Kundera’s Political Affiliation

1. Kundera’s first political affiliation or inclination happened on 18 when 1947 he joined the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
2. However, within three years, in 1950, he was expelled from the party. His creative mind
perhaps couldn’t adjust to the conformity demanded by the party. He moved to Prague the
same year and enrolled in the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts.
3. In 1952, he was appointed as a lecturer to teach World Literature.
4. In 1956, he rejoined the Communist Party. This second reunion didn’t last, either. His radical
ideas of reforming the communist party, like insisting that Czechoslovakia adopt a unique
identity, are different from other nations like Russia and Poland to the east and France and
Germany to the West.
5. His 1967 novel The Joke used his earlier expulsion from the communist party as the base of
the story, set to ridicule the Communist Party. The same year, in June, he attended the
Fourth Congress of the Czech Writers Union. He delivered a speech on the importance of
Czech citizens maintaining a certain cultural individuality from its other European neighbors.
6. His reformist views found bedding in the 1968 Prague Spring, a period of political
liberalization and mass protest against the First Secretary of the Communist Party of
Czechoslovakia. The protest continued until August 1968 when the Soviet Union and Warsaw
Pact members invaded the country to suppress the reforms demanded in the fear of Czech
joining the NATO pact. His books were subsequently banned by the Czech government that
year.
7. Witnessing his dear country invaded and all his grand ideas of reform being crushed under
Soviet Tanks, as well as his books being banned, he decided to move out of his country for
some and thus made his first trip to Paris in the same year 1968, where he befriended
Claude Gallimard who eventually convinced Kundera to move permanently to France in
1975.
8. In 1979, his Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked. In 1979, the Communist Party of
Czechoslovakia, in reaction to Kundera's scathing anti-communist book "The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting," officially stripped the writer of his citizenship.
9. Since then, he distanced himself from politics. He repeatedly insisted that he was a
novelist rather than a politically motivated writer. Political commentary disappeared from
his novels after publishing The Unbearable Lightness of Being except about broader
philosophical themes.