FROM STALINISM
TO PLURALISM
A
Documentary History
of
Eastern Europe
since 1945
Edited by
GALE STOKES
New York
Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1991
37
The Tragedy of Central Europe
Milan Kundera
April 26, 1984
In
November 1956, the director of the Hungarian News Agency, shortly before his
office was flattened by artillery fire, sent a telex to the entire world with a desperate
message announcing that the Russian attack against Budapest had begun. The
dispatch ended with these words: “We are going to die for Hungary and for
Europe.”
What did this sentence mean? It certainly meant that the Russian tanks were
endangering Hungary and with it Europe itself. But in what sense was Europe in
danger? Were the Russian tanks about to push past the Hungarian borders and into
the West? No. The director of the Hungarian News Agency meant that the Russians,
in
attacking Hungary, were attacking Europe itself. He was ready to die so that
Hungary might remain Hungary and European.
Even if the sense of the sentence seems clear, it continues to intrigue us.
Actually, in France, in America, one is accustomed to thinking that what was at
stake during the invasion was neither Hungary nor Europe but a political regime.
One would never have said that Hungary as such had been threatened; still less
would one ever understand why a Hungarian, faced with his own death, addressed
Europe. When Solzhenitsyn denounces communist oppression, does he invoke Eu-
rope as a fundamental value worth dying for?
No.
Budapest or Warsaw.
“To die for one’s country and for Europe” —that is a phrase that could not
be thought in Moscow or Leningrad; it is precisely the phrase that could be thought
in
In
Central Europe, the eastern border of the West, everyone has always been
particularly sensitive to the dangers of Russian might. And it’s not just the Poles.
Frantisek Palacky, the great historian and the figure most representative of Czech
politics in the nineteenth century, wrote in 1848 a famous letter to the revolutionary
parliament of Frankfurt in which he Justified the continued existence of the
Hapsburg Empire as the only possible rampart against Russia, against “this power
which, having already reached an enormous size today, is now augmenting its force
beyond the reach of any Western country.” Palacky warned of Russia’s imperial
ambitions; it aspired to become a “universal monarchy,” which means it sought
Reprinted from Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” trans. Edmund White,
The New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984, pp. 33-38, by permission of The New York
Review of Books. Copyright © 1984 Nyrev, Inc.
Wrenenn seunrertre
217
218
THE RETURN OF POLITICS
world domination. “A Russian universal monarchy,” Palacky wrote, “would be an
immense and indescribable disaster, an immeasurable and limitless disaster.”
Central Europe, according to Palacky, ought to be a family of equal nations,
each of which—treating the others with mutual respect and secure in the protection
of
a
strong, unified state—would also cultivate its own individuality. And this
dream, although never fully realized, would remain powerful and influential. Cen-
tral
a
Europe longed to be a condensed version of Europe itself in all its cultural
variety,
‘
.
its
smal! arch-European Europe, a reduced model of Europe made up of
nations conceived according to one rule: the greatest variety within the smallest
space. How could Central Europe not be horrified facing a Russia founded on the
opposite principle: the smallest variety within the greatest space?
Indeed, nothing could be more foreign to Central Europe and its passion for
variety than Russia: uniform, standardizing, centralizing, determined to transform
every nation of its empire (the Ukrainians, the Belortssians, the Armenians, the
Latvians, the Lithuanians, and others) into a single Russian people (or, as is more
commonly expressed in this age of generalized verbal mystification, into a “single
Soviet people”).
And so, again: Is communism the negation of Russian history or its fulfillment?
Certainly it is both its negation (the negation, for example, of its religiosity) and
fulfillment (the fulfillment of its centralizing tendencies and its imperial dreams).
‘Seen from within Russia, this first aspect—the aspect of its discontinuity—is
the
more striking. From the point of view of the enslaved countries, the second
aspect—that of its continuity—is felt more powerfully.
But am I being too absolute in contrasting Russia and Western civilization? Isn’t
Europe, though divided into east and west, still a single entity anchored in ancient
Greece and Judeo-Christian thought?
Of course. Moreover, during the entire nineteenth century, Russia, attracted to
Europe, drew closer to it. And the fascination was reciprocated. Rilke claimed that
Russia was his spiritual homeland, and no one has escaped the impact of the great
Russian novels, which remain an integral part of the common European cultural
legacy.
Yes, all this is true; the cultural betrothal between the two Europes remains a
great and unforgettable memory. But it is no less true that Russian communism
vigorously reawakened Russia’s old anti-Western obsessions and turned it brutally
against Europe.
But
Russia isn’t my subject and I don’t want to wander into its immense
complexities, about which I’m not especially knowledgeable. I want simply to make
this
is
point once more: On the eastern border of the West—more than anywhere
else —Russia
seen not just as one more European power but as a singular civiliza-
tion, an other civilization.
This is why the countries in Central Europe feel that the change in their destiny
that occurred after 1945 is not merely a political catastrophe: It is also an attack on
their civilization. The deep meaning of their resistance is the struggle to preserve
their identity—or, to put it another way, to preserve their Westernness.
There are no longer any illusions about the regimes of Russia’s satellite coun-
Central Europe
tries.
219
But what we forget is their essential tragedy: These countries have vanished
from the map of the West.
Why has this disappearance remained invisible? We can locate the cause in
Central Europe itself.
The history of the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Hungarians has been
turbulent and fragmented. Their traditions of statehood have been weaker and less
continuous tharr those of the larger European nations. Boxed in by the Germans on
one side and the Russians on the other, the nations of Central Europe have used up
I
their strength in the struggle to survive and to preserve their languages. Since they
have never been entirely integrated into the consciousness of Europe, they have
remained the least known and the most fragile part of the West—hidden, even
further, by the curtain of their strange and scarcely accessible languages.
The Austrian empire had the great opportunity of making Central Europe into a
strong, unified state. But the Austrians, alas, were divided between an arrogant
Pan-German nationalism and their own Central European mission. They did not
succeed in building a federation of equal nations, and their failure has been the
misfortune of the whole of Europe. Dissatisfied, the other nations of Central Europe
blew apart their empire in 1918, without realizing that in spite of its inadequacies it
was irreplaceable. After the First World War, Central Europe was therefore trans-
formed into a region of small, weak states, whose vulnerability ensured first Hitler’s
conquest and ultimately Stalin’s triumph. Perhaps for this reason, in the European
memory these countries always seem to be the source of dangerous trouble.
And, to be frank, I feel that the error made by Central Europe was owing to what
call the “ideology of the Slavic world.” I say “ideology” advisedly, for it is only a
piece of political mystification invented in the nineteenth century. The Czechs (in
spite
of
the
severe warnings of their most respected leaders) loved to brandish
naively their “Slavic ideology” as a defense against German aggressiveness. The
Russians, on the other hand, enjoyed making use of it to justify their own imperial
ambitions. “The Russians like to label everything Russian as Slavic, so that later
they can label everything Slavic as Russian,” the great Czech writer Karel Havlicek
declared in 1844, trying to warn his compatriots against their silly and ignorant
enthusiasm for Russia. It was ignorant because the Czechs, for a thousand years,
have never had any direct contact with Russia. In spite of their linguistic kinship, the
Czechs and the Russians have never shared a common world: neither a common
history nor a common culture. The relationship between the Poles and the Russians,
though, has never been anything less than a struggle of life and death.
Joseph Conrad was always irritated by the label “Slavic soul” that people loved
to
he
slap on him and his books because of his Polish origins, and, about sixty years
ago,
wrote that “nothing could be more alien to what is called in the literary
world the ‘Slavic spirit’ than the Polish temperament with its chivalric devotion to
moral constraints and its exaggerated respect for individual rights.” (How well I
understand him! I, too, know of nothing more ridiculous than this cult of obscure
depths, this noisy and empty sentimentality of the “Slavic soul” that is attributed to
me from time to time!)
Nevertheless, the idea of a Slavic world is a commonplace of world historiogra-
220
THE RETURN OF POLITICS
phy. The division of Europe after 1945—-which united this supposed Slavic world
(including the poor Hungarians and Romanians whose language is not, of course,
Slavic—but why bother over trifles?)—has therefore seemed almost like a natural
solution.
So
is
it
the
disappearance?
fault
of
Central Europe that the West hasn’t even noticed its
Not entirely. At the beginning of our century, Central Europe was, despite its
political weakness, a great cultural center, perhaps the greatest. And, admittedly,
while the importance of Vienna, the city of Freud and Mahler, is readily acknowl-
edged today, its importance and originality make little sense unless they are seen
against the background of the other countries and cities that together participated in,
and contributed creatively to, the culture of Central Europe. If the school of Schén-
berg founded the twelve-tone system, the Hungarian Béla Barték, one of the great-
est -
musicians of the twentieth century, knew how to discover the last original
possibility in music based on the tonal principle. With the work of Kafka and
Hasek, Prague created the great counterpart in the novel to the work of the Viennese
Musil and Broch. The cultural dynamism of the non-German-speaking countries
was intensified even more after 1918, when Prague offered the world the innova-
tions of structuralism and the Prague Linguistic Circle. And in Poland the great
trinity of Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and Stanislas Witkiewicz anticipated
the European modernism of the 1950s, notably the so-called theater of the absurd.
A
question arises: Was this entire creative explosion just a coincidence of geog-
raphy? Or was it rooted in a long tradition, a shared past? Or, to put it another way:
Does Central Europe constitute a true cultural configuration with its own history?
And if such a configuration exists, can it be defined geographically? What are its
borders?
It
state:
would be senseless to try to draw its borders exactly. Central Europe is not a
It
is
a
culture or a fate. Its borders are imaginary and must be drawn and
redrawn with each new historical situation.
.
Central Europe therefore cannot be defined and determined by political frontiers
(which are inauthentic, always imposed by invasions, conquests, and occupations),
but by the great common situations that reassemble peoples, regroup them in ever
new ways along the imaginary and ever-changing boundaries that mark a realm
inhabited by the same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same com-
mon tradition.
Sigmund Freud’s parents came from Poland, but young Sigmund spent his
childhood in Moravia, in present-day Czechoslovakia. Edmund Husserl and Gustav
Mahler also spent their childhoods there. The Viennese novelist Joseph Roth had his
roots in Poland. The great Czech poet Julius Zeyer was born in Prague to a German-
speaking family; it was his own choice to become Czech. The mother tongue of
Hermann Kafka, on the other hand, was Czech, while his son Franz took up
German. The key figure in the Hungarian revolt of 1956, the writer Tibor Déry,
came from a German-Hungarian family, and my dear friend <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>, the excel-
lent novelist, is Hungario- Yugoslav. What a tangle of national destinies among even
the
most representative figures of each country!
And all of the names I’ve just mentioned are those of Jews. Indeed, no other part
Central Europe
of
its
221
of the world has been so deeply marked by the influence of Jewish genius. Aliens
everywhere and everywhere at home, lifted above national quarrels, the Jews in the
twentieth century were the principal cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central
Europe. They were its intellectual cement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators
spiritual unity. That’s why I love the Jewish heritage and cling to it with as
much passion and nostalgia as though it were my own.
Another thing makes the Jewish people so precious to me: In their destiny the
fate
of
Central Europe seems to be concentrated, reflected, and to have found its
symbolic image. What is Central Europe? An uncertain zone of small nations
between Russia and Germany. I underscore the words: small nation. Indeed, what
are the Jews if not a small nation, the small nation par excellence? The only one of
all
the
small nations of all time which has survived empires and the devastating
march of History.
But what is a small nation? I offer you my definition: The small nation is one
whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can
disappear and it knows it. A French, a Russian, or an English man is not used to
asking questions about the very survival of his nation. His anthems speak only of
grandeur and eternity. The Polish anthem, however, starts with the verse: “Poland
has
not yet perished... .”
Central Europe as a family of small nations has its own vision of the world, a
vision based on a deep distrust of history. History, that goddess of Hegel and Marx,
that incarnation of reason that judges us and arbitrates our fate—that is the history
of
conquerers. The people of Central Europe are not conquerers. They cannot be
separated from European history; they cannot exist outside it; but they represent the
wrong side of this history; they are its victims and outsiders. It’s this disabused view
of history that is the source of their culture, of their wisdom, of the “nonserious
spirit” that mocks grandeur and glory. “Never forget that only in opposing History
as
such can we resist the history of our own day.” I would love to engrave this
sentence by Witold Gombrowicz above the entry gate to Central Europe.
Thus it was in this region of small nations who have “not yet perished” that
Europe’s vulnerability, all of Europe’s vulnerability, was more clearly visible before
anywhere else. Actually, in our modern world where power has a tendency to
become more and more concentrated in the hands of a few big countries, ail
European nations run the risk of becoming small nations and of sharing their fate. In
this sense the destiny of Central Europe anticipates the destiny of Europe in general,
and its culture assumes an enormous relevance.
Today, all of Central Europe has been subjugated by Russia with the exception
of
little Austria, which, more by chance than necessity, has retained its indepen-
dence, but ripped out of its Central European setting, it has lost most of its indi-
vidual character and ali of its importance. The disappearance of the cultural home of
Central Europe was certainly one of the greatest events of the century for all of
Western civilization. So, I repeat my question: How could it possibly have gone
unnoticed and unnamed?
The answer is simple: Europe hasn’t noticed the disappearance of its cultural
home because Europe no longer perceives its unity as a cultural unity.
In
fact, what is European unity based on?
222
the
THE RETURN OF POLITICS
In
the
Middle Ages, it was based on a shared religion. In the modern era, in
which the medieval God has been changed into a Deus absconditus [hidden God],
religion bowed out, giving way to culture, which became the expression of the
supreme values by which European humanity understood itself, defined itself, iden-
tified itself as European.
Now it seems, that another change is taking place in our century, as important as
one fhat divided the Middle Ages from the modern era. Just as God long ago
gave way to culture, culture in turn is giving way.
But to what and to whom? What realm of supreme values will be capable of
uniting Europe? Technical feats? The marketplace? The mass media? (Will the great
poet be replaced by the great journalist?) Or by politics? But by which politics? The
right
or
the
left?
Is
there
a
discernible shared ideal that still exists above this
Manichaeanism of the left and the right that is as stupid as it is insurmountable? Will
it
be the principle of tolerance, respect for the beliefs and ideas of other people? But
won't this tolerance become empty and useless if it no longer protects a rich
creativity or a strong set of ideas? Or should we understand the abdication of culture
as
the
a
sort of deliverance, to which we should ecstatically abandon ourselves? Or will
Deus absconditus return to fill the empty space and reveal himself? I don’t
know, 1 know nothing about it. I think I know only that culture has bowed out.
The last direct personal experience of the West that Central European countries
remember is the period from 1918 to 1938. Their picture of the West, then, is of the
West in the past, of a West in which culture had not yet entirely bowed out.
With this in mind, I want to stress a significant circumstance: The Central
European revolts were not nourished by the newspapers, radio, or television—that
is,
by the “media.” They were prepared, shaped, realized by novels, poetry, theater,
cinema, historiography, literary reviews, popular comedy and cabaret, philosoph-
ical discussions—that is, by culture. The mass media—which, for the French and
Americans, are indistinguishable from whatever the West today is meant to be —
played no part in these revolts (since the press and television were completely under
state
control).
That’s why, when the Russians occupied Czechoslovakia, they did everything
possible to destroy Czech culture. This destruction had three meanings: First, it
destroyed the center of the opposition; second, it undermined the identity of the
nation, enabling it to be more easily swallowed up by Russian civilization; third, it
put a violent end to the modern era, the era in which culture still represented the
realization of supreme values.
This third consequence seems to me the most important. In effect, totalitarian
Russian civilization is the radical negation of the modern West, the West created
four centuries ago at the dawn of the modern era: the era founded on the authority of
the
thinking, doubting individual, and on an artistic creation that expressed his
uniqueness. The Russian invasion has thrown Czechoslovakia into a “postcultural”
era and left it defenseless and naked before the Russian army and the omnipresent
state television.
While still shaken by this triply tragic event which the invasion of Prague
represented, I arrived in France and tried to explain to French friends the massacre
of culture that had taken place after the invasion: “Try to imagine! All of the literary
Central Europe
and
223
cultural reviews were liquidated! Every one, without exception! That never
happened before in Czech history, not even under the Nazi occupation during the
war.”
Then my friends would look at me indulgently with an embarrassment that I
understood only later. When all the reviews in Czechoslovakia were liquidated, the
entire nation knew it, and was in a state of anguish because of the immense impact
of
the
event.
If
ail
the
reviews in France or England disappeared, no one would
notice it, not even their editors. In Paris, even in a completely cultivated milieu,
during dinner parties people discuss television programs, not reviews. For culture
has
already bowed out. Its disappearance, which we experienced in Prague as a
catastrophe, a shock, a tragedy, is perceived in Paris as something banal and insig-
nificant, scarcely visible, a nonevent.
After the destruction of the Austrian empire, Central Europe lost its ramparts.
Didn’t it lose its soul after Auschwitz, which swept the Jewish nation off its map?
And after having been torn away from Europe in 1945, does Central Europe still
_
exist?
Yes, its creativity and its revolts suggest that it has “not yet perished.” But if to
live means to exist in the eyes of those we love, then Central Europe no longer
exists. More precisely: in the eyes of its beloved Europe, Central Europe is just a
part of the Soviet empire and nothing more, nothing more.
And why should this surprise us? By virtue of its political system, Central
Europe is the East; by virtue of its cultural history, it is the West. But since Europe
itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central
Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe
only Eastern Europe.
Central Europe, therefore, should fight not only against its big oppressive neigh-
bor but also against the subtle, relentless pressure of time, which is leaving the era
culture in its wake. That’s why in Central European revolts there is something
of
conservative, nearly anachronistic: They are desperately trying to restore the past,
the past of culture, the past of the modern era. It is only in that period, only in a
world that maintains a cultural dimension, that Central Europe can still defend its
identity, still be seen for what it is.
The real tragedy for Central Europe, then, is not Russia but Europe: this Europe
that represented a value so great that the director of the Hungarian News Agency
was ready to die for it, and for which he did indeed die. Behind the Iron Curtain, he
understood.
did not suspect that the times had changed and that in Europe itself Europe was no
longer experienced as a value. He did not suspect that the sentence he was sending
by telex beyond the borders of his flat country would seem outmoded and would not
be
‘

Using the above text, answer the following question as an expert historical po;ician.

What is European unity based on according to Kundera? And why is it not anymore?
Inherently linked to the previous question, WHAT is European culture according to Kundera?