Even before the intruders come in to arrest him, K. sees the old woman in the house across the way gazing at him "with totally unusual curiosity"; thus, from the beginning, the ancient chorus of concierges enters the game; in The Castle, Amalia is neither accused nor convicted, but it is widely known that the invisible tribunal dislikes her, and that is enough to keep all the villagers away from her; because if the tribunal imposes a trial-regime on a country, the entire population is dragooned into the grand machinations of the trial, increasing its efficacy a hundredfold; every single person knows that he could be accused at any moment, and he ponders his self-criticism in advance; self-criticism: the subjection of the accused to the accuser; the renunciation of his self; a way of nullifying himself as an individual; after the Communist revolution of 1948, the daughter of a wealthy Czech family felt guilty about her undeserved privileges as a child of affluence; to show her repentance, she became so fervent a Communist that she publicly repudiated her father; now, after the disappearance of Communism, she is again undergoing judgment and again feeling guilty; ground between the millstones of two trials, of two self-criticisms, all she has behind her is the desert of a repudiated life; even though in the meantime all the houses once confiscated from her (repudiated) father have been returned to her, today she is merely a nullified creature; doubly nullified; self-nullified.
For a trial is initiated not to render justice but to annihilate the defendant; as Brod said: he who does not love anyone, who only dallies, must die; thus K. is stabbed in the heart; Bukharin is hanged. Even when the trial is of dead people, the point is to kill them off a second time: by burning their books; by removing their names from the schoolbooks; by demolishing their monuments; by rechristening the streets that bore their names.
The Trial Against the Century
For nearly seventy years Europe lived under a trial-regime. From among the great artists of the century, how many defendants… I shall mention only those who had some significance for me. Starting in the twenties, there were those hounded by the tribunal of revolutionary morality: Bunin, Andreyev, Meyerhold, Pilnyak, Veprik (a Jewish-Russian musician, a forgotten martyr of modern art; he dared to defend Shostakovich's opera against Stalin's condemnation; they stuck him in a camp; I remember his piano compositions, which my father liked to play), Mandelstam, Halas (the poet who was adored by Ludvik in The Joke., hounded after his death for gloominess seen as counterrevolutionary). Then there were the quarry of the Nazi tribunaclass="underline" Broch (he gazes at me, pipe in mouth, from a photo on my worktable), Schoenberg, Werfel, Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Musil, Vancura (the Czech writer I love most), Bruno Schulz. The totalitarian empires and their bloody trials have disappeared, but the spirit of the trial lingers as a legacy, and that is what is now settling scores. Thus the trial strikes at: those accused of pro-Nazi sympathies: Hamsun, Heidegger (all Czech dissident thought, Patocka most notably, is indebted to him), Richard Strauss, Gottfried Benn, von Doderer, Drieu la Rochelle, Celine (in 1992, a half century after the war, an indignant official refused to designate his house a historical monument); supporters of Mussolini: Malaparte, Marinetti, Ezra Pound (the American military kept him, like an animal, in a cage for months under the blazing Italian sun; in his Reykjavik studio, the painter
Kristjan Davidsson showed me a large photo of him: "For fifty years it has gone with me everywhere I go"); the Munich appeasers: Giono, Alain, Morand, Montherlant, St.-John Perse (a member of the French delegation to the Munich conference, he was closely involved in the humiliation of my native country); then, the Communists and their sympathizers: Maya-kovsky (who today remembers his love poetry and his amazing metaphors?), Gorky, Shaw, Brecht (who is thereby undergoing his second trial), Eluard (that exterminating angel who used to decorate his signature with a drawing of crossed swords), Picasso, Leger, Aragon (how can I forget that he offered me his hand at a difficult time in my life?), Nezval (his self-portrait in oils is on the wall by my bookshelves), Sartre. Some of these people are undergoing a double trial, first accused of betraying the revolution, then accused for services they had rendered it earlier: Gide (in the old Communist countries, the symbol of all evil), Shostakovich (to atone for his difficult music, he manufactured rubbish for the regime's needs; he maintained that for the history of art a worthless thing is null and void; he didn't know that for the tribunal it is the worthlessness itself that counts), Breton, Malraux (accused yesterday of having betrayed revolutionary ideals, accusable tomorrow of having held them), Tibor Dery (some works of this Communist writer, who was imprisoned after the Budapest massacre, were for me the first great literary, nonpropagandistic reply to Stalinism). The most exquisite flower of the century, the modern art of the twenties and thirties, was even triply accused: first by the Nazi tribunal as Entartete Kunst, "degenerate art"; then by the Communist tribunal as "elitist formalism alien to the people"; and finally by the triumphant capitalist tribunal as art steeped in revolutionary illusions.
How is it possible that the Soviet Russian chauvinist, the maker of versified propaganda, he whom Stalin himself called "the greatest poet of our epoch"-how is it possible that Mayakovsky is nevertheless a tremendous poet, one of the greatest? Given her capacity for enthusiasm, her emotional tears that blur her view of the outside world, wasn't lyric poetry-that untouchable goddess-doomed one fateful day to become the beautifier of atrocities, their "warmhearted maidservant" (Baudelaire)? These are the questions that fascinated me when, some twenty-five years ago, I wrote Life Is Elsewhere, the novel in which Jaromil, a poet under twenty years old, becomes the elated servant of the Stalinist regime. I was aghast when critics, although praising my book, saw my hero as a fake poet, a bastard even. In my view, Jaromil is an authentic poet, an innocent soul; otherwise, I would not have seen any interest to my novel. Am 1 the one to blame for the misunderstanding? Did I express myself badly? I don't think so. To be a true poet and at the same time to support (like Jaromil or Mayakovsky) an incontestable horror is a scandal-in the sense of an unjustifiable, unacceptable event, one that contradicts logic and yet is real. We are all unconsciously tempted to dodge scandals, to behave as though they don't exist. That is why we prefer to say that the great cultural figures tainted with the horrors of our century were bastards., but it isn't so; if only out of vanity, aware that they are seen, looked at, judged, artists and philosophers are anxious to be decent and courageous, to be
on the right side, to be right. That makes the scandal still more intolerable, more inexplicable. If we don't want to leave this century just as stupid as we entered it, we must abandon the facile moralism of the trial and think about this scandal, think it through to the bottom, even if this should lead us to question anew all our certainties about man as such.
But the conformism of public opinion is a force that sets itself up as a tribunal, and the tribunal is not there to waste time over ideas, it is there to conduct the investigations for trials. And as the abyss of time widens between judges and defendants, it is always a lesser experience that is judging a greater. The immature sit in judgment on Celine's erring ways without realizing that because of these erring ways, Celine's novels contain existential knowledge that, if they were to understand it, could make them more adult. Because therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children.