My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  More that two thousand years later, Bernhard Bolzano was living in the Czech lands. All of his activities were aimed at strengthening democracy, eliminating social differences, and expanding education. In his utopian On the Best State (from Selected Writings on Ethics and Politics), however, he draws conclusions similar to Plato’s:

  As books may never become the property of individuals, they shall be published at the expense of the state. From this it obviously follows that not everything anyone wants to publish shall in fact be printed. . . . Those who urge us to accept an unrestricted freedom of the press no doubt also wish it to be accompanied by an unrestricted freedom to read. Thus once a bad or dangerous book is printed and distributed, one could hardly prevent it causing incalculable damage. . . . Concerning . . . the production of new works of art, one is not nearly so mild in one’s judgments. . . . For this reason, one will not so easily permit someone to make poetry or musical composition, etc., his primary business when he does not show promise of accomplishing something truly extraordinary.

  As far as censorship was concerned, as a man of the Enlightenment, Bolzano wanted an enlightened, educated, and strictly limited censorship. It should be aimed primarily at immoral works, when a book contains scenes depicting lewdness or other vices in a provocative way, or even defends such vices.

  It is true that freedom of the press and freedom of expression provide an opening for many depravities, but censorship in itself is a depravity that harms society more than any erotic scenes. Moreover, the linking of censorship with the Enlightenment is a contradiction.

  The Frenchman Étienne Cabet, the founder of the Icaria movement, was even more radical in his relationship to freedom of the press. In his utopian Voyage to Icaria he envisions that only his enlightened republic would have the right to print books. The republic [would be] able to rewrite all the books that were imperfect . . . and to burn all the books judged to be dangerous or useless. Cabet later moved to the United States and in the middle of the nineteenth century attempted to create a model republic based upon his ideas, which of course, at the beginning, would assume the form of a pure dictatorship and would compel the inhabitants to adhere strictly to all established norms of life in the colony. He forbade drinking and smoking and instructed the denizens to establish families and turn over to the community the responsibility of raising the children. Cabet’s ideal republic (like all ideal communities), however, had no hope of succeeding and rapidly disintegrated.

  Bolzano too planned out the life of his society in detail. He did away with property inheritance and outlawed youth organizations unless each meeting was overseen by an elder who had the proper worldview. He planned education and determined how many workers would be needed in various places. Everything was to be done, of course, in such a way that they would be happy.

  All architects of the ideal state appealed to the happiness of the citizens. It is I, claimed Charles Fourier, who will be thanked by current and future generations for initiating their happiness. . . . We are going to witness a spectacle which can only be seen once in each globe, the transition from incoherence to social combination. This is the most brilliant movement that can ever happen in the universe, and the anticipation of it shall be a consolation to the present generation for all its miseries. Every year of this period of metamorphosis will be worth centuries of ordinary existence. But humanity did not thank him, and he did not become an actor in his theater.

  The mistake of the utopians lay in their assumption that it is possible to build the ideal state with the agreement of the people. They believed in the ideal person who, as soon as he is afforded the opportunity to act honorably and fairly, would be transformed into a conscious citizen doing his utmost to serve, happily and willingly, the good of the community. And so was born the image of the joyful, enthusiastic citizen for whom the enlightened ruler would plan all of his feelings, activities, and mutual relationships (including amatory ones) and rigorously subordinate him to discipline—which was, however, gladly accepted. He who does not submit has chosen the fate of the pariah. It was a logical conclusion. As soon as the incontrovertible good was discovered, it would be possible and correct to require that everyone be in its service. Those who did not, were violating it, and because the community embodied the good, it would be necessary to deal with them as criminals.

  It is here that the onetime advocates of the ideal community are in agreement with their modern successors. When we read not only the works of Marx but also Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, or Bolzano’s vision of the state, we are amazed that all these dreams of justice and the new arrangement of the community actually epitomized the despotisms or at least the precursors of dictatorships as they are commonly understood. Their authors rightly suspected that people would hardly wax enthusiastic over artificially created relationships. Therefore, they mercilessly put to death everyone who wrenched himself out of the established order. Thomas More suggested imprisonment for those who engaged in premarital sex, and because the parents were responsible for such corruption, they should be imprisoned as well. Marital infidelity would be punished even worse; the serial transgressor would pay for it with his neck. More also advocated the execution of anyone who dared discuss public affairs unofficially and would proclaim war on every state that possessed uncultivated land and did not allow the immigration of surplus citizens of the Utopia. We do not know if Adolf Hitler read Utopia, but at least on this point he decidedly acted according to its principles.

  In Cabet’s Icaria, there is not a police uniform to be seen. But this is not important. Uniformed policemen are unnecessary because in our community all citizens must keep watch over the upholding of the laws and pursue or report criminals. How accurate this two-hundred-year-old characteristic of the police state is.

  In his turn, Campanella demands the execution of everyone who deviates from the strict order of his state. For example, he would punish with death a woman who uses high-heeled boots so that she may appear tall, or garments with trains to cover her wooden shoes. His image of prisons and hangmen in the future ideal state is prophetic of Bolshevism, which came several hundred years after Campanella’s death. They have no prisons, except one tower for shutting up rebellious enemies. The accused who is found guilty is reconciled to his accuser and to his witnesses, as it were, with the medicine of his complaint, that is, with embracing and kissing. No one is killed or stoned unless by the hands of the people. . . . Some transgressors are allowed to put themselves to death: they will place around themselves bags of gunpowder, light them, and burn to death, while exhorters are present for the purpose of advising them to die honorably. . . . Certain officers talk to and convince the accused man by means of arguments until he himself acquiesces in the sentence of death passed upon him. . . . But if a crime has been committed against the liberty of the republic, or against God, or against the supreme magistrates, there is immediate censure without pity. These only are punished with death. He who is about to die is compelled to state in the face of the people and with religious scrupulousness the reasons for which he does not deserve death, and also the sins of the others who ought to die instead of him, and further the mistakes of the magistrates. If, moreover, it should seem right to the person thus asserting, he must say why the accused ones are deserving of less punishment than he.

  It is as if the modern era were begun by Rousseau’s Social Contract which, just like many other utopias, begins from the proposition that at one time people lived in a state of marvelous innocence. Their primary luxury was freedom and will. This paradisiacal condition was destroyed by the emergence of private property. Rousseau does not suggest doing away with private property, however. He describes in detail the specter of the people or the citizen as a kind of revolutionary power, a source of truth, a guarantor of knowledge, and therefore the highest judge. Something incontrovertible and just, which is called the general will, emerges from the unified will of all citizens who have a common interest.
This is expressed by the law. The state itself watches over the fulfillment of the laws and the carrying out of justice. This general will always embodies truth. He who refuses to submit can be compelled to be free. He who continually contravenes, he who scorns the will of the people, deserves nothing less than death. Rousseau deliberates over who should ensure that this general will is fulfilled and at the same time not abused, and he comes up with the enlightened ruler, who would be able, as it were, to change the nature of every individual.

  The people, then, over the course of further centuries, would become the shield concealing the crimes of those who in their name act as their benefactors and enlightened rulers.

  Karl Marx identified this revolutionary force, which alone could achieve a just society, with the proletariat. When it took power, it would create a revolutionary society different from all previous societies. Marx translates his utopian vision of the future society that would be built by the proletariat into the Communist Manifesto: He predicts that as soon as all property is in the hands of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie will be destroyed, and class warfare and contradictory social interests will disappear. In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Just like all creators of utopias, he possesses the fantastic conviction that he has at last found the key to happiness, justice, abundance, and a dignified life—truth. It is possible that the struggle to create this happy society would require time, but the future would reward the people for it. The utopians managed to capitalize on people’s longing for impersonal guidance in order to persuade them of their vision no matter how unreal or even absurd. In backward and impoverished Russia, the resolute, fanatical adherent of Marx’s communist vision, Lenin, actually tried to build a communist society. In 1920 he did not hesitate to proclaim that the generation that is now fifteen will live to see a communist society.

  In a Communist society, as Lenin understood it, each person had the right to satisfy all his needs. In ten to twenty years, the country in which prosperity was to reign was stricken with a famine that took the lives of millions of citizens. Further millions perished because they refused to proclaim, or did not sufficiently proclaim, their enthusiasm for the unreal vision.

  The greatest danger threatens humanity when adherents of utopia succeed in seizing power in its name and try to realize their dreams of a better society. Their unrealistic visions make them blind to reality. The horrible crimes of communism and Nazism arose above all from the utopianism of these ideologies. This forced life into a brutal stranglehold of illusion. When the illusion collapsed, the regime could not disown it without forfeiting its legitimacy. Therefore, it suppressed life—that is, precisely the people whom it invoked.

  Despite all the disastrous experiences, new utopian projects will emerge. People long to live in a better, kinder, and more just world, and are therefore prepared again and again to succumb to the seductive promises of tyrants, political or religious dreamers who promise it to them, either in heaven or in heaven on earth—in both cases, however, for eternity.

  The Victors and the Defeated

  Several days after the coup, the Communist weekly Tvorba printed an impassioned editorial. The 25th of February is one of the greatest days in our history. On this day our nation for the first time in the history of its thousand-year existence actually created a government truly of the people. A government dedicated to realizing all the just demands of the working masses, who will be hindered by nothing in their constructive labor. As one can see from this brief excerpt, the author, Arnošt Kolman, did not excel in literary style. It is likely, however, that at the time he believed what he was writing. (At the end of his life, he admits in his memoirs: Heavy thoughts force themselves upon me near the anniversary of Victorious February 1948, the day that unfortunately also predetermined August 21, 1968. For the rest, I admit that I too had a hand in that Pyrrhic victory.)

  Meanwhile, the newspapers published a manifesto titled “Forward, Not One Step Back.” The propagandistic text full of phrases about the people and progress, undoubtedly created in the ideological department of the Communist Party, implored all of the creative intelligentsia to support the new regime:

  The magnificent days during which the fate of our nation and our republic is being decided beckon all upstanding patriots, all people of goodwill, to a state of readiness and responsibility. . . . At this historical moment, we turn to all the workers of the mind, to the entirety of the nation’s creative intelligentsia to take their place at the side of the Czech and Slovak people, who so readily rose to the defense of the country. The Czechoslovak working people . . . in a powerful national uprising thwarted sabotage, prevented confusion and disruption, and are now flocking to the new and vital National Front, the genuine representative of the Czech and Slovak nation. Join the action committees of the National Front. Help exterminate the forces of darkness and obscurantism. Join us in the formation of the progressive powers of the nation, which will ensure a happy and joyful future for our glorious country.

  Forward, not one step back.

  This text, composed in the new language in which the proponents of democracy are referred to as the forces of darkness and obscurantism while the representatives of dictatorship are called honorable patriots laboring to create social progress, signaled the end of Czechoslovak democracy. Nevertheless, it was signed by hundreds of educated people—writers, actors, singers, and painters. Among the signatories devoted to the Communist Party, there were certainly opportunists, those with a bad conscience, but there were more who believed that the future belonged to socialism. Enchanted and confused by the illusion that existed only in the minds of dreamers, demagogues, and false prophets, they were prepared to sacrifice their own freedom as well as that of society.

  Years later, on the anniversary of the February coup, we would see films of the ecstatic crowd in the Old Town Square. It is possible, by various means, to compel people to go into raptures. Enthusiasm can be feigned or organized, but one can assume that the enthusiasm of the crowd on this late February day was neither forced nor feigned. To bring the supporters of revolution to the square was not difficult for the conspirators behind the scenes.

  The history of our modern era is permeated with revolutions and coups, which always proceed to the zealous consent of the crowd in the streets. The people of France thrilled to the execution of their king and queen. They then rejoiced at the beheading of the revolutionary leaders, and a few years later the same anonymous people welcomed Napoleon’s coronation as emperor. There were plenty of people who believed that the Bolshevik Revolution would inaugurate a new era of history; it would banish inequality and return the decision-making process to the people—that indefinable but repeatedly invoked societal entity. They sang the glory of the leaders: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin. (The first died in time, the second was murdered by his comrades, the last two perished on the scaffold to the excited or enforced agreement of the mob.) And throughout Germany, the crowds hysterically cheered the victory of Hitler’s Nazi party, which promised to return glory and prosperity to the humiliated country.

  It is as if a dream of paradise slumbers in our thoughts. Christian thinkers recognized that people would gladly believe in a new kingdom in which they would know more love and God’s forgiveness. This kingdom, however, was accessible only after death. Now came a new promise: an earthly paradise in which equitable relations would reign here and now. The poor would receive property; the silenced would receive their voice; the suppressed and the dissatisfied would receive satisfaction.

  If the appropriate historical situation arrives, or if a sufficiently powerful group of conspirators manages to change conditions, someone will eventually appear promising to lead those who yearn for the unattainable to the goal of their longings. The crowds will go out into the street and shout in beatific anticipation that their lives, heretofore tormenting in the
ir everydayness, finality, loneliness, and banality, will be transformed. The crowds will acclaim the glory of the leader, the idea, the future, which they believe they are just beginning to create. The crowds applaud; wave banners, slogans, portraits; offer freshly picked flowers to the leaders of the revolution; sing and dance. For a moment, hope wins out over life experience. There is something magnetic about the ecstatic crowd, not only for those who participate in it but also for those who observe it, often with fear. This attraction overwhelms them. It inhibits their will to resist the progression of events, even though they are convinced the events will be destructive.

  When we look back at those epochal times and the rejoicing mobs, we usually forget, or at least do not notice, that we’re seeing only a portion, sometimes an inconsiderable one, even though it is the louder portion of the participants. Because besides its victors, every revolution has its losers, and they are usually greater in number than the victors.

  When the Czechoslovak republic was coming into being, there were three and a half million Germans in the country. They were frightened by the emergence of a “republic of Czechs and Slovaks” because it meant the loss of their influence and their station as leaders. Not even the hundreds of thousands of citizens connected with the old monarchy rejoiced. Its downfall threatened the end of their world, or at least their careers.