Ivan Klíma, who has died aged 94, carried into the third decade of the 21st century his memories of four years in a Nazi concentration camp. That childhood, from 10 to 14, was spent in the “model” camp at Terezín, where Jews died from malnutrition rather than extermination.
It left an indelible stamp on the Czech writer’s mind and work as it taught him that “life can be snapped like a piece of string”. As did his four decades of struggle with the repressive communist regime that blighted Czech culture until the Velvet Revolution of 1989, led by his friend and fellow-dissident Vaclav Havel.
Yet the best of Klíma’s 30-plus books interrogate not so much these vast tragic histories as the small wars, defeats and victories of domestic life. The resilient survivor of two tyrannies said: “Fiction should concentrate on human life and relationships, not politics.” His ironic and humane vision feels distant from the intellectual essay-novel perfected by his compatriot Milan Kundera.
“It’s risky to have too many ideas in a novel,” he warned, and insisted that “most of what I have written does not rely on the existence of any particular regime.” All the same, in landmark novels such as Love and Garbage, Judge on Trial and Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, the forces of power, violence and revolt echo through the characters’ limited worlds.
Klíma was born in the still-young state of Czechoslovakia to parents whose Jewish ancestry had ceased, so they believed, to count in daily life; until the Munich crisis of 1938 (when Ivan was turning seven), “I had never heard the word ‘Jew’,” he said. He was baptised a Moravian Protestant. His father, Vilém, worked as an electrical engineer, someone who “cured motors and machines, and even invented some of them”; his multilingual mother, Marta, was a secretary. After the war they changed their name from Kauders to the Czech-sounding Klíma.
In 1939, after the Nazi takeover, the shadow of persecution fell over the family. Ivan had to wear the yellow star “that made me feel ashamed”. His father had secured a job in a Liverpool factory but refused to leave his visa-less relatives behind. The Klímas were incarcerated in Terezín in 1941; Vilém’s electrical skills helped them avoid transfer to a death camp. Understated as ever, Ivan recalled being “hungry, not starving”.
“We survived,” he wrote, “but the Germans took away all of my friends” – to Auschwitz. When he worked as a hospital orderly after the Soviet invasion of 1968, colleagues noted his relaxed attitude to corpses. As he told Maya Jaggi, for a Guardian profile, “I was used to seeing dead bodies.” Years of hardship left marks: he would pocket apples at literary events and, used to harsh camp lights, slept with a scarf over his face.
As communists took control in postwar Czechoslovakia, Klíma studied at Charles University in Prague. He wrote a thesis on the visionary satirist Karel Čapek, in whose work he found a “liberating antidote of democratic thinking”. At his history teacher’s invitation, Ivan had reluctantly joined the Communist party. But his father (like many other skilled workers) received a jail term on phoney charges of “sabotage” in 1953. Ivan’s party branch, like some “merciless holy order”, had tried to force him to denounce his parent.
After graduation Klíma became a magazine and publishers’ editor; his co-editors on the journal Kveten included Kundera. There, “we tried to write without the ever-present ideological agitation”.
From 1964 to 1967 he served as deputy editor of the writers’ union journal, Literární Noviny, as calls for cultural freedom grew louder, and then, after its suppression, co-founded a successor: Literární Listy. In 1958 he had married Helena Mala, a psychotherapist; they had two children, Michal, who would become a journalist and editor, and Hana, an artist.
Klíma wrote absurdist plays as well as fiction; the Royal Shakespeare Company promised to stage one, but backed out. In 1967, he sensationally demanded an end to censorship at the writers’ union conference. As editor and author, Klíma helped the Prague Spring bloom with like-minded friends such as Ludvík Vaculík and Pavel Kohout. But when Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the movement in August 1968, Klíma was in London with a younger girlfriend, while his wife spent time on an Israeli kibbutz: the sort of tangled mess his fiction explores.
He returned to Prague and the following year took up a post at the University of Michigan. But he returned in 1970, as “I was needed at home.” He later recalled that “There’s nothing worse than exile for the writer.”
As contemporaries such as Kundera (in Paris) and Josef Škvorecký (in Toronto) fought Gustáv Husák’s Soviet puppet regime from afar, Klíma toughed it out at home. He paid the price: a spell of menial jobs, from garbage collector to engine-driver and surveyor’s assistant, later wittily memorialised in Love and Garbage (1986) and My Golden Trades (1992).
He lost his passport and driving licence, enduring daily state surveillance and a two-decade publication ban – although he did have a few cartoon screenplays made. Still, the deadpan ironist felt glad that “compared to the war, no one was trying to kill me”.
In Prague he hosted gatherings of dissident writers and organised the smuggling abroad of underground, samizdat, literature, often typed on 14 stacked sheets on thin airmail paper. About 300 works saw the light in this way. In place of conspicuous persecution, the regime made dissidents invisible. “People thought we lived in exile,” he said. “In a way, we did.”
In his work, much not published at home until after the 1989 revolution, Klíma unpicked the knots of compromise and complicity that made life bearable. Because “the system never allowed you to win,” he wrote, “it saved you from defeat as well.”
Compromise tempted him as well as his characters: to the surprise even of the secret police, he did not sign the Charter 77 human-rights manifesto, as he feared his name would wreck his daughter’s chances of an art-school place. In fiction, he charted the erotic complications that, for many Czechs, took the place of “higher goals”, and offered the illusory belief that “at least in one area of our lives we were free”. Klíma had other affairs himself, but he and Helena never divorced.
Outsiders did relieve the isolation. To the visiting novelist Philip Roth, Klíma served as “my principal reality instructor” in Prague. (Roth also likened the droll Czech with his Beatle haircut to a “highly intellectually evolved” Ringo Starr.) International contacts, and the foreign outlets for Klíma’s work secured by the Polish-born Swedish publisher Adam Bromberg, eased the transition to freedom in the late 1980s as the regime withered.
After the Velvet Revolution, Klíma, who had re-founded Czech PEN in 1989, found himself a bestselling celebrity. There were queues to buy titles such as My Merry Mornings, with an astonishing print-run (by Czech standards) of 150,000.
That mania soon passed, to his relief. Freedom, he noted, quickly became a taken-for-granted state. Although works such as his landmark novel Judge on Trial (1986) charted public landscapes of principle, cynicism and deception, much of his fiction still dealt with desire, distrust and betrayal on a domestic scale. The themes of “love, infidelity and reconciliation”, as he described them, loomed large in novels such as No Saints Or Angels (1999), with its well-drawn female narrator.
Klíma surveyed his own history in a captivating memoir, My Crazy Century (2009; English translation 2013), but – unlike Havel – never tried to climb on to the stage of political action. Having outlived communism in all its three stages (“tough, liberal, tired”), he had no wish to shape its successors.
He lived and wrote in a woodland area south of Prague with his children and four grandchildren nearby. He did, belatedly, pick up public honours: the Kafka prize, and the medal for “outstanding service” to the Czech Republic.
In later years he published less but maintained his robust faith in fiction as the route to truth. “You may throw a hundred appeals for justice out with the garbage and no heart will tremble,” as My Golden Trades puts it, “but you cannot silence a hundred stories.”
He is survived by Helena, Michal, Hana and his grandchildren.
• Ivan Klíma, writer, born 14 September 1931; died 4 October 2025
