Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

New York, March 31, 2000

Next year [2009] will mark the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of communism in Europe. Liberated from the complexity of knowing too much about the cruel past, the young people of Eastern Europe’s post-communist generation seem uninterested in what their parents and grandparents endured.

Yet the recent revelation of the Czech writer Milan Kundera’s presumed complicity in the face of Stalinism is but the latest of the long half-life of a toxic past. Other examples come to mind: the accusations of collaboration with the secret police raised against Lech Wałesa, Romania’s public controversies surrounding Mircea Eliade’s fascist past, and the attacks on the alleged “Jewish monopoly of suffering” which equate the Holocaust with the Soviet Gulag.

Friedrich Nietzsche said that if you look in the eye of the Devil for too long, you risk becoming a devil yourself. A Bolshevik anti-communism, similar in its dogmatism to communism itself, has from time to time run riot in parts of Eastern Europe. In country after country, that Manichean mindset, with its oversimplifications and manipulations, was merely refashioned to serve the new people in power.

Opportunism has had its share in this, of course. In 1945, when the Red Army occupied Romania, the Communist Party had no more than 1,000 members; in 1989, it had almost four million. One day after Nicolae Ceau sescu’s execution, most of these people suddenly became fierce anti-communists and victims of the system they had served for decades. Residual traces of totalitarian thinking can also be found in the hostility to former dissidents such as Adam Michnik or Václav Havel, both of whom argued that the new democracies should not exploit resentments or seek revenge, as the totalitarian state did, but instead build a new national consensus to structure and empower a genuine civil society. Former generals of the secret police and members of the communist nomenklatura, untouchable in their comfortable villas and retirement, must derive great pleasure from watching today’s witch hunts and manipulation of old files for immediate political purposes.

But the case of Kundera appears different — though no less disturbing. In 1950, Kundera, then a 20-year-old communist, reportedly denounced to the criminal police as a Western spy a man he had never met — a friend of his friend’s girlfriend. The man was later brutally interrogated in a former Gestapo torture facility and spent fourteen years in prison. Kundera’s name was contained in the investigating officer’s report, which was authenticated after a respected historian discovered it in a dusty Prague archive.

The reclusive Kundera, who immigrated to Paris in 1975, has declared that “it never happened.” Moreover, Czechoslovakia’s fearsome secret police, who had every interest in silencing or compromising the famous dissident writer, never used the incident to blackmail or expose him. Until more information is forthcoming, both from Kundera and from the authorities, the case will not be solved “beyond reasonable doubt.” But if that happens, the case will call for deeper reflection.

As far as we know, Kundera never was an informer, either before or after this incident, and we cannot ignore the fact that he later freed himself from the compulsory totalitarian happiness that communism propagated. Indeed, his case also serves as a reminder that the early 1950s was the most brutal period of “proletarian dictatorship” in Eastern Europe — a period of great enthusiasm and terrible fear that poisoned the minds and souls of devoted believers, fierce opponents, and apathetic bystanders alike. Moreover, Kundera’s case is hardly unique. In 2006, the Nobel-Prize-winning German author Günter Grass disclosed that, sixty years earlier, he was, as a teenager, a member of the Waffen-SS. Similarly, a few years ago, the world was shocked to learn that the famous Italian writer Ignazio Silone had, in his youth, collaborated with the fascist police. Daily life under totalitarianism, be it communist or fascist, was routinely based on a deep duplicity the effects of which are longstanding.

I don’t agree with those who say we should not be interested in the dark episodes in the life of a great writer. Why not? We should be interested not for prosecutorial purposes, but in order to gain a more profound understanding of a bloody, demagogical, and tyrannical utopia — and of human weakness and vulnerability. We may even consider it a rewarding testament to an artist’s ability to overcome his past mistakes and still produce priceless work. But can we justifiably defend morally compromised artists and intellectuals on the basis of their work’s merit, yet condemn ordinary people for often less grave offenses? An egregious example of this was the way followers of Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica defended his support for the fascist Iron Guard and his later collaboration with the communists, while at the same time condemning even a generic cleaning woman for mopping the floors in the offices of the secret police. Shouldn’t that cleaner’s drudgery to support her family, children, and her own survival be taken equally into account?

Life under totalitarianism was an extreme situation that requires us to apply special, nuanced rules to all the captives of that ordeal. To understand that epoch, we have to know and judge carefully often ambiguous and overwhelming circumstances, never simplifying a multilayered daily reality for the sake of current political goals. If nothing else, in order to forgive, we have to know what we are forgiving.

The horrible murder of Giovanna Reggiani that took place near a Romanian refugee camp in the suburb of Tor di Quinto in Rome shocked both Italy and Romania. The case gained significance by adding fuel to the fiery public debates now under way not only in Italy but across Europe on the status of refugees and foreign residents.

Some Italians responded violently; some Italian and Romanian politicians, eager to offer quick and tough solutions, made scandalous statements that echoed the xenophobic and totalitarian slogans of the past. We are encountering, not without irony, a grotesque reverse of the “national pride” seen when cultural and sporting stars are appropriated by the state and presented as part of the collective patrimony.

The murder was an individual crime and to compound the tragedy of a crime through measures that target an entire minority is irresponsible and will have grave moral and social consequences both for the unjustly punished and for the punishers. No minority is, after all, homogeneous, as was demonstrated by the fact that the person who alerted the police was a compatriot of the killer and from the same camp of refugees. Collective punishment also means a type of amnesia by Italians and Romanians, not only about what happened under Fascism, Nazism, and communism, but also about their own national histories. Italians, after all, migrated not only from Italy’s south to its north, but to other countries looking for a better life. They, too, know what it is like to be a refugee, an exile, a stranger.

Romania, for its part, has a history not at all admirable in regard to its “Roma” minority, whose shortcomings and deeds always attract blame but never any real action by the state to improve their condition. The Roma minority first appeared in Romania in the fourteenth century, but only in 1856 was its slavery abolished!

Nowadays, Romanian society is dealing with the consequences of decades of terror and lies, of demagogy and poverty that have scarred several generations. These wounds cannot be instantly healed. Communism’s fall unleashed a huge surge of human energy, but this started with a bizarre and cynical transfer of privileges and assets within the old “ nomenklatura ,” and with a new general Darwinian struggle.