The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  5.

  At this point the Forum had to leave the Magic Lantern, and I had, alas, to leave Prague. The next week was probably as important as the previous two, but someone else will have to chronicle its inner dramas. On Tuesday there were further, inconclusive talks with Adamec. On Wednesday he threatened to resign, and on Thursday he did so. His former deputy, Marián Calfa, a Slovak, was asked by President Husák to form a new government. The Forum said they might be able to come to an agreement with him, and made some “suggestions” for the new cabinet. (A week before they had said “the CF does not aspire to any ministerial post,” but, as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once remarked, a week in politics is a long time. Above all, a week in revolutionary politics.)

  There followed “round table” talks between representatives of all the official parties—crucially, of course, the Communists, headed here by Vasil Mohorita—and those of the Forum, headed by Havel, and of the Public Against Violence, headed by Jan Carnogurský. As in Poland, the “round table” really had just two sides. But in Poland, the round table took two months; in Czechoslovakia, two days. Precisely meeting the Forum’s deadline, on Sunday, December 10, UN Human Rights Day, Gustav Husák swore in the new government, and then resigned as president.

  Václav Havel read out the names of the new cabinet to a jubilant crowd on Wenceslas Square. Virtually all the Forum’s “suggestions” were reflected in the agreed list. Jan Carnogurský was catapulted in the space of just a fortnight from being a prisoner of conscience. expecting a stiff sentence, to being one of two so-called “first vice-premiers” of Czechoslovakia, with partial responsibility for the security apparatus that had for so long harassed and persecuted him. In a compromise, since the two sides could not agree on an interior minister, he shared this responsibility with the Communist premier, Marián Calfa, and the other “first vice-premier,” our old friend the chief Prognistic, Pan Docent Valtr Komárek, Dr. Sc.

  Komárek would have overall responsibility for economic policy, with two other members of his institute under him: Vladimír Dlouhý (like Komárek, a Party member), and, predictably, the glinting economist Václav Klaus as minister of finance. (So now Prince Schwarzenberg could rest content: one does know the minister.) As if in a fairy-tale, Jirí Dienstbier went from stoker to foreign minister. Almost as remarkably, Miroslav Kusy, a wellknown, Slovak philosopher and signer of Charter 77, expelled from the Party like so many others, took charge of the Federal Office of Press and Information. Petr Miller, The Worker, became minister for labor and social affairs. The formerly puppet, but newly independent, Socialist and People’s parties got two seats each. Although the prime minister was still a Communist, only eight other ministers (out of a total of twenty-one) were Party members, and of these, two—Komárek and Dlouhý—were identified more with the Forum than with the Party.

  It was an extraordinary triumph at incredible speed. The “ten days” actually took just twenty-four. Well might the factory sirens blow and church bells ring on the morrow, instead of the threatened general strike. Within the next week, Klaus and Carnogurský were already announcing fiscal and legal changes to start the country down the road to a market economy and the rule of law: the road conjured up seemingly out of nothingness in those steamy dressing rooms and corridors of the Magic Lantern just a fortnight before. The next Sunday, Jirí Dienstbier was cutting the barbed wire of the iron curtain on the Czechoslovak-Austrian frontier, holding the giant wire cutters with his colleague, the Austrian foreign minister, Aloïs Mock. The students held another demonstration, taking exactly the same route that they had on Day One, just a month before: along the embankment, right at the National Theater, up Národní Street into Wenceslas Square. This time they were not met by truncheon-wielding police, by white helmets or red berets, for this time the police were, in a real sense, under their control.

  Of course there were countless difficulties ahead. One major outstanding issue was the election of a new president. The Forum quickly said that Havel was its candidate, for the transitional period to free elections, and that he should be elected as soon as possible by the Federal Assembly. The Party suddenly discovered a burning passion for “democracy,” and suggested that the next president should be chosen by direct popular vote, which would take longer to organize, and which, it fondly hoped, Havel might actually lose. (Note, incidentally, that Hungary’s Communists recently tried an almost identical wheeze.) There was also a side plot concerning a suitable position for Dubcek, with his threefold importance: as a historical symbol, a reform Communist, and, not least, a Slovak.

  As this article goes to press, the (Communist) prime minister has formally endorsed Havel’s candidacy at a session of the Federal Assembly, and it therefore seems likely that the playwright will indeed be elected by that body in the near future. But even if that important dispute is resolved by the time you read this, there are many more ahead, on the path to free elections to parliament in the first half of 1990. Barring a great disaster (external or internal), it nonetheless seems certain that Czechoslovakia is now launched down the same road as Poland and Hungary, as East Germany (in a special, complicated way), and perhaps as Bulgaria: the road from communism to democracy. The breakthrough has happened.

  What I have recounted here is only a small part of the story, albeit a central part. There are many other vital parts that others will have to fill in: for example, the story from the Party–government side, and, indeed, the detail of the actual negotiations. It is too soon to draw any balance sheet. But a few tentative reflections may already be ventured.

  Why did it happen in November? The real question is rather: why did it not happen before? Historically, Czechoslovakia was much the most democratic state in the region before the war. Geographically, Prague lies west of Vienna. Culturally, it is the Central European city. The Prague Spring was crushed by external force. But the river ran on underground. The gulf between the pays réel and the surreal, mendacious pays légal—Husák’s kingdom of forgetting—grew ever wider. During the last couple of years, the number of those prepared to risk something in order to speak their real minds grew very significantly. There were the 40,000 who signed the “Several Sentences” Manifesto. There were the hundreds of thousands of believers who signed the petition for religious freedom. There were the students and the actors. Once the transformations began in neighboring Poland and Hungary, one had the feeling that it was just a matter of time before things moved in Czechoslovakia.

  And so it was. But East Germany went first. And if one asks, “Why did things go so fast in Czechoslovakia?” the simple answer is “because the Czechs came last.” East Germany was the final straw: seen, remember, not just on television but also in Prague itself, as the East German escapees flooded into the West German embassy. National pride was aroused. Rapid change was clearly possible, and allowed, even encouraged, by Gorbachev. From the members of the audience in the Realistic Theater on the first Saturday who immediately leapt to their feet in a standing ovation at the actors’ demand for a general strike, to the crowds on Wenceslas Square chanting, “Now’s the time,” from the journalists who at once started reporting truthfully, to the workers who never hesitated about going on strike: everyone was ready. Everyone knew, from their neighbors’ experience, that it could be done.

  More than that, their neighbors had given them a few ideas about how it should be done. In a real sense, Czechoslovakia was the beneficiary, and what happened there the culmination, of a ten-year-long Central European learning process—with Poland being the first, but paying the heaviest price. A student occupation strike? Of course, as in Poland! Nonviolence? The First Commandment of all Central European oppositions. Puppet parties coming alive? As in East Germany. A “round table” to negotiate the transition? As in Poland and Hungary. And so on. Politically, Czechoslovakia had what economic historians call the “advantages of backwardness.” They could learn from the others’ examples; and from their mistakes.

  Yet when all this has been s
aid, no one in Prague could resist the feeling that there must also be an additional, suprarational cause at work. Hegel’s Weltgeist, said some. Agnes of Bohemia, said others. “The world is moving from dictatorship to democracy,” said a third, in a newspaper interview. How you describe the suprarational agency is a matter of personal choice—for myself, I’ll stick with the angels—but on a sober enumeration of causes, the whole is definitely more than the sum of its parts.

  If there were angels at work, there were also devils. One saw more than once how the devils of ambition, vanity, pride, the little germs of corruption, wriggled their way down into the bowels of the Magic Lantern. Taken all in all, however, the central assembly of the Forum in the Czech lands was an impressive body. It was as democratic as it could reasonably be, in the circumstances. It was remarkably good humored. It showed a genius for improvisation. Profound differences of political ideology, faith, and attitudes were generally subordinated to the common good. A reasonable balance was struck between the political and the moral imperatives. Above all, men and women who for twenty years had been deprived of the most basic possibilities of political articulation were able to get together and say, within a matter of days: “This is what we want, this is how the face of the new Czechoslovakia should look.” And it is a face that bears examination.

  All the same, they were lucky. Even compared with Solidarity in Poland nine years ago, this was the politics of amateurs. There were several moments in the second week when one felt they had lost their way in the tangle of demands, long and short term, moral, symbolic, and political. Thus, to forget about those crucial levers of power, the defense and interior ministries, might look, to a cold and critical observer, like carelessness. To toss in the demand next day, in a hastily drafted letter, might look, to the cold and critical observer, like theater rather than politics. But such was the tide of popular feeling (helped by the favorable external winds), and so clear the general direction, that it came right in the end. And in politics, as Disraeli observed, nothing succeeds like success.

  “Unhappy the land that has need of heroes,” cries Brecht’s Galileo. Unhappy the land that has need of revolution. The twenty years, and in many respects the forty years, are really lost. Lives have been ruined. Damage has been done that can never be repaired. But if you must have a revolution, then it would be difficult to imagine a better revolution than the one Czechoslovakia had: swift, nonviolent, joyful, and funny. A laughing revolution. It also came without the accompanying (and precipitating) economic crisis of Poland or Hungary. What is more, because the change has been so swift—because Komárek, Dlouhý, and Klaus are already in government, taking the necessary steps—Czechoslovakia has a real chance of making the larger transition from dictatorship to democracy, and from planned to market economy, with relatively little economic pain: although I stress the word relatively.

  So the parting images should be of happiness. Collective happiness, as seen in Wenceslas Square, but even more of individual happiness. I think of Pavel, designing the bicameral legislature in his stoker’s hut. I think of Petr, given a new last chapter for his history of Czechoslovakia, which will be published legally, while he travels to Oxford. I think of Rita, preparing for her new job as ambassador to Washington. I think of Jirí, now making the foreign policy of the Czechoslovak (Socialist?) Republic. And I think of Václav—that is, Wenceslas—drinking a Christmas toast.

  Sentimental? Absurdly so. But sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof, and God knows there will be evils enough in East Central Europe over the next decade: common, workaday evils of fragile polities and struggling economies. For a short while, at least, we may surely rejoice. After twenty years, the clocks have started again in Prague. The ice has melted. The most Western of all the so-called East European countries is resuming its proper history.

  —January 18, 1990

  14

  Godot Comes to Sarajevo

  Susan Sontag

  What does one do, what can one do, when armed thugs, their heads filled with racist propaganda, start shooting at helpless people, at children running back from school, old men going for a coffee, mothers carrying groceries, actors, clerks, doctors, teachers trying to get to work? What do you do when these same thugs shell theaters, smash shops, blast schools? And all this in the name of an ethnically pure community, the antithesis of Sarajevo, a civilized European city with citizens from all manner of ethnic and religious backgrounds rubbing along fine.

  One can call for the armed intervention of outside powers, to silence the sniping thugs with bombs. Or one can report meticulously and with personal risk on the atrocities taking place, so that crimes don’t pass unnoticed, even if they remain unpunished.

  But civilization is resilient. People still played music and went to the theater and educated children in the Warsaw ghetto too. Directing a performance of Waiting for Godot is in this tradition. It upholds the standards of civilized life in the face of those who wish to destroy it.

  —I.B.

  “Nothing to be done.” “Nista ne moze da se uradi.”

  —opening line of Waiting for Godot

  1.

  I WENT TO Sarajevo in mid-July to stage a production of Waiting for Godot not so much because I’d always wanted to direct Beckett’s play (although I had), as because it gave me a practical reason to return to Sarajevo and stay for a month or more. I had spent two weeks there in April, and had come to care intensely about the battered city and what it stands for; some of its citizens had become friends. But I couldn’t again be just a witness: that is, meet and visit, tremble with fear, feel brave, feel depressed, have heart-breaking conversations, grow ever more indignant, lose weight. If I went back, it would be to pitch in and do something.

  No longer can a writer consider that the imperative task is to bring the news to the outside world. The news is out. Plenty of excellent foreign journalists (most of them in favor of intervention, as am I) have been reporting the lies and the slaughter since the beginning of the siege, while the decision of the western European powers and the United States not to intervene remains firm, thereby giving the victory to Serb fascism. I was not under the illusion that going to Sarajevo to direct a play would make me useful in the way I could be if I were a doctor or a water systems engineer. It would be a small contribution. But it was the only one of the three things I do—write, make films, and direct in the theater—which yields something that would exist only in Sarajevo, that would be made and consumed there.

  Among the people I’d met in April was a young Sarajevo-born theater director, Haris Pasovic, who had left the city after he finished school and made his considerable reputation working mainly in Serbia. When the Serbs started the war in April 1992, Pasovic went abroad, but in the fall, while working on a spectacle called Sarajevo in Antwerp, he decided that he could no longer remain in safe exile, and at the end of the year managed to crawl back past UN patrols and under Serb gunfire into the freezing, besieged city. Pasovic invited me to see his Grad (“City”)—a collage, with music, of declamations, partly drawn from texts by Constantine Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Sylvia Plath, using a dozen actors—which he had put together in eight days. Now he was preparing a far more ambitious production, Euripides’ Alcestis, after which one of his students (Pasovic teaches at the still-functioning Academy of Drama) would be directing Sophocles’ Ajax. Realizing suddenly that I was talking to a producer as well as to a director, I asked Pasovic if he would be interested in my coming back in a few months to direct a play.

  “Of course,” he said.

  Before I could add, “Then let me think for a while about what I might want to do,” he went on, “What play will you do?” And bravado, following the impulsiveness of my proposal, suggested to me in an instant what I might not have seen had I taken longer to reflect: there was one obvious play for me to direct. Beckett’s play, written over forty years ago, seems written for, and about, Sarajevo.

  Having often been asked since my return from Sarajevo if
I worked with professional actors, I’ve come to understand that many people find it surprising that theater goes on at all in the besieged city. In fact, of the five theaters in Sarajevo before the war, two are still, sporadically, in use: Chamber Theater 55 (Kamerni Teater 55), where in April I’d seen a charmless production of Hair as well as Pasovic’s Grad; and the Youth Theater (Pozoriste Mladih), where I decided to stage Godot. These are both small houses. The large house, closed since the beginning of the war, is the National Theater, which presented opera and the Sarajevo Ballet as well as plays. In front of the handsome ochre building (only lightly damaged by shelling), there is still a poster from early April 1992 announcing a new production of Rigoletto, which never opened. Most of the singers and musicians and ballet dancers left the city to seek work abroad soon after the Serbs attacked, but many of the most talented actors stayed, and want nothing more than to work.

  Images of today’s shattered city must make it hard to grasp that Sarajevo was once an extremely lively and attractive provincial capital, with a cultural life comparable to that of other middle-sized old European cities, including an audience for theater. Theater in Sarajevo, as elsewhere in Central Europe, was largely repertory: masterpieces from the past and the most admired twentieth-century plays. Just as good actors still live in Sarajevo, so do members of this cultivated audience. The difference is that actors and spectators alike can be murdered or maimed by a sniper’s bullet or a mortar shell on their way to and from the theater; but then, that can happen to people in Sarajevo in their living rooms, while they sleep in their bedrooms, or fetch something from their kitchens, or go out their front doors.

  But isn’t this play rather pessimistic, I’ve been asked. Meaning, wasn’t it depressing for an audience in Sarajevo; meaning, wasn’t it pretentious or insensitive to stage Godot there?—as if the representation of despair were redundant when people really are in despair; as if what people want to see in such a situation would be, say, The Odd Couple. But it’s not true that what everyone in Sarajevo wants is entertainment that offers them an escape from their own reality. In Sarajevo, as anywhere else, there are more than a few people who feel strengthened and consoled by having their sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by art. This is not to say that people in Sarajevo don’t miss being merely entertained. The dramaturge of the National Theater, who began sitting in on the rehearsals of Godot after the first week, and who had studied at Columbia University, asked me before I left to bring some copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair when I return later this month, so she could be reminded of all the things that had gone out of her life. Certainly there are more Sarajevans who would rather see a Harrison Ford movie or attend a Guns n’ Roses concert than watch Waiting for Godot. That was true before the war, too. It is, if anything, a little less true now.