by Tony Judt
In eastern Europe, where the intellectual elites of the pre-war years were tainted with ultra-conservatism, mystical nationalism or worse, the social promotion of youth was even more marked. Czesław Miłosz, whose influential essay The Captive Mind was published in 1951 when he was just 40 and already in political exile, was not at all atypical. Jerzy Andrzejewski (who appears in Miłosz’s book in a less than flattering light) published Ashes and Diamonds, his acclaimed novel of postwar Poland, while in his thirties. Tadeusz Borowski, born in 1922, was still in his mid-twenties when he published his memoir of Auschwitz: This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.
The leaders of the East European Communist parties were, typically, slightly older men who had survived the inter-war years as political prisoners or else in Moscow exile, or both. But just below them was a cohort of very young men and women whose idealistic commitment to the Soviet-backed takeovers played an important part in their success. In Hungary, Géza Losonczy, who would fall victim to the Soviet repression after the 1956 Hungarian revolt, was still in his twenties when he and hundreds like him schemed to bring the Hungarian Communist Party to power. Heda Kovaly’s husband, Rudolf Margolius, one of the defendants at the Slánský trial in December 1952, was 35 when he was appointed minister in the Communist government of Czechoslovakia; Artur London, another of the accused at that trial, was younger still, 33 years old when the Communists seized power. London had received his political education in the French resistance; like many in the Communist underground, he learned how to exercise political and military responsibilities at a very young age.
Youthful enthusiasm for a Communist future was widespread among middle-class intellectuals, in East and West alike. And it was accompanied by a distinctive complex of inferiority towards the proletariat, the blue-collar working class. In the immediate post-war years, skilled manual workers were at a premium—a marked contrast with the Depression years still fresh in collective memory. There was coal to be mined; roads, railways, buildings, power lines to be rebuilt or replaced; tools to be manufactured and then applied to the manufacture of other goods. For all these jobs there was a shortage of trained labor; as we have seen, young, able-bodied men in the Displaced Persons camps had little difficulty finding work and asylum, in contrast to women with families—or ‘intellectuals’ of any sort.
One consequence of this was the universal exaltation of industrial work and workers—a distinct political asset for parties claiming to represent them. Left-leaning, educated, middle-class men and women embarrassed by their social origin could assuage their discomfort by abandoning themselves to Communism. But even if they didn’t go so far as to join the Party, many artists and writers in France and Italy especially ‘prostrated themselves before the proletariat’ (Arthur Koestler) and elevated the ‘revolutionary working class’ (typically imagined in a rather Socialist-Realist/Fascist light as stern, male and muscular) to near iconic status.
Although the phenomenon was pan-European in scope and transcended Communist politics (the best-known intellectual exponent of ‘workerism’ in Europe was Jean-Paul Sartre, who never joined the French Communist Party), it was in eastern Europe that such sentiments had real consequences. Students, teachers, writers and artists from Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere flocked to (pre-schismatic) Yugoslavia to help rebuild railways with their bare hands. In August 1947 Italo Calvino wrote enthusiastically about young volunteers from Italy similarly engaged in Czechoslovakia. Devotion to a new beginning, the worship of a real or imagined community of workers, and admiration for the Soviets (and their all-conquering Red Army) separated a young post-war generation from its social roots and the national past.
The decision to become a Communist (or a ‘Marxist’, which in the circumstances of the time usually meant Communist) was typically made at a young age. Thus Ludek Pachman, a Czech: ‘I became a Marxist in the year 1943. I was 19 years old and the idea that suddenly I understood everything and could explain everything enchanted me, as well as the idea that I would march with proletarians of the whole world, first against Hitler and then against the international bourgeoisie.’ Even those, like Czesław Miłosz, who were not swept off their feet by the charms of its dogma, unambiguously welcomed Communism’s social reforms: ‘I was delighted to see the semi-feudal structure of Poland finally smashed, the universities opened to young workers and peasants, agrarian reform undertaken and the country finally set on the road to industrialization.’ As Milovan Djilas observed, recalling his own experience as Tito’s close adjunct: ‘Totalitarianism at the outset is enthusiasm and conviction; only later does it become organizations, authority, careerism. ’
Communist parties initially flattered intellectuals, for whom Communism’s ambitions stood in appealing contrast to the small-state parochialism of their home-lands as well as the violent anti-intellectualism of the Nazis. For many young intellectuals, Communism was less a matter of conviction than an affair of faith—as Alexander Wat (another subsequently ex-Communist Pole) would observe, the secular intelligentsia of Poland hungered after a ‘refined catechism’. Although it was only ever a minority of East European students, poets, playwrights, novelists, journalist or professors who became active Communists, these were often the most talented men and women of their generation.
Thus Pavel Kohout, who in later decades would achieve international renown as a dissident and post-Communist essayist and playwright, first came to the public eye in his native Czechoslovakia as an ultra-enthusiast for his country’s new regime. Looking back in 1969 he described his ‘sensation of certainty’ upon watching Party Leader Klement Gottwald in Prague’s crowded Old Town Square on the day of the February 1948 Czech coup. Here, ‘in that human mass which set out to search for justice and in this man [Gottwald] who is leading them into the decisive battle’, the 20-year-old Kohout found ‘the Centrum Securitatis that Comenius tried to find in vain.’ Four years later, embraced in the faith, Kohout wrote ‘A Cantata to our very own Communist Party’:
Let us sing greetings to the party!
Her youth is marked by young shock workers
She has the reason of a million heads
And the strength of millions of human hands
And her battalion is the
words of Stalin and Gottwald.
In the midst of blooming May
Into far-away confines
Above the old Castle the flag swaying
With the words ‘The truth prevails!’
The words gloriously fulfilled themselves:
Workers truth has prevailed!
Towards a glorious future our country rises.
Glory to Gottwald’s party!
Glory!
Glory! 60
This sort of faith was widespread in Kohout’s generation. As Milosz would observe, Communism operated on the principle that writers need not think, they need only understand. And even understanding required little more than commitment, which was precisely what young intellectuals in the region were looking for. ‘We were children of the war,’ wrote Zdeněk Mlynář (who joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946, at the age of fifteen), ‘who, having not actually fought against anyone, brought our wartime mentality with us into these first postwar years, when the opportunity to fight for something presented itself at last.’ Mlynář’s generation knew only the years of war and Nazi occupation, during which ‘it was either one side or the other—there was no middle ground. Thus our unique experience drummed into us the notion that the victory of the correct conception meant quite simply the liquidation, the destruction, of the other.’61
The innocent enthusiasm with which some young East Europeans plunged into Communism (‘I’m in that revolutionary mood . . . ’, as the writer Ludvík Vaculík would exclaim to his girlfriend upon joining the Czech Party) does not diminish the responsibility of Moscow for what was, in the end, a Soviet take-over of their countries. But it helps account for the scale of disenchantment and disillusion that followed. Slightly older Communist
s, like Djilas (born in 1911), probably always understood, in his words, that ‘the manipulation of fervor is the germ of bondage.’ But younger converts, particularly intellectuals, were stunned to discover the rigors of Communist discipline and the reality of Stalinist power.
Thus the imposition of Zdanov’s ‘two cultures’ dogma after 1948, with its insistence upon the adoption of ‘correct’ positions on everything from botany to poetry, came as a particular shock in the popular democracies of eastern Europe. Slavish intellectual adherence to a party line, long-established in the Soviet Union where there was in any case a pre-Soviet heritage of repression and orthodoxy, came harder to countries that had only recently emerged from the rather benign regimen of the Habsburgs. In nineteenth-century central Europe, intellectuals and poets had acquired the habit and responsibility of speaking on behalf of the nation. Under Communism their role was different. Where once they had represented an abstract ‘people’ they were now little more than cultural mouthpieces for (real) tyrants. Worse, they would soon be the victim of choice—as cosmopolitans, ‘parasites’ or Jews—for those same tyrants in search of scapegoats for their errors.
Thus most of the Eastern European intellectuals’ enthusiasm for Communism—even in Czechoslovakia, where it was strongest—had evaporated by Stalin’s death, though it would linger on for some years in the form of projects for ‘revision’, or for ‘reform Communism’. The division within Communist states was no longer between Communism and its opponents. The important distinction was once again between those in authority—the Party-State, with its police, its bureaucracy and its house intelligentsia—and everyone else.
In this sense the Cold War fault-line fell not so much between East and West as within Eastern and Western Europe alike. In Eastern Europe, as we have seen, the Communist Party and its apparatus were in a state of undeclared war with the rest of society, and closer acquaintance with Communism had drawn up new battle-lines: between those for whom Communism brought practical social advantage in one form or another, and those for whom it meant discrimination, disappointment and repression. In Western Europe the same fault-line found many intellectuals on both sides; but enthusiasm for Communism in theory was characteristically present in inverse proportion to direct experience of it in practice.
This widespread ignorance of the fate of contemporary Eastern Europe, coupled with growing Western indifference, was a source of bewilderment and frustration to many in the East. The problem for East European intellectuals and others was not their peripheral situation—this was a fate to which they had long been resigned. What pained them after 1948 was their double exclusion: from their own history, thanks to the Soviet presence, and from the consciousness of the West, whose best-known intellectuals took no account of their experience or example. In East European writings about West Europe in the early fifties there is a reiterated tone of injury and bewildered surprise: of ‘disappointed love’ as Miłosz described it in The Captive Mind. Does Europe not realize, wrote the exiled Romanian Mircea Eliade in April 1952, that she has been amputated of a part of her very flesh? ‘For . . . all these countries are in Europe, all these peoples belong to the European community. ’
But they did not belong to it anymore, and that was the point. Stalin’s success in gouging his defensive perimeter deep into the center of Europe had removed Eastern Europe from the equation. European intellectual and cultural life after the Second World War took place on a drastically reduced stage, from which the Poles, Czechs and others had been summarily removed. And despite the fact that the challenge of Communism lay at the heart of Western European debates and disputes, the practical experience of ‘real existing Communism’ a few score miles to the east was paid very little attention: and by Communism’s most ardent admirers, none at all.
The intellectual condition of post-war Western Europe would have been unrecognizable to a visitor from even the quite recent past. German-speaking central Europe—the engine room of European culture for the first third of the twentieth century—had ceased to exist. Vienna, already a shadow of its former self after the overthrow of the Habsburgs in 1918, was divided like Berlin among the four allied powers. It could hardly feed or clothe its citizens, much less contribute to the intellectual life of the continent. Austrian philosophers, economists, mathematicians and scientists, like their contemporaries in Hungary and the rest of the former Dual Monarchy, had either escaped into exile (to France, Britain, the British Dominions or the US), collaborated with the authorities or else been killed.
Germany itself lay in ruins. The German intellectual emigration after 1933 had left behind almost no-one of standing not compromised by his dealings with the regime. Martin Heidegger’s notorious flirtation with the Nazis was atypical only in its controversial implications for his influential philosophical writings; tens of thousands of lesser Heideggers in schools, universities, local and national bureaucracies, newspapers and cultural institutions were similarly compromised by the enthusiasm with which they had adapted their writings and actions to Nazi demands.
The post-war German scene was further complicated by the existence of two Germanies, one of them claiming a monopolistic inheritance of the ‘good’ German past: anti-Fascist, progressive, enlightened. Many intellectuals and artists were tempted to throw in their lot with the Soviet Zone and its successor, the German Democratic Republic. Unlike the Federal Republic of Bonn, incompletely deNazified and reluctant to stare the recent German past in the face, East Germany proudly insisted upon its anti-Nazi credentials. Communist authorities welcomed historians or playwrights or film-makers who wanted to remind their audiences of the crimes of the ‘other’ Germany—so long as they respected certain taboos. Some of the best talent that had survived from Weimar Republic days migrated east.
One reason for this was that because Soviet-occupied East Germany was the only state in the eastern bloc with a Western doppelganger, its intellectuals had access to a Western audience in a way not open to Romanian or Polish writers. And if censorship and pressure became intolerable, there remained the option of returning west, through the Berlin crossing points, at least until 1961 and the building of the Wall. Thus Berthold Brecht opted to live in the GDR; young writers like Christa Wolf chose to remain there; and younger writers still, like the future dissident Wolf Biermann, actually migrated east to study and write (in Biermann’s case at the age of 17, in 1953).62
What appealed to radical intellectuals from the ‘materialist’ West was the GDR’s self-presentation as progressive, egalitarian and anti-Nazi, a lean and sober alternative to the Federal Republic. The latter seemed at once heavy with a history it preferred not to discuss, and yet at the same time curiously weightless, lacking political roots and culturally dependent on the Western Allies, the US above all, who had invented it. Intellectual life in the early Federal Republic lacked political direction. Radical options at either political extreme were expressly excluded from public life, and young writers like Böll were reluctant to engage in party politics (in sharp contrast to the generation that would follow).
There was certainly no lack of cultural outlets: by 1948, once shortages of paper and newsprint had been overcome and distribution networks rebuilt, over two hundred literary and political journals were circulating in the Western Zone of Germany (though many of these disappeared following the currency reform), and the new Federal Republic could boast an unusual range of quality newspapers, notably the new weekly Die Zeit, published in Hamburg. And yet West Germany was, and would for many years remain, peripheral to the mainstream of European intellectual life. Melvin Lasky, a Western journalist and editor based in Berlin, wrote of the German intellectual condition in 1950 that ‘Never in modern history, I think, has a nation and a people revealed itself to be so exhausted, so bereft of inspiration or even talent.’
The contrast with Germany’s earlier cultural pre-eminence accounts in part for the disappointment many domestic and foreign observers felt when contemplating the new Republic: Raymond Aron was no
t the only person to recall that in earlier years this had looked to be Germany’s century. With so much of Germany’s cultural heritage polluted and disqualified by its appropriation for Nazi purposes, it was no longer clear just what Germans could now contribute to Europe. German writers and thinkers were obsessed, understandably enough, with peculiarly Germandilemmas. It is significant that Karl Jaspers, the only major figure from the pre-Nazi intellectual world who took an active part in post-1945 debates, is best known for a singular contribution to an internal German debate: his 1946 essay on The Question of German Guilt. But it was West German intellectuals’ studious avoidance of ideological politics that did most to marginalize them in the first post-war decade, at a time when public conversation in western Europe was intensely and divisively politicized.
The British, too, were mostly peripheral to European intellectual life in these years, though for very different reasons. The political arguments that were splitting Europe were not unknown in Britain—inter-war confrontations over pacifism, the Depression and the Spanish Civil War had divided the Labor Party and the intellectual Left, and these divisions were not forgotten in later years. But in inter-war Britain neither Fascists nor Communists had succeeded in translating social dissent into political revolution. The Fascists were largely confined to the poorer quarters of London, where they traded for a while in the 1930s on popular anti-Semitism; the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never gathered much support outside its early strongholds in the Scottish shipbuilding industry, some mining communities and a handful of factories in the West Midlands of England. Even at its brief electoral peak, in 1945, the Party won just 102,000 votes (0.4 percent of the national vote) and elected two members to Parliament—both of whom lost their seats at the 1950 elections. By the election of 1951 the CPGB attracted just 21,000 voters in a population of some 49 million.