Translated by Daniela Hurezanu,
winter 2009
*A tax consultant.
EMPTY THEATERS?
Following a lengthy decomposition, the communist system in Eastern Europe collapsed, but the collapse failed to bring about an equally sudden democratic and prosperous normality. After the decades-long confinement by totalitarianism, why can’t people, and East Europeans in particular, grasp the true dimension of freedom, why can’t their actions reflect the demands of this great moment? Why are honesty, courage, tolerance, and cooperation stifled by demagogy, cynicism, and brutality? The simplest answer, as Thomas Mann put it, is that freedom is something more complex and delicate than force.
After their flight from Egypt, the ancient Jews needed to wander through the desert for forty years in order to rid themselves of the habits of slavery and give birth to a truly free generation capable of making their dreams habitable. The perplexity shown by many at the uncertain, often explosive, situation in Eastern Europe seems a form of naïvety, if not arrogance. Similar historical events should allow us to understand the burden of guilt, compromise, and revenge; the confusion, the identity crisis, the displacement, the void that liberation from a repressive authority somehow has to fill. Indeed, it is preposterous to expect democratic manners from those who are deprived of their daily bread.
We are not talking here only about the consequences of the perverse decades of communism. First and foremost, we are talking about human nature. Let us recall what happened in France in 1946, 1947, and 1948; that is, in the years after a relatively brief period of occupation. Paraphrased below are the entries for the period taken from the Jean Gilder-Boissière diary, which, when published in 1950, provoked a scandal. A bottle of wine that costs 42 francs wholesale is sold for 568 francs in a good restaurant. More and more people are nostalgically referring to the time of the occupation, when life was better and even the theaters were offering shows of a higher quality. A famous publisher who brought out a pro-Nazi magazine during the war has founded a publishing series under the aegis of Maurice Thorez, the General Secretary of the French Communist Party. Albert Camus has resigned from the newspaper Combat, enraged that only the tabloids and party newspapers can surmount the economic squeeze. Three hundred armed communists attack the printing offices of their own newspaper, L’Humanité, where workers, protesting about their meager wages, barricaded themselves in. An underground SS organization that was falsifying papers to prove that the leaders of the French Resistance were actually active accomplices of the Germans is uncovered. Groups of former accomplices are demanding the rehabilitation of Pierre Laval on the ground that the former collaborationist prime minister was executed under circumstances unworthy of a civilized justice. And many of the collaborationists consider themselves not only victims, but also the new prosecutors, moral sternness proving to be much more widespread among those with guilty consciences.
A quote from December 28, 1946: “During the occupation, 29,000 people were shot in France. Of them, 75,000 [sic] were communists. After the liberation, the most profitable business was to sell Resistance certificates to … former collaborationists.” Or, as a Surrealist Romanian poet who had been a communist in the underground stated after the war, “There were so few of us; yet we turned out to have been so many.”
There is a difference between a wartime occupation of four years and the decades-long siege of Eastern Europe, but there are also some similarities. Today, we are witnessing two simultaneous, familiar, and opposite trends: a laborious regeneration and a powerful reassertion of past conditioning. Clearly there are still many obstacles to the East’s integration into the system of Western democracy. A certain sense of discouragement is understandable.
But the East European stage is not empty. Though free of the official masquerade and lacking the fervor of the socialist underground, today the stage is noisier and more contradictory than ever. It is crowded by new actors, scenarios, and a new play of masks — a dramatic, frenzied, and striking enactment of the whole human tragicomedy.
Fragmentation, dispersion, all-too-rapid conversions, and annihilating excesses can produce a misleading sensation of emptiness and motionlessness. The one-party system provided its subjects with a shared obsession with survival — sought through opportunism — and the avoidance of confrontation.
The communist East also provided the West with a common obsession with survival, whether through compromise and even complicity with the East or in opposition to it.
Eviction from Utopia
A decisive interdiction in Paradise was the Creator’s, the Censor’s forbidden fruit. The Bible calls this first taboo “the tree of knowledge.” Contemplative and submissive, if not downright apathetic, man could have remained forever in the slumbering kingdom of apparent perfection, but this would have annihilated him. It would have meant death, or, even worse, the monstrosity of ignorance. The voyage into the unknown and the contradictory, the imperative to know the world and oneself — the beginning of consciousness — meant individuality, the individual expression of liberty and responsibility. Defying the unique and supreme authority meant eviction from heaven, from utopia. Becoming free, taking the risk, was naturally followed by a crisis of identity, of affiliation; a crisis of self-definition that was supposed to include, but also to go beyond, the very act of taking the risk. Left alone with the world and with himself, mortal, hence real, man was forced to earn his daily bread “by the sweat of his brow.” In order to overcome the crisis, which also was the first economic crisis, he had to become active, rational, and pragmatic. But before long, moral guidance was needed to save mankind from a Hobbesian struggle for survival.
In this respect, the Ten Commandments are more than the reflection of moral urgings; they are social rules as well. Compared to the first and unique interdiction, these rules brought diversification and differentiation, since they referred to relationships among humans and not to the relationship with a sole supreme and exterior authority. As the basis of relationships among all people, irrespective of rank and origin, they were the expression of an incipient democratic evolution.
Who Am I?”
The biblical narrative offers us man’s first vision of himself and of Divinity, each reflected in the image of the other. Thus, history is the history of human risk. It tells us about the risk beings who define themselves and acquire their identity by each of their undertakings. It is not accidental that in Eastern Europe — where a move away from the apathy of submission is taking place — we are witnessing not only an identity crisis, but also, and all too often, a need to identify with new myths. This need for new myths means a need for exterior spiritual protection from the existing confusion, from loneliness and the ever more feverish competition for survival or power.
This is also true in the West. Free of its outside enemy, the West finally has a chance to analyze its own crisis; the crisis of the code of coexistence among people and between people and nature. We are living in a world in which liberty and responsibility have to be redefined and regained at every moment. A world of secular relativity in which mass uniformity and depersonalization often appear as the outcome of “democratization,” of a mass-media culture. A global, post-industrial, perhaps already postmodern, society. More then ever before, the question “Who am I?”, as the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal recently reminded us, becomes essential to understand the immediate past and also to divine the future.