Antonín J. Liehm: Thawing and the Sixties
19. November 2007 19:43
“How did the Czechoslovak Spring originate after so many years of communism?
“How did the Czechoslovak Spring originate after so many years of communism? Why did Soviet tanks have to be brought in after twenty years of communism? How were such beautiful books, movies, theaters, paintings made even though they weren’t in any way connected to socialistic realism?” asked French students. And the questions continued to accumulate.
If you want to understand foreign history, try viewing it through your own nation’s history, I used to tell them. It won’t answer all questions, for very historical parallel can only be approximate, but it can help with understanding different aspects.
For example:
In 1715, Lewis XIV, famous for saying, ”L´état c´est moi,” died. In those times it wasn’t called a totalitarian regime, the people just had no rights. The power over thinking, over ideologies was firmly held by the hands of the Catholic Church, and a narrow class owned virtually everything.
After the King of Sun’s death everything started to change. “Desperate and ruined provinces shook with happiness”, wrote Saint-Simon, “people thanked God for the chance to breathe, which they weren’t even hoping for”. In the following years the hierarchy of values started falling apart. The totalitarian regime remained, but obedience to the state and the church was challenged. Dogmas ceased to be dogmas. Montesquieu could come out, Voltaire appeared, etc.
One day the first volume of the Encyclopedia appeared on the market. As a result, the works of people like Diderot (whose most famous works came out in France only after his death), d´Alembert, Holbach and others became increasingly available. The king’s censors were awake, but the whole thing was under the protection of representatives of the regime, such as the censorship director count de Malesherbes, the king’s mistress Mme de Pompadour and many more. After years of vexations and prohibitions came to an end, the regime had more than four thousand proponents from all classes, including aristocrats and lower clerics.
Libertine literature originated and spread fast, pamphlets accumulated, theatres became more and more daring, the church’s authority grew weak, and certitudes quickly became questions. Large scale anti-authoritative intellectual efforts, known as the Enlightenment, represented mainly by the increasingly stronger third class, helped political demands surface. However, not even the intellects representatives, who mostly belonged to higher classes, not even the representatives of the political movement influenced by them, were revolutionaries in the right sense of the word. They strived, through their work’s influence and through direct action for reforms, for some kind of Anglicization of the existing system.
Representatives of the Enlightenment won in 1789, and proceeded to adopt a new constitution and human rights declaration in Versailles’ ballroom, which occurred during the French Revolution. The eminent enlighteners were long dead and, count de Malesherbes ended up under the guillotine.
Nevertheless, in Russia during March of 1963, Stalin – the representative of the new age totalitarian state, a despotic man, who’s name is associated with beating fascism and the rise of USSR to become the second great power – died. Just like then in France, people in the centers and provinces could finally breathe, although they’d almost given up hope. Nothing was like before.
The period that followed was called Thawing; in culture, but also in politics and economy. Stalin’s death bought about much change.For instance, after the Polish and Hungarian explosion, pro that would have been previously inconceivable were now allowed inside the political structure throughout the empire. Now, instead of the overwhelming presence of the state and society, man appeared prevalent in literature, theatre, film. History stopped being copied from resolutions and ruling ideology could be discussed by philosophers publicly at universities. But even thawing seemed dangerous, and so by the end of the fifties it had to be refrozen.
But it wasn’t. Society had already discovered that the totalitarian model, before reminiscent of a big compact cake of cheese, now resembled a cake of gruyère, and it started entering through its holes. The fate of the anti-Stalinist thawing throughout the empire wasn’t yet decided and the face of the Cold War changed every day. About as often, or let’s say as commonly, as the intellectuals, and artists; behind them the broad cultural form loomed to explore the terrain, to find out the thickness of walls and bars behind half opened windows. This time though not with the acknowledgement of the authorities, but on their own, taking their own risks.
The battle took ten years and they fought only to end up like France did two hundred years ago - they beat the church, specifically, its ideologies, dogmas, and protectors. In the oncoming vacuum, at least three decades of creative energy exploded and brought such fruits, much richer then the previous. Kundera talks about this moment as one of the greatest in European history.
Unknown writers, new filmmakers, whose movies spread worldwide, and great composers appeard. International reception of their activities and work kept them marginally protected before the gradually weakening and reckless powers. Weaker and more reckless because it could no longer rely upon their nomenclature, not even on the silent nods from those, whom it had power over. Thanks to the million readers of the weekly Czech Writers Journal economical independence of the writers’ association was ensured. Thus, more and more writers kept joining and the journal rose in a vertically structured society, opinions, thought, political structures and alliances, which until then, was totally unimaginable. Not even the TV and radio ramparts could withstand such pressure and soon became the mass mongers of something which could have only originated in intellectual and artistic laboratories. Even Czech radio and television received a number of international appreciations and acknowledgements.
Of course not everything that had originated from Czech and Slovak culture had a remarkable meaning. It withstands (same as the fruit of the French enlightenment) the test of time, which (not the market as president Václav Klaus thinks) is the most unmerciful judge of value and life of art. It is almost unbelievable, how much of the cultural crop of Czechoslovakia’s sixties had been tested by time and left to other generations, often without a footnote.
Even these newfound authors were not revolutionaries during the nine months of the Czechoslovakian spring of 1968. Similar to the French enlighteners, they didn’t put forth much effort to overthrow their regime, but instead, fought to reform it, to open the windows and break down the barricades that stood in the way of further progress. The winning moment of this struggle occured when the Soviet tanks entered and changed things through the means of violence. This differed drastically from Poland where the army did not use any brute forces.
The distinct parallel with the French Enlightenment doesn’t end here though. In 1970 Edmund Burke labeled them as the roots of all evil. After him Herder opened the road to nationalism. The period after the French Revolution took only what it needed from the enlightenment movement. It wasn’t until 1830 when the greatest novel about the time of restoration, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, was published. Eventually, it will be considered the key work of the post-communist age.
In Czechoslovakia, the sixties culture was not much better than the culture of the neighboring countires. After twenty years of normalization, the almost-born democracy continued displacing them from the nation’s memory. Just as the “enlightenment’s naivety” is put to fault for the catastrophes of the following centuries, so is the “naivety of the sixties” responsible not only for everything that followed imminently, but even for the cultural vacuum of today. Czech writer and historian Alena Wagnerová speaks of “the disappearance of cultural elites as a political power.“
But we remember that in France, the first Industrial Revolution moved the focus in a different direction and the cultural elites reappeared as a political power only after the divorce of the church from the state and especially the Darfus’ affairs. Thus, I hereby state, along with Foucault, that the Czech and Slovak culture of the sixties do not belong to any cultural elite, nor any civilization, but to those, who are and will be in their spirit and relationship with today and tomorrow, the bearers of the struggle for intellectual emancipation.
Translated by Kuba Kaifosz