14, 1931, Klíma’s early life was scarred by the Nazi occupation. As a child, he and his Jewish family were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where they miraculously survived the Holocaust. After World War II, he initially welcomed the rise of communism in Czechoslovakia — a sentiment soon replaced by disillusionment as the regime turned repressive.
Klíma joined the Communist Party in 1953 but was expelled in 1967 after openly criticizing the government’s censorship and oppression. Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, his books were banned, forcing him into the underground dissident movement. His works circulated through samizdat publications while he endured state surveillance and censorship.
Among his most acclaimed novels are Judge on Trial, Love and Garbage, My Golden Trades, and his two-volume memoir My Crazy Century, in which he explored the moral and spiritual consequences of living under tyranny. “The craziness of the 20th century that I write about has to do with the totalitarian ideologies which were responsible for unbelievable crimes,” he said in a 2010 interview.
Klíma spent a year teaching at the University of Michigan in 1969–1970, where he formed close ties with American author Philip Roth, who helped publish Czech dissident writers in the United States. After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Klíma became a symbol of intellectual resistance, honored by then-President Václav Havel with the Medal for Outstanding Service to the Czech Republic in 2002 and recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize the same year.
Reflecting on his life, Klíma once said the most defining moment was his liberation from the concentration camp: “There’s only life or death. Nothing else matters.”
