The Politics of Culture in Czechoslovakia

Jacques D. Rupnik, a Social Studies teaching fellow, is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the Sorbonne. Paris, France, and a research associate at the Russian Research Center.

The extraordinary Czech literary and cinemagraphic "new wave" of the 1960s was a product of, as well as a contributing factor in, the struggle to change a regime that had been introduced in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and which obstinately refused to undergo any transformations after Stalin's death. The Czechs, unlike the Poles and Hungarians in 1956, did not experience even a brief period of destalinization. The artists of the '60s challenged the Zhdanovian ideological norms imposed on any creative activity. Instead of "socialist realism" that portrayed a prison labor camp as a "pioneering project in the building of socialism," Czech artists presented their perception of reality: a devastating attack on the Stalinist system.

Thus when the miracle happened, and the reformist streams of the initially Party-controlled Prague Spring of 1968 overflowed into a nationwide tide of unrest, the intellectuals, and writers in particular, were, by their past experience, often best equipped to help wipe out the Stalinist garbage accumulated over 20 years. Overnight the Prague literary journal Literarni Listy became the most avidly read paper in the country and its contributors, the spokesmen for popular aspirations (an understandable situation in a country where no legal means of opposition were available, writers and journalists had access to the media recently freed from censorship). The philosopher Ivan Svitak was calling for workers' councils while Martin Vaculik, the author of The Axe (Harper and Row), published his famous 2000-word manifesto, a political program for the whole country, which was greatly to anger Mr. Brezhnev.

If the Czech intellectuals played such a prominent political role during the Dubcek era, they also became one of the most exposed targets of the repression that followed the Russian invasion. Their films were banned, their works removed from libraries along with those of Sartre, Graham Greene and Aragon. Among the officially published translations. Russian works dominate; curiously, perhaps only Raymond Chandler can rival Sholokov or Fadeev. In cinemas only Russian war movies, American westerns and second rate French and Italian comedies are available.

As in every dictatorship, only music considered ideologically harmless can flourish. Today, cultural life in Czechoslovakia is apparently the most repressed and sterile in Eastern Europe.

What then happened to all the "bright young men and women" who made the new wave of the 1960s possible?

Antonin J. Liehm's Closely Watched Films is to my knowledge the most up to date comprehensive study of Czech cinema available in English. Avoiding the technical, pseudo -professional jargon usually associated with film criticism, he presents an illuminating analysis of the origins of Czech film's new wave of the 60's. With regard to the difficulties of filmmaking in the 1950s, Liehm says that "with the consolidation of a dictatorship that proved to be military-bureaucratic rather than revolutionary, it became increasingly clear that the liberation of the film from the dictates of the market meant its subjugation to the dictates of the state." In the West directors are permanently torn between giving way to their creative instincts and submitting to the demands of producers, and viewers, since in the last instance, the very existence of film depends on its box office success. The situation is different with a nationalized film industry as in Czechoslovakia, where the previewer (the censor) and the producer are the same person, i.e. the Party establishment. This also explains why directors in Czechoslovakia were almost forced to become involved in politics since their chances of making films depended so much on political conditions. But Liehm's book is not a long and dreary story of the artists' struggle against censorship. He shows how the post-Stalinist state, affected by the "disintegration" of the official ideology (including the dogmas of "socialist realism") ended up preferring strictly non-political art, while art in general and film in particular were playing an eminently political role as demystifiers of ideologies. In this global perspective of subtle interplay of politics and culture, Liehm sees the history of post war Czech film from the point of view of generations.

The "golden age" of the 1960s is, for Liehm, the culmination of a long process which depended on political conditions, and resulted in a close relationship between four generations of directors who, despite the differences in their outlooks and techniques, were animated by a strong feeling of solidarity. Both elements account for the richness and the diversity of the Czech film production.

Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde, 1965) and Ivan Passer (Intimate Lighting, 1965) rejected any theoretical approach to reality. Theirs is one of close, almost microscopic observation; they find "in that microcosm of human action a portrait of the social reality as a whole" This accounts for the political dimension of a film with an apparently nonpolitical subject, such as Firemen's Ball, 1968. Others, like Jaromil Jires (The Joke, 1968) preferred social analysis and political generalizations, while Chytilova's Dazies or Nemec's Report on the Party and the Guests are philosophical tales in the Voltairian sense of the word.

Although having different philosophical and esthetic approaches to filmmaking, they all shared a common attitude toward actors (Forman and Passer introduced the use of non-professional actors) that is best defined by the director Jiri Weiss: "To me an actor is what five divisions of the Soviet army are for Sergel Bondartchuk (Soviet director, author of the gigantic film version of War and Peace). And a conversation between a man and his wife is more interesting to me than the battle of Borodino. The miracle of cinematography is the reconstruction (or, if you will, the construction) of human life. Film magnifies human "fleas" to superhuman proportions, and a tremor of the lips or the eye's loving glance is more powerful than a cannon shot."

The "ideal" conditions of the 1960s, freeing Czech directors from commercial constraint and political pressures as well, account in part for the emergence in Czechoslovakia of a dozen first class film directors of international recognition (winning two Oscars for The Shop on Mainstreet, by Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, and in 1968 for Mencl's Closely Watched Trains). When the Russian tanks rolled in and put an end to the Dubcek experiment of "socialism with a human face," Czech film directors, as well as many other people, were faced with the following choice: emigration abroad or "internal emigration." For most of the directors who stayed, the "normalization" meant no longer being allowed to shoot the kind of films they wanted. Sometimes they had to agree to film according to the expectations of the new regime. Thus Jaromil Jires, who revealed his extraordinary talent with The Cry (1963), and confirmed it with The Joke (1968), (a powerful critique of Stalinism), and with his surrealistic tale Valerie and her Week of Wanders (1969), last year completed a new movie about the construction of the Prague subway, with a heavy emphasis on the Soviet technological assistance.

These personal tragedies are only one aspect of the incredible mediocrity now ruling over Czech film production. The tone was set by Miroslav Muller, a hardliner and the current cultural watchdog of the Czech Communist Party. He tried his own talent and wrote the screenplay of a new film directed by K. Stekly (who is well in his 70s and the only director who agreed to do the job). The film is called The Enemy at the Wheel and is supposed to be an allegory on the 1968 events. The story goes something like this: a gang of cab drivers (former intellectuals and criminals) arrange the firing of a manager and the foreman of a garage, both devoted communists. The foreman's wife is seduced by her former lover, recently returned from emigration, who intends to take her with him to the capitalists. But, thanks to Providence, the airport is closed (because the Russian Antonovs carrying tanks are just landing). The overjoyed foreman, immediately recognizes the sound and shouts gratefully, "It's them!" Then, as the script indicates, the noise of the engines swells to a crescendo and "grows into an optimistic chorus of heavenly voices." Even Zhdanov would have considered this as sabotage of "socialist realism."

The alternative for those who refuse to be these kinds of "engineers of human souls" as comrade Stalin used to put it, was to leave the country and continue their film careers in the West, especially in America where the chances to make films were best (Forman, Passer, Kadar and Weiss now live in New York). All found themselves caught in the following dilemma: to continue the kind of work they used to do in Czechoslovakia that won them international fame or to adopt the style of filmmaking of their adopted country.

What made the "discreet charm" of Czech films of the 1960s in the West was a certain atmosphere, their simplicity in the observation of everyday life, of ordinary people, a subtle sense of humor combined sometimes with social satire. This required a deep and almost subconscious knowledge of a place and people and feelings. These qualities are impossible to transport to a new reality. In other words, it is impossible to make "Czech" movies in America. Ivan Passer's recent Law and Disorder just doesn't work when it tries to be a "Czech film" about ordinary Brooklyn shopkeepers and cab drivers, because Passer is not "equipped" by his experience to do this kind of film. This problem is not confined to Czech directors. Antonioni's Zabriskie Point is a failure in the sense that it sees America through European eyes, picking out and reproducing certain superficial stereotypes. Alain Resnais spent two years in New York, with all material means at his disposal desperately trying to make a European film about America. Finally he decided to go back to Paris, and shot a successful movie. Stavisky Only perhaps the genius of Milos Forman transcended this difficulty; his Taking Off is certainly the best European film made in America, about America; and again, he reached the universal through microscopic observation of the most particular. Besides this exception, that proves the rule, the uprooted artist is inevitably driven to the other alternative: to try to become an American artist. This again is a difficult enterprise, since if the point is to make American movies many Americans would seem far better equipped to do this than Czech emigres. Certainly, Roman Polansky has proved the contrary; having started with the very Polish Knife in the Water, he has managed to become one of the best Hollywood directors with Chinatown. For most directors some kind of balance between the two alternatives has to be found. Milos Forman may perhaps come close to achieving this with his new One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (starring Jack Nicholson and to be released in the fall).

The future of Czech film directors in America is a different story from the future of Czech cinema. Some of the best have left the country (the last to leave was Jan Nemec who arrived in Paris last summer, after six years of not being allowed to shoot). Those who stayed are on the blacklist, and to be blacklisted in Prague--as well as in Hollywood in the fifties--means to lose the possibility to do creative work for many years. Ivan Passer once related how eager he was to start shooting his first American movie, Born to Win (1971). He said that filmmaking had one thing in common with athletics: you have to practice, keep in shape, keep in touch with the craft. Thus to lose the possibility to shoot for many years is a total disaster for a director. And even if in ten years (to be optimistic) a "thaw" comes in Prague, and new conditions for art appear, it is too late, you can't just pick up where you left off; times have changed and film with it. And for those outside the country it would be too late, too, since in the mean time they may have become American directors, cut off from the realities of their country of origin.

But was there not a feeling of the end of an era in Prague already in the spring of 1968, when Czech directors were suddenly, after 20 years, confronted with their newly gained freedom? As Jan Nemec says:

"the difference between today [1968] and yesterday is primarily that we all find ourselves in a situation that we were not ready for. The cards have been redealt, the game is open, and for a moment everyone can play what he wants. The moving force of all our activity today has been 'the struggle against the dark forces of reaction,' to borrow a phrase from Stalin's History of the Bolshevik Party. The driving force has fallen by the wayside, at least for the present. When one lives in a society that is essentially not free, it is the obligation of every thinking person to attack obstacles to freedom in every way at his disposal, which is what happened. Now, of course, everyone is faced with a choice: What does he really want? What does he feel must be done and said in the new situation, one that differs from the previous situation in that people are no longer behind barbed wire, but rather within a normal society, so that in our case, a different sort of activity will be called for?"

Maybe 1968 signaled the end of the "new wave." However, a dozen directors of international standing were already turning to something different, finding new ways of expressing their talent. The Russian invasion not only put an end to the "new wave" but, for the time being anyway, to Czech cinema as such.

It is only now that the West is becoming acquainted with the extraordinary revival of Czech literature that took place during the 1960s as these remarkable works keep coming from Western publishers, along with books, written after the Russian invasion, that are banned from publication in Czechoslovakia. Contrary to the situation in cinema, we have here much more of a sense of the continuity of this literary trend. Movie production is a "public activity" which requires substantial material means; once the political conditions had changed, the production of "undesirable" directors was stopped. Writers are much more difficult to silence. They may not be published and thus lose touch with their readers, but they can still write privately, "for the drawer" as they now say in Prague. Besides, the importance of a readership for the writer still has to be proved: Salinger has for the last 20 years deliberately secluded himself from a public he considers rather a nuisance to his creativity.

Writers also seem to have an inclination to assume a sense of mission (to preserve the national culture against totalitarian rule). Thomas Mann in his California villa remained the embodiment of German culture, resisting the barbarism of Goebbels and Co. Solzhenitsyn, though not published in Russia in the last ten years before he was expelled, still had a sense of speaking for the people, representing the national values against the neo-Stalinist pragmatism of Brezhnev. Similarly Czech writers, particularly Kundera. Vaculik and Kohout sensed the necessity to remain in their country. In touch with their people, even in this period of darkness. This is also reinforced by the shared feeling that they have a debt to pay. In 1948 Kohout and Kundera warmly welcomed the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia. They soon found the Stalinist frame too narrow for their creative work and though materially privileged, launched a decisive attack on the ruling party elite. Frustrated from the results of a "revolution from above" in 1948, they helped to bring about another one "from below" in 1968.

Their works come to us at a time when no new literature worth reading is being published in Czechoslovakia. The "official" literature oscillates between two genres: trashy novels and political pamphlet. Mr. Muller can again serve us as the example of the first type, with his cheap would-be sexy novel. "With Elvira at the Spa."

The other sort is best represented by Alexej Pludek's antisemitic "novel" Vabank, the first to deal in literature with the events of 1968. As in any socialist-realist work the characters must be archetypes. The "positive hero" is a working class Czech guy, who just returned from Syria where he was providing "brotherly help" on an engineering project. The "bad guy" is a son of the exploiting class, "pretentious, selfish and foreign to our country." The fact that he operates as "eminence grise" of various literary and political circles is not "an indication of exceptional gifts, but rather a symptom of an egoistic character, in his case almost innate." Why almost? Isn't it obvious since we learn later that his grandfather's real name was Bergmann! (The latter arrived poor from Galicia and within five years owned already all the pubs and breweries in town!) In a style reminiscent of the Nazi era or more recently of General Brown. Pludek presents the Czechoslovak reform movement of 1968 as only a part of a large. Zionist plot, which started with the 1967 six-day war in the Middle East and was to end with "the seizure of the government of the major world powers."

While this kind of fascist garbage received the National Book Award in Prague, a dozen works by Czech writers not allowed to be published in their country were acclaimed by critics in the West. Whereas the "official" publications seem a rather desperate effort' third-rate writers to please their Russian-sponsored supervisors, those that are banned are linked with and perpetuate the Czech literary tradition.

This tradition is best represented by the work of two authors writing at Prague at the end of World War I: Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Schweik). The tradition could be called the literature of the absurd: with Kafka it is expressed through the feeling of alienation, with Hasek through a satiric sense of humor. Joseph Skvorecky continues the latter tradition with his novel The Tank Brigade, where the contemporary Schweik is confronted with the stupidity and absurdity of the Czech army at the height of the Stalinist era, instead of the Austrian Army of Franz Joseph.

Ludvik Vaculik's novel The Guinea Pigs (NY: Third Press) is a most brilliant venture in the Kafka-esque vein. Like Joseph K. in The Trail, Vaculik's hero is a bank employee. He lives a petty monotonous life with his wife Eva, "two tolerable little boys" and a couple of newly acquired guinea pigs that soon become the center of the family life. Our clerk works in a weird bank; enigmatic employees of the bank walkd out everyday with some of the bank notes in their pockets. Sometimes the money is confiscated by the guards at the exit, but the whole thing seems absurd since the guards don't return it all to the bank. What an economist would diagnose simply as a supplementary cause of inflation under socialism, deeply puzzles our clerk, who hopelessly tries to understand the whereabouts of this clandestine circulation of currency. The more he tries, the less he knows and the more confused he becomes, as his investigations lead him to the mysterious and dangerous basements and sewers of the Prague underground. Even a state bank in a socialist state did not remove from Prague the obscure forces that haunted Joseph K....

Another prolific, now-silenced Czech writer is Milan Kundera. While he became famous in the West with his political novel The Joke, his work became a classic in Prague where anybody would know the famous quotation from it when Ludvik, replying to his enthusiastically communist girlfriend who wrote to him about the "health atmosphere" prevailing at the summer Party school, quips on a postcard:

"Optimism is the opium of the people! The healthy atmosphere stinks! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik"

The Joke is the story of an individual's life destroyed by the absurdity of a sociopolitical system (and of an era) that was deadly serious. Kundera's new novel Life is Elsewhere (NY: A. Knopf) explores the individual's motivations for joining that system and playing a part in its arbitrary destructive powers.

In Life is Elsewhere the hero (Jaromil) is an overprotected, mother's only beloved boy who discovers and embraces at the same time, live, revolution, poetic strength, political intolerance and impotence. Youth, poetry, revolution and sexual immaturity fit together for Kundera.

Jaromil is a frustrated and extremely jealous lover. With the triumph of the "revolution," (the communist takeover in 1948), he joins the Party, and exchanges private beauty, which he alone understood, for public "beauty," which can be understood by everybody. With a Party card in his pocket, he discovers a way to satisfy his jealous anxieties. His girlfriend, late for a rendez-vous with him, does not find anything better to appease him than to invent a story about her brother leaving the country for the West. Jaromil (who by this time has achieved prominence by giving poetry readings to police agents) goes immediately to denounce her to the National Security. In the evening once she is already in jail, it occurred to him that at that very moment his girl was no doubt surrounded by men--policemen, interrogators, guards. They could do with her whatever they wanted. Watch her change into prison clothes, peer through her cell window while she was sitting on a pail, urinating....One thing puzzled him: these images did not arouse a single spark of jealousy!

You must be mine or die upon the rack, if I want you, Keats' cry rings through the ages. Why should Jaromil be jealous? The redhead girl now belongs to him more than ever. Her fate was his creation. It was his eye watching her as she urinated into the pail; it was his hand touching her when a guard treated her roughly. She was his victim, his creation; she was his, his, totally his own!

Jaromil was no longer jealous. That night, he slept the deep sleep of a real man.

Kundera actively hates poetry as much as he hates the crimes perpetrated under the banner of poetic political slogans. But he is certainly wrong when he equates the surrealistic slogans of the May 1968 revolt in Paris ("L'imagination au pouvoir." "La poesie est dans la rue!" "Soyez realistes demandez l'impossible!") with the Stalinist slogans Jaromil is editing for the May Day parade in Prague some twenty years before. Nothings was more foreign to the spontaneity and libertarian spirit of the May 1968 revolt than the oppressive regimentation of the Stalinist era in Czechoslovakia; the Parisian May had probably more in common with the Prague Spring of 1968 (in which Kundera played an active role) than he suspects.

Maybe that is so, because of his theoretically biased premises; while Kundera equates lyrical poetry, in its quest for the absolute, with revolutions that often turn into dictatorships, the novel is the art of reason, maturity, and truth, where you cannot cheat. That is why there are no great Stalinist novels. But Stalinist poetry (like Nezval in Czechoslovakia or Kundera himself in his youth) left us beautiful verse because through the magic of poetry, all statements become the truth, provided they are backed by the power of real experience. And the poet certainly experiences deeply, so deeply their emotions smoulder and blaze. The smoke of their firely feelings spread like a rainbow over the sky, a beautiful rainbow spanning prison walls....

Life is Elsewhere won Kundera the Medici Literary award for the best foreign novel published in France, a sign of international recognition and interest for his work as well as the efforts of a whole generation of writers whose fate is so closely parallel with that of their country.

Although everybody was ready to weep crocodile tears when half a million troops from the Warsaw Pact armies marched in, in August 1968, to crush Czech hopes for a socialism reconciled with democracy, the pity was short-lived. For the Western establishment, detente and attractive trade prospects have superceded the initial expressions of humanitarian sympathy mixed with "red-scare" rhetoric. To people on the left, especially pro-communist intellectuals in Europe, the more blatantly violent repression under right wing dictatorships, has made them forget the much "duller" horrors of the Czech "normalization," and close ranks with the socialist camp, But, as is well known, "fellow trave'lers" have always proved to be warm supporters of "socialism in one country," so long as it was not their own.

When Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius), the leading seventeenth century philosopher and founder of modern pedagogy left Czech lands in 1620 to avoid persecution, fored Germanization and Catholicization, he was invited to become the first president of Harvard; he turned the offer down. What on earth had that obscure place on the other side of the ocean to offer the most prominent Czech intellectual of his time?

Ironically, today, when Czech intellectuals continue to see no way to insure national survival other than by making a significant contribution to world culture, most people at Harvard are ignorant of, or indifferent to the efforts of these people in "this faraway country of which we know nothing.