Interview with Jiří Gruša
Prague, February 9, 2009 – The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes recently conducted an interview with Jiří Gruša – the well-known Czech poet, prosaist, translator, literary critic, diplomat and politician – for publication in the last 2008 issue of its Czech-language quarterly review, Pamět´a dějiny. Gruša, currently president of the International PEN Club and director of the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, broadly addresses questions tied to coming to terms with Czechoslovakia’s 20th century totalitarian past. The timeliness of the themes Gruša addresses compelled us to translate the interview for English-speaking audiences.
We Were Unhappy and Have Begun Not to Know It
With Jiří Gruša on the lack of virtuousness and the threshold of memory
Jan Hanzlík, Jiří Reichl
The expression “coming to terms” with Communism is a favorite empty phrase. What should we understand from it? How should such a process take place?
Justice is, together with wisdom, courageousness and a sense for moderation, the foundation of free and creative societies. The main element of justice is balance, or evaluation of the difference between causes and consequences of human behavior. It is an act ensuring immunity, and thus also the activity of social organisms. There exists such a thing as ideological AIDS, with fatal consequences. Czechs, in contrast with Austrians, for example, have always been blind in the left eye. We were the only nation in Europe to ride down Communism with a ballot in the hand. It is important to know why this happened to us. And why exactly this Czech deed damaged so many Czechs and of course even Slovaks, including its initiators. It’s not about revenge, which rules out balance, because it organizes a counter-attack, rather than an antidote, but about a description of beliefs and disease.
Nineteen years have passed since the fall of Communism. How has the Czech perception of the period of totalitarianism developed during that time?
Seifert, in his recollections of his youth during the First Republic, which also lasted that long (or short), once wrote: We were happy and have begun not to know it.1 Today we could say: We Were Unhappy and Have Begun Not to Know It. That wouldn’t be so bad if it implied a healthy aging process. But it implies health as such.
How actually should the debate on the past be led, so that it reaches the greatest number of primarily young people?
Debate is a good thing, but a database is its prerequisite – and digitalization, of course, plus the greatest possible number of young researchers. And that’s again a question of scholarships. I recommend looking for European sources, as well. Research on the Czech type of totalitarianism is crucial. It was the only one in Western European society, and again for almost twenty years it has passed without the presence of Soviet troops.
It is said about Austrians that they consider themselves as Hitler’s victims, not at all as his flunkies – in other words, that they have rejected a kind of reflection of their own mistakes. Is it really like that? And if so, what effect does it have on contemporary Austria?
If we look beyond the linguistic definition of a nation, that is, from Herder and his success, especially in Czech meadows and groves, we are actually one nation. By that I don’t mean to say that a linguistic definition is not significant, but it determines the telling – narrative – of a given collective, not its passing. “National socialism” is a Czech logo from the year 1895, which, with the help of a translation from Cheb (Eger), transformed into a world label. Communism is a Rhineland story, which we listened to more sincerely than all Germans. In Czech you could say “national socialist” even after ‘45 and vote for the only “bourgeois party” where it didn’t matter that it had the same name as its German enemy. From Austrian “flunkies,” they became victims after everything that happened, because they took the wrong train. Just as in our country in 1948 two million people thought that they were taking the right one, when they bought the ticket of the Communist Party. For the Austrians with their Austrianness, it was not clear after 1918 – it was a symbol of defeat. For that reason, many thought that they would correct this thing if they became Greater Germans. Already before that, a relatively solid number of them maintained that Ohne Jud’ und Slav und Rom, bauen wir den deutschen Dom. Without a Jew, Slav or Roman, only thus will the cathedral of „Germanness“ glitter (free translation of the author). While we, with the aid of our self-importance, could only embrace that great Russian oak tree over there,2 because it was clear that the Russians would not speak Czech to please us, and the Austrians could forget that the Imperium Romanum, which they had so long governed, was successful not only as a German-Roman, but – through the Czechs – also Slavonic structure, with a proto-federal shape. And that its difficulties began at the moment when it added to its score the modifier of the German nation, which in the neo-national sense was not yet ready.
But Hitler was an Austrian.
But also a typical mutt on promenade, from the Czech-Austrian borderlands. From among his relatives there appears the name Roubal; his best friend’s name is Kubíček. Such self-identification with a bigger and more secure hunting region characterizes Napoleon and Stalin, too. But here it was topped up with the pathological desire for racial purity of a man who did not intend to conceive children, but instead caused human victims on modern mass front lines. Austrians didn’t want him; Vienna vomited him up. He got flunkies only as a representative of a political epidemic. Similarly to another old Austrian mutt with the classic Czech name Gottwald3. Societies that have lost their collective immunity behave like an infection. Czechs are blind in the left eye because they had to clamber up from the left – that is, with the help of social ascent and its ideology. Austrians are blind in the right, because they wanted to guard against social slippage, which they themselves caused with their postponing of social-political reforms. Thus the European political blind man was created, reliant on the immoral soothsayer of the left and the right. And something from that tradition has lasted until today. Look at the latest election results in our country and in Austria. But careful! Two small notes regarding our irony towards Vienna. All Hitler had to do was send the army to Austria to have his zest assured. But in ‘45, Stalin was able to withdraw his soldiers from Czechoslovakia and still get the jubilating Czechs in his camp, whereas in Austria in that same period, not even the Red Army’s presence helped him attain his coveted election victory. For that reason, the rest of the century was funnier on the Danube than on the Moldau.
It almost seems as if there were a few dozen individuals responsible for our Communist tragedy. But on average it appears that every citizen of the ČSSR had at least one relative in the party. Where are they all?
Well, at the election urns! But they don’t know that with that they will not change the diagnosis of the previous era, neither for a long time the climate of the current one. It was not a chivalrous offense which one doesn’t speak about in high society, but a fatal epidemic which must not return. And that, please, even in their interests.
By contrast, in Germany, which you know very well, reflections carried on for instance with the delay of one generation. Isn’t this time lag necessary?
There exists something called the threshold of memory. This threshold is necessary to attain in recovery from social traumas. It’s a sixty- to eighty-year period, after which history stops hurting as personal trauma, without ceasing to function as a source of experience. It is a three-generation feat. In the first phase you have to learn not to enforce justice as clean retribution. In the second comes reflection as description of the shock. Here institutes are founded, like yours. And then the third generation sees itself as demos of democracy, not as a cannibalistic people.
And when we wait for a similar approach, for instance, in Russia, where to this day the wider public considers the invasion of Czechoslovakia as brotherly help or doesn’t even have so much as an idea about it?
Russia is authoritarian today, not despotic. That is, if you will, progress. If it does not, however, invest in its social infrastructure or raise its social IQ as the only non-fossil source of energy, its old problems will return. At the moment that fossil energy gives out, so will fossil regimes. That moment is not in the unforeseeable future. Getting rid of political fossility is everything. Modern power is not the power to hurt someone, but the ability not to harm its talented ones. As long as Russian bigwigs see in democracy the imperial ideology of their rival, and not the imperative of creativity, they will have a hard time, and they will not avoid a further implosion.
In the year 1950, you were twelve. What kind of memories do you have of the 1950s?
Non-unionist.4 My father, who directed a small dairy, refused to join the Party when they came to him with the offer that with membership, he would keep his place. Then he had to go to the mines and I with my mother to Pardubice. There, until the year 1950, I went to the oratory of the Salesians, who one night were seized and taken away to work battalions. When dad left the dairy, it stopped producing cheese. And when the Salesians were away, the boys in Jesničánky started to fight more.
To live through the years of adolescence in one of the darkest periods of this country must have been an utterly specific experience. How would you describe it?
What doesn’t destroy you makes you stronger. It was, however, an era of unnatural selection. A parody on Darwin, in English: Not the fittest won, but the faintest. The most competent was not rewarded, but instead he with the worst ways. This did not end up repaying everyone. The capable ended up on the waste heap of history, as the weeding out of the class unsuitable was called in the jargon of Lenin‘s Golden Horde.5 From these, however, grew a splendid biotope of new growth.
How did the Prague intellectual environment look in the period between Stalin and Kruschev?
Well, like a beach full of Robinsons, who shipwrecked but didn’t drown.
From today’s perspective it seems practically incomprehensible how many intelligent people aligned unconditionally with a party of a criminal regime, and how long it took some of them to see through it. How is something like that possible?
Intelligence means also appraisal of threat. The first thing that a decrease in immunity of a given system weakens is human fortitude. In Latin it’s called fortitudo, or strength. And it was esteemed virtuousness. Less virtuousness implied less quality of life. The first thing that then plays a role is instinct: one time as self-preservation, another as aggression. And most often you get it as a not always easy distinguishable combination of the two. Self-preservation advised being among the powerful. Not to look back, to go forward, and not to designate the direction oneself. This has consequences, however. When you go where you didn’t want to, you maintain that the direction was not your fault, but you don’t take kindly to it. Thus resentment is created, the worst form of human behavior.
Informing, it seems, is common Czech practice. Why?
Because we are a non-aristocratic society – viz. virtuousness – and below it always paid off.
How, with the hindsight of several weeks, would you describe the “explosion” and development of the “Kundera scandal”?
It’s not about an explosion, but a classic act of the ancient Greek goddess of rumors named Pheme. In Czech we still use the word fáma. The ancient Greeks built her monuments and brought victims, so that where possible she would notice those who didn’t venerate her. Pheme always combines truthful detail about you with the benefit of your enemy. It doesn’t begin if there is not something in it that will scatter. We thus do not have a Kundera scandal, but a scandal of Communist writing after the year 1948. And it is “Kunderized” in that today our only truly world-renowned literat started as agitprop.
That means that in this discussion rebound reflections of our Communist past?
No, it means that the shadow cast on Kundera maybe illuminates the first decade of ideologized writing in post-February Czechoslovakia.
Does that help refine the discussion, or relativize and aggravate it?
As said, at the end of the second phase of historical memory comes specification; however, that does not mean belittling Kundera’s literary achievement.
Did anything in the tone or style of the debate which broke out after the publication of Hradilek’s article surprise you?
No, it has the classic dimensions of post-modern mediality. These, of course, are not always encouraging.
Along with re-discussing the role of Milan Kundera in the 1950s comes returning anew to the question of the circumstances of the author’s life and his work. How do you perceive this relationship in the context of the “Kundera scandal”?
No work is created without biographical sources, but neither is any shielded by them. The Czech proverb: „What is said in joke is with the devil“ – co je žertem, to je s čertem6 – is a philosophical, not literary science sentence. Literary science is nevertheless literature about literature. So there is some irony if Kundera’s great novel about the 50s, Žert (The Joke), suddenly has such a devil connotation.
What is your personal opinion on the whole thing?
Those who think that they will minimize Kundera are mistaken.
Have you ever found yourself in a situation comparable with the one in which Milan Kundera perhaps found himself? Can you guess at what your behavior would have been, if you had been confronted with a similar problem?
Luckily no. There were two years for sedition the year they jailed me for Dotaznik;7 in the 50s, there was the rope. And when Böll raised his voice, they let me go. When Einstein protested in the 50s against the death sentence of the famous woman Horáková, he sped up the execution. For the paragraph “věděl, nepověděl”8 which concerned the non-reporting of suspicious things, you served up to ten years then. In spite of that, there didn’t exist only fiery young “unionist“9 literatures, but also their contemporaries, like Kolář, who served time in the 50‘s, and Kalandra, who did not survive that decade, or Zahradníček, who spent it in a concentration camp and died after they had barely released him, as a result of imprisonment. At that time there were also world-renowned authors, like Hostovský, who had already had to leave the country. Pavel Jánský, my poet friend, then a beginning poet, wrote a few critical verses in ‘48 and vanished to jail in Bory.10 He had to wait for his first book until the thaw of the 60s, only to be banned again. As was the case then for all quality authors, without regard for the political accent of their own beginnings. I met with Kohout already in samizdat, and with Kundera in exile.
Arnošt Lustig declared that people are not born as fighters. They have to live ordinary, placid lives. But what should their “correct” behavior be like when there are not conditions for a placid life?
Arnošt is right. Heroika is not a common commodity. Otherwise it wouldn’t even work. Achilles first runs around in girl’s dresses and doesn’t know if he likes boys or girls more. It is much simpler to live in the unending and chaotic randomness of the everyday as an inconspicuous dodger, than to think about whether in the middle of this refuse there might exist some kind of chancy connections and to reach for them. But only thus are created the contextual pluses of our life and the heightened plane of its inhabitance. And it is also known about Arnošt that he bravely came through the hell of the holocaust.
1 Translator’s note: A reference to the verse of Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986), Czech poet, author and 1984 Nobel Laureate in Literature.
2 Translator’s note: A reference to the verse of Ján Kollár (1793-1852), poet, linguist and historian of Slovak origin, in which he depicts Russia as a great oak tree.
3 Translator’s note: A reference to Klement Gottwald (1896-1953), long-time leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, later Czechoslovak prime minister and, from June 1948, president.
4 Translator’s note: Gruša refers here to the Československá svaz mládeže (ČSM), lit. Czechoslovak Union of Youth, the umbrella youth organization founded by the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1949.
5 Translator’s note: A reference to the Russian designation for the 13th century Mongol khanate, often associated specifically with Genghis Khan.
6 Translator’s note: literally, “What is said in joke is with the devil,” or more freely translated, perhaps “Said as a joke, up in smoke.”
7 Translator’s note: Gruša‘s experimental novel Dotazník aneb Modlitba na jedno město a přítele (lit. Questionnaire, or Prayer for One City and Friend) was initially published in samizdat in the late 1970‘s.
8 Translator’s note: A reference to the infamous Czechoslovak Socialist Republic legal article, lit. “knew, didn’t tell.“
9 Translator’s note: Another reference to the Czechoslovak Union of Youth.
10 Translator’s note: Bory is to this day the name for the Pilsen prison, located in the Bory section of the city.