American Poet Allen Ginsberg in Prague
He was the 'King of May'....
From all over the world, refugees and travelers come to Berlin. They bring us their countless stories — soo many great ones — which also cross the boundaries of time.
At a party, years ago, I met Stefan — a tall, elderly Czech film producer. (It was a social event linked with the February premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, or Berlinale.) His drink in hand, Stefen entertained me with stories about being a young person in Prague during the Cold War — especially in 1965, when he met American “beat” poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997). Stefan told me he’d turned eighteen that year, an eager student growing up in communist Czechoslovakia; in Prague, where he suddenly found himself face-to-face with one of the most intrepid and flamboyant American poets of his time.
As if by divine intervention — on a cloud of marijuana, perhaps — the thirtysomething Ginsberg floated into the lives of Stefan and his pals exactly at the start of Prague’s annual May Festival. Spontaneously jumping into the fun, the uninhibited- and unabashedly gay Allen Ginsberg joined his perhaps-more-serious Czech counterparts, all taking the stage as contestants for the popular voting of that year’s “King of May.” Ginsberg won the title handily, said Stefan, and amidst great noise and celebration, the American “beatnik” became a king in Prague.
In the brief but intensive party that followed, revelers paraded the engaged and engaging Ginsberg through town, waving to bemused, befuddled onlookers. Inevitably, Ginsberg opened his mouth, however, to say something/anything intentionally offensive to Communist government authorities (=to “the Man”). Soon, the American was put on a plane, where he started composing “Kraj Majalis - King of May” — his later-famous poem about the whole event.
The poem ‘King of May’ voices sympathy with Czech students whom the writer had met; also his opposition to the totalitarian regime that oppressed them….
Remarkable to think that my conversation partner, the ever-rebellious Stefan — whose name I didn’t learn, unfortunately — actually had been there alongside Ginsberg in Prague of 1965. Interestingly, he had read the (banned) works of at least two of Allen Ginsberg’s buddies — Jack Kerouac (“On the Road”) and William Burroughs (“Naked Lunch”). [For my part, I landed in Prague with a group just a dozen years after Ginsberg, when savvy Czech students sidled up to us and, very quietly, asked whether we had any recordings (cassettes) of Frank Zappa….]
For his part, Stefan told me, he quickly escaped Prague to ride the cultural wave to France, where he learned filmmaking. (He ended up working alongside Jean Luc Goddard, he said.) But he always owed a debt of gratitude to the American poet Allen Ginsberg, who’d landed in Stefan’s otherwise grey, repressive town, coming to ground like some kind of wayward angel, just to rock his world.
Stefan told me how his group of teen-age friends had flocked around Ginsberg, taking him in much in the same way that we, the next “post-hippy” generation, attended him at countless readings in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Laughing, Stefan told me how Ginsberg himself described the strange “why and how” of his coming to Cold War Czechoslovakia….