Czech Journal of Contemporary History
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Vol. VI (2018) Vol. Vol. VI (2018) CZECH JOURNAL of CONTEMPORARY HISTORY Petr Vidomus Czechs Give Asylum to US Family A “Different” Jazz Ambassador Herbert Ward through the Lenses of FBI Reports ISTORY Stephan Stach “It Was the Poles” or How Emanuel Ringelblum Was Instrumentalized H by Expellees in West Germany On the History of the Book Ghetto Warschau: Tagebücher aus dem Chaos Petr Orság With Chinese Communists against the Czechoslovak “Normalization” Regime Exile Listy Group and Its Search for Political Allies against Soviet Power Domination in Central Europe Petr Roubal The Crisis of Modern Urbanism under the Socialist Rule ONTEMPORARY C Case Study of the Prague Urban Planning between the 1960s and 1980s Tomáš Vilímek “He Who Leads – Controls!” of Corporate Management and Rigours of “Socialist Control” in Czechoslovak Enterprises in the 1980s OURNAL Prague Chronicle: J Oldřich Tůma Unreached 90th Birthday of Milan Otáhal Tomáš Hermann Central European Historian Bedřich Loewenstein (1929–2017) ZECH C Book Reviews (Pavol Jakubec, Vít Hloušek, Karol Szymański, Květa Jechová) CZECH JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY Vol. VI (2018) THE INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY HISTORY EDITORIAL CIRCLE: Kateřina Čapková, Milan Drápala, Kathleen Geaney, Adéla Gjuričová, Daniela Kolenovská, Michal Kopeček, Vít Smetana, Oldřich Tůma EDITORIAL BOARD: Muriel Blaive, Prague/Vienna Christianne Brenner, Munich Chad Bryant, Chapel Hill (NC) Petr Bugge, Aarhus Mark Cornwall, Southampton Benjamin Frommer, Evanston (IL) Maciej Górny, Warsaw Magdalena Hadjiiski, Strasbourg Milan Hauner, Madison (WI) Vít Hloušek, Brno Adam Hudek, Bratislava Georgyi Kasianov, Kiev Tamás Kende, Budapest Pavel Kolář, Florence Jan Kuklík, Prague Mark Kramer, Cambridge (MA) James Krapfl , Montreal Jan Láníček, Sydney Libora Oates-Indruchová, Olomouc Andrea Orzoff, Las Cruces (NM) Adrian Portman – von Arburg, Brno Vilém Prečan, Prague/Scheinfeld Peter Ruggenthaler, Graz Dušan Segeš, Bratislava Kacper Szulecki, Berlin/Oslo Victoria Vasilenko, Belgorod Kieran Williams, Des Moines (IA) Ella Zadorozhnyuk, Moscow EDITORS: Vít Smetana, Kathleen Geaney Contents Essays and Articles Petr Vidomus: Czechs Give Asylum to US Family A “Different” Jazz Ambassador Herbert Ward through the Lenses of FBI Reports ................................. 5 Stephan Stach: “It Was the Poles” or How Emanuel Ringelblum Was Instrumentalized by Expellees in West Germany On the History of the Book Ghetto Warschau: Tagebücher aus dem Chaos .......................................... 42 Petr Orság: With Chinese Communists against the Czechoslovak “Normalization” Regime Exile Listy Group and Its Search for Political Allies against Soviet Power Domination in Central Europe ...... 62 Petr Roubal: The Crisis of Modern Urbanism under the Socialist Rule Case Study of the Prague Urban Planning between the 1960s and 1980s ........................................ 100 Tomáš Vilímek: “He Who Leads – Controls!” Corporate Management and Rigours of “Socialist Control” in Czechoslovak Enterprises in the 1980s .................. 125 Prague Chronicle Oldřich Tůma: Unreached 90th Birthday of Milan Otáhal ............... 158 Tomáš Hermann: Central European Historian Bedřich Loewenstein (1929–2017) ................................................................... 163 Book Reviews Pavol Jakubec: A country on the Boundary ........................................ 175 Vít Hloušek: Swing Music and Its Fans during the Protectorate ...... 185 Karol Szymański: Czechoslovak Leviathan ............................................ 191 Květa Jechová: A Family Colonized by the State? On a Book about Family Policy in the Czech Lands in the Previous Century .............................................. 203 Summaries ..................................................................................................... 212 Authors ............................................................................................................ 221 Czechs Give Asylum to US Family A “Different” Jazz Ambassador Herbert Ward through the Lenses of FBI Reports Petr Vidomus In recent years, US historiography has invested substantial effort into mapping the phenomenon of “jazz diplomacy” in the 1950s and 1960s. The mission of the well- -known Jazz Ambassadors project of the US State Department was fairly clear: to present jazz as an example of typical American culture, show it as a messenger of freedom in countries often governed by oppressive regimes, and dispel the embarrass- ment of the world’s public over the US Government’s unwillingness to tackle pressing issues of racial inequality and civil rights.1 In the early stage of the Cold War, US administration soon realized that jazz and swing music would be better tools of its cultural diplomacy than ballet or classical music, especially since the successful European tour of the opera Porgy and Bess2 1 See, in particular, the works of VON ESCHEN, Penny M.: Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press 2004; DAV- ENPORT, Lisa E.: Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era. Jackson, Uni- versity Press of Mississippi 2009; FOSLER-LUSSIER, Danielle: Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy. Berkeley, University of California Press 2015; HATSCHEK, Keith: The Impact of American Jazz Diplomacy in Poland during the Cold War Era. In: Jazz Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2010), pp. 253–300. 2 UY, Michael: Performing Catfi sh Row in the Soviet Union: The Everyman Opera Company and Porgy and Bess, 1955–56. In: Journal of the Society for American Music, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2017), pp. 470–501. 6 Czech Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. VI in 1954 and 1955. The subsequent series of tours of American jazz musicians in Africa, Asia, Middle East, and Eastern Europe was supplemented by other parallel forms of propaganda, such as radio broadcasts (represented, for example, by Willis Conover’s Music USA programme aired by the Voice of America) or sending books and musical recordings to countries behind the Iron Curtain.3 Thanks to cultural exports sponsored by the US Government, thousands of people were able to meet jazz idols of those times, including Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Good- man, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, or Louis Armstrong. As we now know, this diplomatic effort to present the United States as a land of freedom suffered from many controversies, mainly because Afro-American musicians sent to tours under the auspices of the US Government had their own experience with domestic racism, which they sometimes mentioned when abroad. However, the main character appearing on the following pages is an American who somehow did not fi t into the offi cial efforts to use jazz music as a tool of diplomacy. Herbert Ward was a left-wing jazz bassist and singer, who asked for asylum in com- munist Czechoslovakia at the end of 1954. He, too, helped promote jazz behind the Iron Curtain, and many Czech musicians still remember him. However, his story is counterposed to the offi cial vision of US cultural diplomacy which sent only care- fully selected musicians, ones who could serve its purposes mentioned above, to tour the world, while Herbert Ward was, as a US political refugee, a good proof of the hypocrisy of the US system for Czechoslovak authorities. I call him a “different” jazz ambassador in the title of my study to distinguish Ward’s mission from that of the “Real Jazz Ambassador,” the nickname given to Louis Armstrong in the context of US jazz diplomacy.4 My work attempts to prove that the earliest share in the rehabilitation of jazz in communist Czechoslovakia belonged to Herbert Ward, a relatively unknown white jazzman whom the FBI suspected of cooperation with the Communist Party of the United States, rather than to Louis Armstrong. While Armstrong was intentionally used by US diplomacy, Ward was an unintended consequence of the persecution of left-wing citizens in the United States in the early 1950s. The story of the American musician who applied for political asylum in Czecho- slovakia in 1954 (together with his wife and two little sons) became part of the mythology of the older jazz generation and also made its way into popular culture.5 3 RITTER, Rüdiger: Broadcasting Jazz into the Eastern Bloc – Cold War Weapon or Cultur- al Exchange? The Example of Willis Conover. In: Jazz Perspectives, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2013), pp. 111–131; REISCH, Alfred A.: Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain. Budapest–New York, Central European University Press 2013. 4 Compare VON ESCHEN, Penny M.: Satchmo Blows Up the World, pp. 58–91. 5 Especially into Josef Škvorecký’s short story “Malá pražská matahára” [Little Prague Ma- tahara] and his essay “Red Music,” or the movie Rytmus v patách [Rhythm at the heels] based on another short story of Škvorecký, which was fi lmed for the Czech TV by Andrea Sedláčková in 2010. The roles of the Wards were played by James Harries and Tonya Graves. See ŠKVORECKÝ, Josef: Red Music. In: IDEM: Mezi dvěma světy a jiné eseje [Be- Czechs Give Asylum to US Family 7 However, these sources do not answer the main questions asked in this text: Who, actually, was Herbert Ward, and how did he fi nd himself in Czechoslovakia? Was he indeed hunted by the FBI? Was it because of his political (communist) belief, or because of much more mundane reasons (as some contemporary witnesses suggest)? In my opinion, Ward’s case will not only help supplement the well-known story of US jazz diplomacy, but also contribute