A Suicidal Spring

Zdenek Adamec stopped understanding his son, also named Zdenek, when the boy was seven. "He asked me how a nuclear reactor worked," says the father, a tombstone carver. "I had to buy a book so I could give him some answers." Eleven years later, the son was still groping for answers, this time to a much larger question: how to save a world that he felt was headed for the abyss. Last month, Adamec made up his mind. On March 6, he walked to Wenceslas Square in Prague, climbed the steps of the National Museum, doused himself with gasoline and lit a match. Passersby rushed to his aid, putting out the flames with coats and a fire extinguisher. But paramedics couldn't save him.

Adamec called his self-immolation "Action Torch 2003" and chose his location carefully — just steps from the spot where a history student named Jan Palach had set himself on fire in 1969 to protest the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks. Adamec explained in a 1,500-word suicide note posted on the Web that he was following Palach's example to protest "the so-called democratic system where not people but money and power rule." He warned that "unless humankind radically changes its ways within the next several decades, civilization will perish in filth or wars."

Adamec's grievances were many: violence in movies and on TV, environmental pollution, the U.S.-led war in Iraq, bullying and drug use in Czech schools. But the effect of his actions has been unmistakable. In the past seven weeks, five more people in the Czech Republic have set themselves ablaze, and three have died: Vera Jedlicková, 50, burned herself near her family plot at Brno's central cemetery on March 18, the day she checked out of a psychiatric ward where she had been treated for depression. Roman Másl, a 21-year-old student, immolated himself in Pilsen on April 1. Pavel Janícek, 42, unemployed, with a history of mental illness and suicide attempts, burned himself in Velká Chyska on April 8. His partner told police that Janícek had feared a prison sentence he was about to serve. Two others, a 31-year-old psychiatric patient in Opava and a 20-year-old developmentally disabled man from Policka, ignited themselves but survived. Another man, 42 and unemployed, tried to kill himself by bicycling up to a gas station in Boskovice, then pumping his pockets with 50-worth of diesel. It failed to catch fire.

The grim knock-on effect came as little surprise to those familiar with Czech history. In 1969, 28 Czech residents set fire to themselves in the 31?2 months after Palach's death, which brought some 200,000 people into Wenceslas Square to light candles and lay flowers. Thirty-four years later, relatively few came to mourn Adamec. But his death and the copycat immolations that followed have become a kind of Czech Rorschach test, as people seek and find explanations that may have more to do with themselves than with the suicides.

Mental instability obviously helps explain several of the immolations. But what about Adamec and Másl? Josef Broz, co-author of a 1999 political manifesto that called on mainstream political leaders to resign in favor of politicians untainted by the past, argues that the Feb. 28 election of Václav Klaus as President was "symbolically behind" Adamec's death. A former Finance Minister and two-time Prime Minister, Klaus was elected six days before Adamec died and many see his victory as a triumph of the robber-baron capitalism that so disgusted Adamec. Zdenka Kmunícková, a psychiatrist who attended the burned Palach, says the self-immolations come at a time when the strain of the postcommunist era is building. Milan Cerny, a psychiatrist who was at the time of Palach's death Kmunícková's boss at the psychiatric research center in Prague, blames the deaths on the Palach mystique. "I think the people are solving their own problems and are only dressing them up as something more," he says. "Were it not for Palach, many of them would have probably tried to commit suicide by other methods." But the acts of Adamec and his followers may also have been a curiously Czech response to troubled times. "People don't take to the streets to fight," says Josef Nesvadba, a prominent Czech author and retired psychoanalyst. "They go home and turn on the gas.