Jan Patočka dies

JAN 01 1977 · 12:00

Jan Patočka in 1971. The philosopher and Charter 77 spokesman died on 13 March 1977 after an eleven-hour StB interrogation. Place: Strahov Hospital, Prague · the funeral, Břevnov cemetery, four days later Figures: Jan Patočka, sixty-nine, phenomenologist, Husserl's last Prague student, first Charter 77 spokesperson · the StB interrogators, unnamed Jan Patočka has been the most distinguished of the Charter spokespersons because he is the most distinguished of the signers. He attended Husserl's lectures in Freiburg in 1933, defended his Habilitation under Heidegger in 1939, and was Husserl's last regular interlocutor in Prague before the master's exile. Twice (1948, 1972) he was barred from Czech universities. He lectured for thirty years in apartments and in his own kitchen, the so-called bytové semináře: apartment seminars. Through January and February 1977 he is interrogated repeatedly. Re-check the chronology. Standard accounts and Wikipedia place the eleven (or ten) hour interrogation on 3 March 1977 (the same day, or the day after, the van der Stoel meeting on 1 March), not 11 March. Wikipedia (Jan Patočka): held by police for ten hours on 3 March; fell ill the same evening; hospitalized; brief improvement; relapsed and died on 13 March. The corpus has the meeting on March 3 and the interrogation on March 11, which is the inverse of the better-attested sequence.