Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  If Merekalov was really hinting at a non-aggression pact, then the present Soviet account is false. Oddly enough, Professor Duraczynski is more inclined to that view than Geoff Roberts. The Roberts conclusion is that Merekalov was really talking about trade relations. Stalin did not make his final choice until August, when he and Molotov concluded (a) that European war following a German attack on Poland was now inevitable, and (b) that France and Britain would leave the USSR in the lurch in that war.

  It remains a space still more white than otherwise. We are still uncertain why, when or how the great reversal was decided. In the end, the Soviet armies were to crush Hitler and save us all. But it can’t even be said for certain that the Pact made that possible, that the USSR was better prepared to fight Hitler in 1941 than in 1939.

  So much for problems of fact. Moral judgments are rather easier. The surrender of Britain and France to Hitler at Munich made the Nazi-Soviet Pact thinkable, if not inevitable. The alliance with Hitlerism to abolish Poland, and the fate of Poles under Soviet occupation, are great crimes. From that point of view, what begins to appear in the space as censorship weakens is still only darkness.

  [1987

  The Berlin Wall as Holy Monster

  Many years ago, in the British embassy in Bonn, there was a small, impassioned, well-loved man named Dr Kohn. A lawyer who had been a refugee from Hitler, one of his duties was to instruct successive British ambassadors on the tortuous complexities of divided Berlin. Dr Kohn knew every precedent over this rusted railway line, that grass-grown bridge or ruin, when staff-car windows should be wound down or kept shut at checkpoints – the whole, gigantic, dog-eared encylopaedia which might one day stop a world war.

  He had a set speech for ambassadors, which began like this. ‘Remember, please remember, the words of the great jurist Puffendorf about the Holy Roman Empire: monstro simile, like unto a monster: with Berlin as with the Empire, seek not to understand, only to preserve!’

  When I went to live in Berlin, the place was a nature reserve of monsters, dozing about the place but occasionally emitting puffs of fire as they snored. There was Gross-Berlin, under Four-Power control. There was Berlin-Capital-of-the-German-Democratic-Republic, and West Berlin. There were islets of West in East, like the enclave of Staaken, and promontories of East in West, like the ruins of the Potsdam Station inhabited by ghouls, crooks and maniacs evading the jurisdiction of the West Berlin police.

  But the greatest monster of them all was the Wall, writhing across the middle of the city in grey and white concrete or breeze-block, becoming a broad, sandy stripe of wire-fences and watch-towers as it encircled the outer suburbs and forests of West Berlin. That Wall is 25 years old this week. It has eaten nearly a hundred lives, though its diet of blood is very sparse these days. It continues to horrify millions, who come to see it and to peer across. They ‘seek to understand,’ and fail. On the other side, they ‘seek to preserve,’ and I regret to say that the Wall – apart from graffiti and the odd bomb from the West – is in excellent health.

  The Berliners have grown used to it. Over a quarter-century, family ties which caused such agony when they were sundered in August 1961 have naturally diminished. West Berliners can visit the East, and elderly East Berliners can usually return the visit if they have relations on the Western side.

  But the monstrosity of the barrier, the sense of inhumanity and crime, remain. Living in Berlin is like inhabiting the map of ancient cartographers: not only ‘here be dragons,’ but the feeling that if you stray too far, you come to the edge of the world: the blank white face of concrete across the street, the rails sawn off suddenly as they enter a purposeful curve.

  And yet it was even stranger to visit Berlin before the Wall. It was already two cities. But you could wander at will and freely between two universes, climbing into the train among the oranges and advertisements of the Zoo station and getting out at Marx-Engels-Platz among the shabby crowds, the huge red banners stirring in the Siberian wind against half-ruined buildings. The Wall came as a shock, hardly as a surprise.

  For the anniversary, the East German authorities have expanded their exhibition which shows how, in August 1961, they ‘saved peace in the heart of Europe.’ The claim isn’t entirely untrue. For many years, the generals of NATO had agreed (when their West German colleagues were not listening) that the main threat of war in Europe was the possible collapse of the German Democratic Republic, by insurrection or economic disaster; it would be hard and perhaps impossible to stop the West Germans piling in to rescue ‘the brothers and sisters in the Soviet Zone,’ and then Soviet intervention and Western counter-intervention would become inevitable.

  By the summer of 1961, Khrushchev’s efforts to force the Western Allies out of Berlin by threats were flagging, after three years of crisis. But the outrush of East Germans through the open Berlin border rose rapidly; by August, some 1,500 refugees were arriving daily in West Berlin. Closing the border on 13 August ensured that the German Democratic Republic would not bleed demographically to death. In its brutal way, it stabilised not only Berlin but all Europe.

  The Western Allies did nothing beyond protesting. There was relief mixed with their outrage. In fact, the pass had already been sold by President Kennedy on 25 July when, in a television speech, he insisted on the freedoms of West Berlin and the rights there of the Western Allies but – deliberately – implied that the East Germans and the Soviet Union could do much as they pleased in their part of the city.

  Only two months before, at Vienna, Khrushchev had warned Kennedy that any status quo was dynamic, that no Power could bring historical changes to a halt. Now Khrushchev had tried to achieve exactly that. Two years later, Kennedy came to West Berlin and proclaimed that he was ‘ein Berliner.’ But his words in July 1961 had been the first guarantee in the Cold War that the West would not try to overthrow the East German State -or any other State in the Soviet part of Europe. The tragedies of Czechoslovakia seven years later and of Poland in 1981 suffocated authentic social changes, while the West stood by and wailed.

  There are walls to keep people out, like the Great Wall of China or Hadrian’s. There are walls to keep people apart, like those the British have built along the ‘Peace Line’ in Belfast. Walls to keep people in are less common. Here the Germans have more practice than most, having bricked millions of Jews into ghettos during the occupation of Poland.

  And yet, just as the point of minefields in war is to force an enemy into the gaps between them, so walls are also for letting people through. This reminds me of a conference about political bridge-building years ago in Prague: the German said bridges meant unity, the Czech observed that bridges were the first things to be blown up and the Russian (this is a true story) said the point of bridges was that you could control who was crossing them.

  The Berlin Wall has been used exactly like that. Sometimes for political concessions, sometimes for money, sometimes just to make trouble, the East Germans have made energetic use of their power to unlock it. At the moment, the problem of the West Berlin border is that the authorities of the German Democratic Republic are letting through a torrent of ‘refugees’ -Iranians, Tamils, Pakistanis – who are claiming asylum in West Berlin and West Germany, swamping all efforts to cope with them. Some 50,000 have come in since January. If the Bonn Government recognises the Wall as an ‘international frontier,’ then East Germany might consent to shut the gates again.

  A monster of irony. But then, to keep sane, I imagine my great-great-uncle, a Berlin botany professor famous for rambles with his students through these forests now split between worlds. There they go, girls with sketchpads and boys in knickerbockers, behind a happy, bearded old man in a straw hat. I see them float from the pines and across the ‘Death Strip,’ through the barbed wire, over the mines and electronic sensors and into the shade of the trees the other side, engrossed in Latin names and a new sub-species of vetch, ghosts of a place without zones or sectors, where walls were for wallflowers.

 
[1986

  Why Burning People is Always Wrong

  ‘Rehabilitation’ of the dead: this is a ritual peculiar to the times we live in. This is something which could happen only in the century of Orwell.

  A troop of dignitaries, trembling with the sense of their own generosity, advances to some dishonoured grave and says: ‘Sorry we executed you! It was all a misunderstanding. We see now that you were in some ways right. We forgive you. Indeed, we forgive ourselves. Have these flowers. Have this street named after you. You were a dead unperson; now you are a dead person. Congratulations!’

  Communist parties, or at least those in power, are famous for rehabilitating. Khrushchev did it for some – only some – of Stalin’s victims among the old Bolsheviks. The Czechoslovak Communist Party did it for the dead and the living dead of the Slánsky trials. In Hungary, they forgave the ashes of Lázslo Rajk. In China, after the Cultural Revolution and the fall of the Gang of Four, the dead were rehabilitated by the thousand.

  I am not talking about what happens after a revolution, when men and women exhume and honour their martyred comrades in the struggle. I am interested in the moments when the murderers or their heirs pay respects to those whom they murdered. There are, of course, certain rules to this game. The dead sign a declaration of loyalty to the living. It always turns out that they stood for precisely the principles that the present regime is applying. But they stood for them at the wrong moment – as the Czechs say, ‘in complex, exceptional situations…’

  A system which rehabilitates in this way has to be a closed system, a corporation which is always fundamentally correct in the past, present and future but whose individual members or ruling figures may ‘depart from the norms’ at times. The late Arthur Koestler used to say that there were three closed systems, each of which was capable of explaining away criticism in its own terms: Communism, Freudianism and the Catholic Church.

  Communism has been mentioned. The Freudians, to the best of my knowledge, have never sent their dissidents to camps or burned them alive. There remains the Catholic Church.

  All these reflections rushed to my mind the other day when there appeared in the sky, small but a great deal more noticeable than Halley’s Comet, a trial balloon. It was launched in the old city of Cracow in Poland. It was a front-page article in a Catholic weekly noted for its intimacy with the present Pope, who was for long years the Cardinal of that city, and it demanded – in passionate and impatient terms – the rehabilitation of Jan Hus.

  Jan Hus, the greatest of pre-Reformation reformers, was a Czech. Born in about 1372, he spent most of his life as an academic at the Prague university. It was a time when the Czechs were already crying out both against the corruption of the Church in Bohemia and against the encroachment of Germans in economic and intellectual life. Hus was at once a scholar, who invigorated the Czech language and gave it a new spelling, and a patriot and social reformer who toured and inspired his nation.

  But he was, above all, a preacher. Borrowing some ideas from John Wycliffe, in England, Hus came to argue that the Church was not just a hierarchy but ‘God’s People,’ the totality of all born to be saved. Christ was the Head of the Church, and the Pope only his representative. Hus took a traditional view of sacraments, but said that they could not be administered by a priest in a state of mortal sin. He called for a return to Scripture, for a Church which abandoned worldly wealth and became a Church of all the people – and of the poor. He believed that Jesus had ordained the Eucharist ‘in both kinds’ – not only the bread to the congregation but also the wine of Christ’s blood.

  He was to be the victim of a show trial as vicious as any in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Hus was called to explain himself at the Council of Constance, under a safe conduct which was torn up on the grounds that ‘pacts with heretics are not binding.’ He was arrested, charged with a list of heresies he had never uttered and, when he refused to retract beliefs he had never held, burned to death on 6 July 1415. Two years later, his friend Jerome of Prague went to the stake for refusing to sign a statement that the condemnation of Hus had been just.

  Most Catholics now agree that the trial of Jan Hus was a disgrace and an atrocity. But – writing in the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny – the historian Stefan Swiezawski goes further. He asks the Pope to annul the Constance trial. But he also demands the rehabilitation of Hus as a Christian thinker, ‘the cleansing of this great martyr-figure from the unjust accusations against him.’ Jan Hus, he asserts, was not a heretic at all. Quite the opposite. All he did was to express the ideas of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), some 500 years before that huge conclave brought the spirit, life and practice of the Church up to date with the modern world.

  It’s a classic rehabilitation plea. What interests Mr Swiezawski is the idea that the ‘correct line’ of the Church as a whole is unbroken, immaculate; it simply takes a curve through Jan Hus and isolates his killers as ‘deviationists’ who happened to lead the Church at a certain moment in history.

  Could Hus be rehabilitated, and his trial for heresy annulled, as the trial of Joan of Arc had to be annulled before she could become a saint in 1925? That depends on whose hand is holding the string of this balloon. Just possibly, it is the broad hand of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II.

  It would be in his style, and to his purposes. He is sometimes accused of lacking enthusiasm for things ecumenical, for overcoming the divisions between faiths. Here he could begin to do so in the region which interests him most: Eastern Europe. And it would embarrass the Czechoslovak regime, which exerts crushing pressure on the Catholic Church and constantly argues that while Hus and the Hussites were a ‘progressive,’ patriotic Czech movement, Catholicism in Bohemia has historically been pro-German, pro-Habsburg and hostile to Czech independence. If the Vatican took Hus to its bosom, this argument would collapse, Jan Hus remains beloved by the Czechs, and a fusion of his tradition with Catholicism would move the Catholic Church in Bohemia toward the status of a patriotic ‘Church of the nation’ – more like the Church in Poland.

  Good politics, perhaps. But not good history. Master Jan Hus was a brave, witty but above all independent man; must he now be reduced to a mere pioneer of modern Catholic orthodoxy? As someone in the Vatican remarked to me: ‘Vindicate the truth about him, yes – but you can’t put a fifteenth-century man into a twentieth-century context.’ In Eastern Europe, however, history has always been melted down to cast modern ammunition, and this Pope, as a Pole, is not immune to the temptation.

  I do not want to be mean to the learned and well-meaning Mr Swiezawski of Cracow. But perhaps he overlooks the real point. The mighty preacher of the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague needs nobody’s forgiveness (and he forgave his judges before he died). It is not so important to admit that Hus was ‘right.’ It is infinitely more important to say that it is always, everywhere, wrong to kill people for their opinions – even if they are mistaken.

  [1986

  ‘You Lose Freedom by Fighting for It’

  Killing off an old doctrine is a task which pains any statesman of feeling. A faithful family pet, grown smelly and pathetic and no longer able to frighten mice or burglars, has to be discreetly put down. One does not make a drama out of it, and so it was the other day when President Reagan took the Kirkpatrick Doctrine on its last journey to the vet.

  The principle associated with Jeane Kirkpatrick – she certainly publicised it, even if she did not exactly invent it – was a distinction between ‘authoritarian’ regimes and ‘totalitarian’ regimes. With the first – Latin American dictatorships, for example – the United States could live in a relationship that was morally justifiable. With the second, meaning essentially regimes classified as Communist or Marxist, no relationship founded on any form of approval was possible. Now, President Reagan simply states that America will ‘oppose tyranny in whatever form, whether of the Left or the Right.’

  The politics of the change are obvious enough. The Administration wants to have its hands free to dis
entangle itself from failing ‘authoritarian’ regimes in Chile and South Africa, and to claim some retrospective credit from the fall of Marcos in the Philippines and Duvalier in Haiti. The Kirkpatrick line also embarrassed the developing relationship between the United States and China. All this is just opportunism. But was there anything of intellectual substance in the doctrine itself?

  I consulted Roger Scruton’s ‘Dictionary of Political Thought,’ a lucid and original guide by a man who is himself a strict authoritarian. He defines totalitarianism as the rule of a State which ‘permits no autonomous institutions,’ in which ‘freedom of association cannot be permitted.’ He adds that ‘complete state control of communication is also essential, together with an ideology … for the sole origin of all legitimation is the State itself.’

  Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is ‘the advocacy of government based on an established system of authority rather than on explicit or tacit consent.’ Scruton notes the belief that ‘people need authority,’ without which no consent should arise, and adds that more radical authoritarians see ‘a need to ensure stability against the advance of sceptical reflections’ – in other words, the repression of new ideas.

  These definitions create severe problems for the Kirkpatrick Doctrine. To start with, they exclude a number of Communist or semi-Communist States from the totalitarian camp. It would be absurd to say that Poland or Nicaragua, to say nothing of Hungary, ‘permit no autonomous institutions.’ Look at the status of the Church, for a start. These may be governments whose ideology aspires to a totalitarian condition. But China, for example, is far closer to what Scruton is talking about.

  In fact, the doctrine was about something else. As philosophy, its definitions were pretentious humbug. As description, however, they said something very important. Forget the ‘totalitarian’ and ‘authoritarian’ labels, which don’t stick properly. The real distinction is between Communist and non-Communist autocracies.