Cultural Amnesia (57 page)

A few miles out of Prague, the limousine began to slide on the
icy road. The agents got out and scattered the ashes under its wheels.

—HEDA MARGOLIUS
KOVALY,
Prague Farewell
, P. 180

G
IVEN THIRTY SECONDS
to
recommend a single book that might start a serious young student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the twentieth century, I would choose this one. The life of Heda
Margolius Kovaly is not to be envied. If we had to live a life like hers in order to come out of it with her spirit and dignity, we would be better off not living at all. But her life did have
one feature that we can call a blessing. It dramatized, for our edification, the two great contending totalitarian forces, because they both chose her for a victim. As a Jewish teenager in
Czechoslovakia she was fated to be swept up by the Nazis, and subsequently went right through the mill, starting with the Lodz ghetto and going all the way to Auschwitz, where she wound up in a
block for young girls. Mercifully, in evoking her girls’ dormitory, she restricts herself to one scene. The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their
number punished the next morning for having tried to escape. Any of the
kneeling girls who fell over was taken away to be gassed, so they had to hold each other up. In the
morning, the recaptured escapee had her arms and legs broken in front of their eyes.

Emerging by sheer chance from that most hideous of grand tours, Heda walked home to Prague in good time
for the next disaster. Between 1945, when she got back from Auschwitz, until 1948, when the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, there was a brief interlude, during which she had ample
opportunity to realize that those who have made compromises under an occupation in order to survive are reluctant to meet anyone tactless enough to return from oblivion. But there were still some
people left who had retained the rare combination of integrity and energy, and one of them was the man she married. All too soon, Rudolf Margolius was asked to be a minister in Klement
Gottwald’s Communist government. Rudolf had his doubts, but as an honest and conscientious man he felt he couldn’t turn the job down. He threw himself into the task, ignoring the
warnings of less gifted but wiser friends that he was throwing himself into a pit. His intelligence and ability earned their inevitable reward. In the Slánský show trial, Rudolf was
one of the eleven Jews on the list of fourteen accused. The rehearsed confessions were extracted, or rather instilled, under torture. They were well down to the standard of the pre-war Moscow
trials. All the prisoners were found guilty of the crimes they had accused themselves of and most of them were duly hanged, including Rudolf. The bodies were burned and the bags of ashes were
driven away to be distributed in the woods. But there was ice on the roads. Now look again at the quotation above.

For the murdered idealist’s young wife, what happened next was, if possible, worse. The classic Russian techniques
of making life impossible for the family of a people’s enemy were in full swing, with additional refinements made possible by Czech inventiveness. Heda was thrown out of her job and her
apartment, and then additionally persecuted for being unemployed and homeless. After Khrushchev finally blew the whistle on the Stalinist system in 1956, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria all
rehabilitated their show trial victims before Czechoslovakia did. Not until 1963 was the truth told, and even then the information was officially restricted to the Party itself. Heda would have
been justified in giving up on her country. She has hard things to say about
its educated class, too many of whom knew all about the horrors of Soviet communism but thought
that the Czech version would turn out more civilized because its apparatchiks—they had themselves in mind—would be more cultivated. But she found many examples of instinctive decency
among the common people. She has, however, no sentimentality about anyone, and the most valuable aspect of a valuable book is how she is able to count heads in order to trace the insidious
transition from one political catastrophe to another. According to her, there were plenty of democrats in Czechoslovakia after the war who realized the danger of yielding up their country to the
next absolutism. But they were guilty about having yielded up their country to the last one. Abandoned by its supposedly liberal allies, the republic had let the Nazis in. During the Nazi
occupation, the democrats had been demoralized by fear. The Nazis had crushed them and the Russians had saved them: they had done nothing for themselves. They felt powerless. Perhaps, they
reasoned, it would take a new authoritarianism to create and preserve a just order. So they swam with what felt like the tide of history, trying to convince themselves that it was taking them
somewhere even as it sucked them under.

All this is recounted in an exemplary amalgam of psychological penetration and terse style. In her few
years of relatively normal existence before the 1968 Prague Spring and its bitter aftermath disrupted her life all over again, Heda earned a slim living as a translator from English. Raymond
Chandler and Saul Bellow were two of her authors: perhaps their lively example got into her prose. The only fault in the book is that some of the remembered dialogue is too specifically
dramatized to be credible. She would have done better to paraphrase it. Otherwise, everything is as neatly done as the sentence about the ashes. Her book should never have had to be written; but,
since it had, we are lucky that it was done so well. American readers should note that in the U.S.A. it was called
Under a Cruel Star
. A Google search
reveals that the book is on the course in several colleges, but it deserves to be lot more famous than that.

KARL KRAUS

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) was the satirical voice of Vienna from the
Jahrhundertwende
—the turn of the century that marked the last glorious epoch of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire—to the eve of the
Anschluß,
which luckily he did not live to see. As a Jew whose comprehensive contempt for bourgeois complacency also embraced virtually every Jewish artist
whom he suspected of a taste for success, Kraus had found abundant material for mockery in the old society as it decayed. During World War I he had been tirelessly eloquent on the subject of
how the debased language of patriotic journalism had helped to feed lambs to the slaughter. But when the time came, he had comparatively little to say about the advent of the Nazis, and lived
just long enough to confess that Hitler struck him dumb. “
Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein
,” he confessed in July 1933. He followed the
confession with a 300-page essay about “the new Germany” which J. P. Stern later called “one of the greatest political and cultural polemics ever written,” but it
remained true that Hitler’s personal success left Kraus speechless, because it was beyond satire. Even with due allowance for the famous satirist’s waning powers, this was a
remarkable, if tacit, admission of a failure of imaginative energy to match a new
reality. The new reality was at least as absurd as the old one, but it left him with less
occasion to expose its hidden purpose, mainly because the purpose wasn’t hidden: instead, it was blatant. The open face of Nazi evil left Kraus wrong-footed. Published, edited and
largely written as a one-man enterprise, Kraus’s magazine
Die Fackel
had worked mainly as a
sottisier
of
all the self-deluding things said in the newspapers and periodicals; his cabaret act had worked in the same way; and so had his endless, endlessly self-renewing epic play
The Last Days of Mankind
. But even at the time, the debunking emphasis of Kraus’s effort raised the question of whether his satirical view of society was
really all that informative, since any society that allows free expression of opinion is bound to spend a lot of time talking foolishly anyway, and can be quoted against itself without limit,
and indeed, if it is free enough, without penalty. After Kraus’s death the question came rapidly to a head when the Nazis, far from needing to wrap up their intentions in fine phrases,
proved that they could be quite frightening enough by saying exactly what they meant. The problem posed by Kraus’s high reputation as an analyst of language was repeated later on with
the advent of George Orwell, who so convincingly identified the misuse of language with fraudulent politics that it became tempting to suppose the first thing caused the second, instead of
the second causing the first.

Today, Kraus’s satirical vision, far from being an intellectual lost cause, is a show-business success story:
the continuous and unrelenting mockery of the language of official power is institutionalized in the liberal democracies, and especially in the United States, which, since the heyday of Mort
Sahl and Lenny Bruce in the 1950s, has teemed with political and social satirists, many of them holding stellar positions in the media. It is now part of the definiton of a modern liberal
democracy that it is under constant satirical attack from within. Unless this fact is seen as a virtue, however, liberal democracy is bound to be left looking weak vis-à-vis any
totalitarian impulse. An ideology, especially when theocratic, runs no risk of demoralizing its young adherents through questioning its
own principles, because it never
does so. A bright child of his time, Kraus was unusual for his capacity to express his disgust that a free society could be full of things that intelligent people might not like. If, at this
distance, he looks naïve, it is only because of the devastation wrought since by systems which suffered much less from disunity. We have come to value, in other words, the humanist
approximations that made him impatient. One of them was the female aspiration towards personal liberty. He found the idea embarrassing, forgetting that all aspirations sound shrill until they
are fulfilled.

A liberated woman is a fish that has fought its way ashore.

—KARL KRAUS