EAST OF EDEN
H.M. ENZENSBERGER, E.M. CIORAN, V. HAVEL, I. KLíma, I. Kadare,
D. Ugresic, D. Ugresic,
M. Kundera, G. Konrad,
E. Hoffman
[...] In earlier times, legend and rumor were the media of hope. The Promised Land, Arabia Felix, legendary Atlantis, El Dorado, the New World; these were the magical stories that motivated many to set out. Today it is the high-frequency images that the global media system transmits to the very last village of the poor world. Their reality content is even less than that of the marvelous legends of the early modern period; however, their effects are incomparably more powerful. Advertising, especially, which is effortlessly understood in its wealthy countries of origin as a mere sign without real referents, counts in the Second and Third Worlds as a reliable description of a possible way of life. [...]
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, CIVIL WAR
[...] Closed for five thousand years, paradise was reopened, according to Saint John Chrysostom, at the moment when Christ expired; the thief could enter it now, followed by Adam, repatriated at last, and by a limited number of the Just who were vegetating in the infernal regions, waiting for “the hour of redemption”.
Everything suggests that paradise has been bolted shut again and that it will remain so for a long time to come. No one can force an entrance there: the few privileged characters enjoying the place have doubtless barricaded themselves inside, according to a system whose wonders they could observe on earth. This paradise has a look of being the real one: in the depths of our prostration’s we dream of it and in it long to dissolve. A sudden impulse leads us to it, and we plunge in: do we seek to regain, in a moment, what we have lost forever - suddenly to make up for the sin of being born? Nothing shows more clearly the metaphysical meaning of our nostalgia than its incapacity to coincide with any moment of time whatever; hence it seeks consolation in a remote, immemorial past refractory to the centuries and somehow anterior to becoming. The evil from which our nostalgia suffers - effect of a rupture that dates back to the beginnings - keeps it from projecting the Age of Gold into the future; the golden age it conceives quite naturally is the old one, the primordial one to which it aspires less for pleasure’s sake than to swoon there, to lay down the burden of consciousness. If we return to the source of all seasons, of time itself, it is to rediscover the true paradise there, that objects of all our regrets. On the other hand, the nostalgia from which the earthly paradise derives will be minus precisely the dimension of regret: a nostalgia reversed, falsified, and vitiated, straining toward the future, obnubilated by “progress”, a temporal rejoinder, a jeering metamorphosis of the original paradise. Contagion? Automatism? This metamorphosis has ultimately come to pass within each of us. Willy-nilly we bet on the future, make it into a panacea, and identifying it with the appearance of an altogether different time within time, we consider it as an inexhaustible and yet completed duration, a timeless history. A contradiction in terms, inherent in the hope of a New Kingdom, of a victory of the unsolvable at the heart of becoming. Our dreams of a better world are based on a theoretical impossibility. Hardly surprising if, in order to justify them, we must resort to solid paradoxes! [...]
E.M. Cioran, HISTORY AND UTOPIA
[...] I am unwilling to believe that this whole civilization is no more than a blind alley of history and a fatal error of the human spirit. More probably it represents a necessary phase that man and humanity must go through, one that man - if he survives - will ultimately, and on some higher level (unthinkable, of course, without the present phase), transcend. [...]
Václav Havel, LIVING IN THRUTH
[...] If a better economic and political model is to be created, then perhaps more than ever before it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society. This is not something that can be designed and introduced like a new car. If it is to be more than just a new variation on an old degeneration, it must above all be an expression of life in the process of transforming itself. [...]
Václav Havel, LIVING IN THRUTH
[...] There is no way around it: no matter how beautiful an alternative political model may be, it can no longer speak to the ‘hidden sphere’, inspire people and society, call for real political ferment. The real sphere of potential politics in the post-totalitarian system is elsewhere: in the continuing and cruel tension between the complex demands of that system and the aims of life, that is, the elementary need of human beings to live, to a certain extent at least, in harmony with themselves, that is, to live in a bearable way, not to be humiliated by their superiors and officials, not to be continually watched by the police, to be able to express themselves freely, to find an outlet for their creativity, to enjoy legal security, and so on. Anything that touches this field concretely, anything that relates to this fundamental, omnipresent and living tension, will inevitably speak to people. Abstract projects for an ideal political and economic order do not interest them to anything like the same extent - and rightly so - not only because everyone knows how little chance they have of succeeding, but also because today people feel that the less political policies are derived from a concrete and human ‘here and now’ and the more they fix their sights on an abstract ‘someday’, the more easily they can degenerate into new forms of human enslavement. People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being. [...]
Václav Havel, LIVING IN THRUTH
[...] Great ideologies were fascinating either because they imagined a less problematic past or because they envisioned a harmonious future where everyone would receive everything according to his needs. Their often fantastic or naïve arguments and promises required more faith than reason, and they could scarcely have gained the massive currency they did, had the intellectuals not been dominated by feelings of disappointment, uselessness and the need to escape.
It was not just the intellectuals, however, or the creators who were disappointed, it was also the receivers, the audience. [...]
Ivan Klíma, THE SPIRIT OF PRAGUE
[...] There is not a power on earth that has not relied on some form of terror. Man lived not merely in fear of invaders who would ride furiously in from the distance, he lived in fear of gods or of God and his representatives on earth. He lived in fear of the authority of officers and of the bailiffs of his own masters, in fear of losing his home or the food he needed to stay alive or his land or his work.
Every effort to liberate man has in fact been an effort to liberate him from fear, to create conditions in which he would not feel his dependency as a threat. [...]
The fear that sleeps in the beds of the powerless gives a strong impetus to their dreams and their actions. The powerless person longing to escape his anxiety usually sees only two ways out : to flee beyond the reach of the hostile powers, or to become powerful himself. Fear engenders dreams of power. [...]
Ivan Klíma, THE SPIRIT OF PRAGUE
[...] And Petar Petrovic stands on the border between before and after, between one age and another, between one reality and another, between one utopia and another, between the past and the future - and he trembles. He sees clearly: those who stand confused on the border seem to disappear; those who make up their minds hold in their hands a ticket for the future, a ticket for the Balkan Express... [...]
Dubravka Ugresic, THE CULTURE OF LIES
[...] Although the kitsch of today fits the old one like a photograph torn in half, the two pictures are different. Socialist kitsch declared its ideology: brotherhood and unity, internationalism, social equality, progress and the like. The fundamental ideas of nationalist kitsch are : national sovereignty and privilege for the individual on the basis of acceptable blood group. Socialist kitsch had a futuristic projection, and therefore a strong utopian dimension. Nationalist kitsch draws it’s content from passionate submersion in ‘the essence of the national being’ and is therefore turned towards the past, deprived of any utopian dimension. The key symbols of socialist kitsch are connected with work, progress, equality (railways, roads, factories, sculptures of peasants and workers with their arms round each other and such like). The key symbols of nationalist kitsch are connected with national identity (knights, coats of arms, Catholic and Orthodox crosses, sculptures of historical heroes, and so on). Both kinds of kitsch emply an identical strategy of seduction.
There is, of course, another fundamental difference. The socialist state kitsch was created in peacetime, in a country with a future before it. This other kitsch, this ‘gingerbread heart culture’, is poured like icing over the appalling reality of war. In the reality of war, ‘gingerbread heart culture’ intensifies its strategy of seduction and penetrates all the pores of daily life (newspapers, radio, television, language) like a virus, transforming real horror into the horror of •• ‘poshlost’/ the worst thinkable banality. [...]
Dubravka Ugresic, THE CULTURE OF LIES
People are always shouting that they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera, THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING
[...] In all the former Yugoslav territories people are now living a postmodern chaos or order. Past, present and future are all lived SIMULTANEOUSLY. In the circular temporal mish-mash suddenly everything we ever knew and everything we shall know has sprung to life and gained its right to existence.
[...]
The newly created states are also ‘museum pieces’, quotations, and the responses of the newly elected leaders are only references to those already uttered. Like the flash of a hologram, segments of former times appear, fragments of history; from the faces of today’s leaders there often gleams the hellish reflection of some other leaders, in such a gleam the swastika is linked to the red star. The hot heads of the Balkan peoples dream thousand-year dreams, some fragments flash like reality and then sink into the darkness to yield the right to a brief life to some other fragments. In the territories of the disintegrated country, which was once shared, victims and their executioners, attackers and attacked, occupiers and occupied sometimes exchange dreams, sometimes they dream the same dream, thinking they are dreaming different ones.
Dubravka Ugresic, THE CULTURE OF LIES
[...] Not only have we had to endure and see through the same tyranny, but also we also now find ourselves confronted with the same difficult tasks. How can we transform communism into a democratic system in our countries? How can we conjure back from the void the "abolished" bourgeoisie, essential to a properly functioning economy? How can we restore to our societies the civilized codes of conduct, of which we are all in need? Only now shall it become apparent that the geographical concept "Central Europe" has a countenance, a body and a - recognizable - soul. When almost all we were permitted to see was the faces of each other's party leaders, we felt but little affinity for each other. A country only becomes of interest when it inhabitants are about to venture upon something interesting. In our four countries, we are once again striving to demolish despotism - the semi-feudal absolutism that also brought us such great misery in the previous century and of which communism is only the most recent and most effective variation. This metaphorical demolition is one of our tasks and is tantamount to the demolition of our ego. It is a transformation of soul, a reformation of values, a transmutation of personality, and a retrospective self-analysis. But this is not always spiritually uplifting: there are those who try to bluster through the task by simply shouting down the others and this at a time of much shouting. We see the most vociferous amongst them shaking their fist at people who only yesterday they were still cheering with all their might. [...]
György Konrad, LEISURELY OBSERVATIONS IN A FAST MOVING AGE
[...]An entire society is playing the game of moral rebirth; everybody acts as if he is beginning with a clean slate. Those who have done wrong were 'simply obeying higher orders' - as if fear could be a moral justification for whatever sort of behavior. Certainly nobody has remained innocent of the sin of compliance; everybody is implicated in as far as he has complied with the rules of play until recently in force. The change of system tempts many to point an accusing finger. In this country, there is currently a fertile breeding ground for antipathy, sneering sarcasm and pessimism verging on anxiety. Yet one cannot say that this has made life any less interesting. Hungarians are reading ever more newspapers, even if those newspapers have become considerably more expensive. They contain great many interesting articles and on all sides uniformity is giving way to individuality. Meanwhile, the standard of living is decreasing steadily. Many people now simply skip the summer holidays, one in ten fellow citizens now has an income below the poverty line and the homeless people with plastic carrier bags, who are gradually taking possession of the benches in the capital, are no longer being picked up by the police as "workshy elements who are a menace to society". ...Since 1989 there has been no turning back. The experimental period will continue for a few more years. Increasingly often the complaint is voiced that society has become over politicized - as if that was not the case before! Keeping silent is also a political act. This year, for the first time, things are being called by their name here. What has now been said, we can never again forget, even if we would like to. It is not easy to break the habit of being afraid: a minority still has all the say, the majority still remains silent. Under the communist system, everything is political, because under that system every aspect of human existence is politically charged. In this post-communist, experimental period, rules of law are being formulated which have to roll back politics and with which society must be able to defend itself. A whole way of life is under discussion. Many are of the opinion that liberty is a great good, even if it is not accompanied for the time being by a well-filled shopping bag. Now they see that the impossible is suddenly possible after all, many Hungarians are determined to win this game, that is being played so shortly before the turn of the millennium. We are now convinced that no tools of iron can ever again rob us of the power of freedom of speech.
György Konrad, LEISURELY OBSERVATIONS IN A FAST MOVING AGE
[...]If ever the history of the political upheavals, which took place in 1989 in Eastern Europe, is written - upheavals of which the common characteristic is that they were set in motion by nonviolent civil activity - the necessary attention will have to be paid to the manner in which words and images - and the effect thereof - spread themselves during this phenomenon. Many broke their habit of fear and acquired the habit of speaking freely. 1989 was the year of the liberation of eastern Central Europe. I hope that we - with a wisdom bestowed by the events of the past - will never again relinquish human rights, not even if today's champions of freedom should propose tomorrow that we ought to do so in order to attain some exalted goal or other.
With the abolition of the single party system, we also simultaneously abolish the feudal inequalities between citizens, as well as all sorts of privileges. Political emancipation and the emancipation of language and culture are inseparable. Nobody should have his human dignity dented because he has learnt a minority language from his mother! We no longer accept that our national borders hinder the individual's natural freedom of movement. We reject the insular nationalism of the dictatorships. Now more than ever we have a message for each other. Now more than ever we can learn from each other. If we were previously accustomed to casting our gaze eastward and westward, henceforth we will also turn our face to the north and the south.[...]
György Konrad, LEISURELY OBSERVATIONS IN A FAST MOVING AGE
[...]What remains of socialism? All those socialist realist people. After all, they have lived with socialist realism for forty years, thus for most of them, for their whole lives. The lessons, the imprint, the style, the ethics and the logic of those forty years do not just simply disappear into the waste-paper basket. It is socialist people who are now constructing democracy...
I get the impression that Hungarians in the West are more elated than the people at home. At home, happiness about the changes is overshadowed by anxiety about increasing deprivation, impatience about the ambiguity of the changes, the presentiment of approaching catastrophe - that characteristic Central European, proven tendency to see ghosts - and the emergence of a new career-hungry rat race. In any event, it is inappropriate to exhibit joy. Yet I can state with cheerful confidence that it is intriguing to observe a society going through an experimental phase. A society that is consciously transforming itself, that does not know exactly where it is heading, but nevertheless always pushes further ahead, in search of its destination and thus of its individual place within Europe.[...]
György Konrad, LEISURELY OBSERVATIONS IN A FAST MOVING AGE
[...]The city is more plebeian, more proletarian and drabber in appearance: East European ultra-blandness alongside Soviet ugliness. We have managed to become more proletarian, more boorish and small-towner. Everywhere one sees provincial, smelling-of-the-kitchen obesity, indolence and vulgarity. On the street one encounters few characteristic urban faces, few unique personalities. There is a stylistic homogeneity between the executive and the proletarian. At the theatre in the city center, I gaze at the group photograph of the theatre company: the one working class person after the other, plebeian faces heavily fleshed between the jaw and the cheekbones.
This experiment looks more attractive from the outside than the inside. Even if the experiment succeeds, the outcome will be chaos and will probably result in a return to the Christian Nationalist values of the middle classes of the 1930's. We have now reached an absolute zero, a point of departure, a sort of stove in the ballroom, at which the dancers warm themselves when they are preparing for the dance...
What is happening to all those people who are suddenly undergoing a metamorphosis? How are they experiencing their change of role? Yesterday they still belonged to the executive, today they are the new capitalists, or rather: a mixture of both. There is a lot of garbage, nonsense and bullshit. There are few pure forms.[...]
György Konrad, LEISURELY OBSERVATIONS IN A FAST MOVING AGE
[...] To begin with, there are the inconspicuous signs, affixed to shop façades or hotel entrances, announcing foreign currency exchanges. I walk into a makeshift shack bearing such a sign, as well as one announcing the sale of vegetables. Inside, next to the bins of carrots and potatoes, there is a blackboard with official exchange rates listed in chalk. Such is the hold of habit that I’m tempted to look over my shoulder as I accomplish this once-illicit transaction. The moneychanger, of course, is quite used to this by now; the sums he calmly hands over are grotesque, bombastic, Weimarian. For my $50, I get nearly half a million zlotys. I feel momentarily very rich, but I can see how the heady descent of the currency’s value might have given people some discomfiting moments.
‘Well, but now it’s stable and a man can give a lady real money’, the changer says when I ask him about this. ‘A man could do O.K. for himself now, if only they would leave him alone.’
‘They? Who’re they?’
‘Oh, what can I tell you - shady groups. They want to control this business. With guns. Me, I’m an independent. But they’re Mafiosi, that’s all they are, and you may be sure half of them are from the nomenclature. Or from the militia. Who else has guns around here?’ [...]
Eva Hoffman, EXIT INTO HISTORY
[...] I meet my friend Renata in an utterly ordinary cafeteria, and order a sandwich and a salad. An old woman has been contemplating the sparse offerings for some time, and as she sees what I order, she mutters, ‘Some people have enough money in their pockets to fill their bellies’
‘See what’s going on?’ Renata says when we sit down. ‘This never used to happen here. People didn’t envy each other on this pathetic level. What was the point? They knew that nobody had anything much. This is going to become a different country.’
Yes, undoubtedly; and for a while it will combine the syndromes of poverty with the pathologies of capitalism. I tell Renata about my own sense of dismay at first impressions. ‘Melancholy of transition, that’s what you’re feeling’, she informs me. ‘You’re just getting a tiny dose of it, but we’ve all been through it in spades. Or I should say we’re all going through it. I mean, nobody knows what to expect. We have to relearn the whole ball game from the start.’
‘You don’t mean, of course, that things were better before’.
‘No, of course not. Not better - but they were simpler. Us, them. It was a predictable game. Now we’re in an utterly open situation. We don’t know how things are going to turn out from day to day. I mean, we don’t know what’ll happen to our jobs, or who the anchor will be on evening news tomorrow, or whether the local child-care center is going to close. It’s all up for grabs, and there’s no one to blame. It does incline one into melancholy.’ [...]
Eva Hoffman, EXIT INTO HISTORY
[...] Until recently, Sofar was a professor of philosophy in that target of dread and mockery, the Marxist-Leninist Institute. But the institute was closed down one month after the changes, and he is the more or less proud owner of a restaurant he bought shortly after that. ... ‘You see, I’m afraid that it’ll happen again’, he says, ‘the same thing that has happened so often. They’ll want to blame the Communists, the Jews, the Gypsies.’
Sofar doesn’t bother to hide his bitterness about the folding of his institute. ‘It was a great injustice for us’, he says unequivocally. ‘The Minister of Education fired us. Well, we were much more liberal than the Minister of Education was. But they wanted some credit for the new era.’
‘I bought this place right away, after I was fired, with two pals. I got six months’ salary, and this is what I used it for. We’re not making any profit, but maybe we can make enough money so I can be independent. I never want to be dependent anymore. You see’, he continues, in a galled tone, ‘I was in the same situation in ‘68 - the same situation. I was competent, but I became so’- he brings his thumb and forefinger together - ‘small. For five years I was in big troubles. I don’t want to belong to anything anymore.’
Eva Hoffman, EXIT INTO HISTORY
[...]
‘Your English is good’, I compliment him.
‘No, not very good, not at all. Sorry!’
‘Where did you learn it?’ I inquire.
‘Of course, my teacher thirty years ago told me I should learn a useful language. Not Russian. But after all, I got married, I had children. Sorry! But eight years ago, I took a course at the Postal Planning Institute. That’s where I worked.’
‘And why did you leave your job?’
‘I thought the taxi was a good business. And, after all, I have no big boss. That’s good.’
‘And is the cab a good business?’
‘Sorry, it’s no business at all. There are too many cabs, the government didn’t stop them. There are ten thousand cabs in Budapest. Too many. Maybe you’ll find another cab. Maybe!’
‘What has the government been doing during the last year?’ I inquire.
‘I do not know. Sorry! Nobody knows. They say they’re working hard, and they raise the prices. Not the wages. Sorry!’
Eva Hoffman, EXIT INTO HISTORY