Word: schweik
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...When, for example, the maitre d' in that Prague restaurant makes a bold subversive gesture to the occupying Nazis, Jan is sympathetic. But he does not take a stand with the man who has been his friend and mentor. He is, in effect, the heir to "The Good Soldier Schweik," anti-hero of the classic novel by Jaroslav Hasek, which is the Czech anti-epic...
...Over the years, Schweik has been the model for dozens of fictional characters - among them Yossarian in Catch-22 - and he was a particularly favored template for the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, who was Menzel's friend and collaborator for decades. Menzel's finest film, Closely Watched Trains, which won the foreign film Academy Award in 1967, was based on a Hrabal story about a feckless railroad worker who entirely by accident becomes a hero during World War II. I Served the King of England, the Czech Republic's entry for the 2008 Academy Awards, is very much a part...
...Forrest is hardly the first idiot hero to ride through a fiction, bodies dropping all around him. The Czechs celebrate the apparently obtuse Good Soldier Schweik, whereas in terms of plot Voltaire's Candide might have been a Gump pilot. Yet Schweik is not so much a defense of dumb optimism as an argument against militarism and a celebration of sly peasant smarts. And Candide may be literature's most ferocious send-up of cheeriness in the face of the world's cruelties. By its end, its battered hero has abandoned his opening premise that everything happens for the best...
Much as it cheered Ronald Reagan, who, more than Schweik or Candide, is the real proto-Gump. Reagan too was relentlessly upbeat. Reagan too was extraordinarily lucky. And his luck, like Gump's, was often built on the backs of people who suffered off-screen. Forrest had bankrupt shrimpers, martyred Vietnam buddies, and his wife, whose death was remarkably demure, considering her ailment. Reagan scored points off America's poor; somehow managed to cloak himself in heroism while apologizing for a needless screw-up that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut; and avoided tarnishing his reputation for optimism by spending...
Shibboleths in the West were evaporating almost as fast as regimes in the East. It had long been a tenet of conventional wisdom that Czechoslovakia, the homeland of the Good Soldier Schweik, would be one of the last nations to join the march of freedom. Maybe, just maybe there would be another Prague Spring in 1990. But the thaw came in the fall instead. Demonstrations began in mid- November. The first was a legal assembly of students sponsored by the communist-dominated Socialist Union of Youth. But that organization was seething with discontent, and 3,000 of the marchers moved...