If the year 1989 marked the postponed end of World War II, it obviously belatedly redefined the victors and losers of that horrendous bloody act.
I had the undesirable privilege of experiencing the traumas of that nightmare and of its East European aftermath, but I do not claim this as a reason to extol my judgment. Instead, I would prefer to consider myself as one of too many exiles floating in our contemporary world, identifiable as such in all the corners of our troubled planet.
It’s not by chance, probably, that I have lived these last twenty years in New York, the Dada capital of exiles, and that age has brought me peace with my new home and homeland.
Central and Eastern Europe weren’t, of course, only the places of right and left dictatorships, of provincial ethnocentrism and xenophobia, of perpetual and frozen conflicts, of explosive contradictions. They were also the birthplace of a spiritual heritage, of thinkers and artists, of a specific mode of creativity and of a persistent search for meaning, beyond pragmatic negotiations with the daily chaos of life. It’s an old and vital part of our European culture, defined by some as the tense and fruitful spiritual bond and borderland between Athens and Jerusalem.
In 1989 these nations returned to the broad European civilization from the desert and storms of utopia and terror. That natural and irreplaceable part of the continent carried in its return to Europe its spiritual diversity and richness, its vivacity and mysteries, its potential as an active contributor to our common destiny.
And it brought with it its memory, of course, as well as its old and new aspirations.
My fellow exiles, who had evaded totalitarian Eastern Europe, experienced first hand the shocking transition that their homelands went through after 1989. On arriving in the West, we saw that we had missed out not only on decades of economic evolution, but also an evolution of the mind, of public debates, of a new approach to human rights and acceptance of otherness — political, religious, ethnic, sexual otherness.
We saw the truth of what Thomas Mann once said: “Freedom is more complicated than power.” Moving from a closed society to an open and free one isn’t an easy task. It’s even more difficult when that closed society is locked within itself, which meant, in the case of real socialism, total censorship, a ban on private property, the impossibility of leaving the country or even of traveling freely outside it, the state as the only employer, a fierce owner of our social and even our private lives. From a political point of view, it seems obvious that it is easier to exercise state power over an electorate of frightened opportunists who vote 99.9 percent for the Supreme Leader and the only one party in existence than over a diverse, divergent electorate in which the winners obtain only 4 percent more votes than the losers.
Easier and simpler, but that doesn’t mean that our life under the oppressive, omnipresent power of a police state was simple or easy. It only emphasizes the great difference in the choices we had to make, their frame and substance; it means another realm for individual and collective responsibility, the contrast between initiative and apathy, between enterprise and obedience, between competition and total dependency on the master state, embodying a kind of unshakable fate.
Soon after the ecstatic moment of liberation, the former socialist states of Eastern and Central Europe went through a difficult and turbulent transition, with many new tensions, economical and political, but also psychological and moral. As slavery has to be learned, step by step, if one is to survive its terror and tricks, freedom must also be learned, step by step, if one is to face up to its chances and competitions, its rewards and restrictions. The turmoil of 1989 brought hope and happiness, but it also revealed nasty secrets that destroyed families and friendships and a common sense of togetherness; it shattered our kind of social stability, however insecure or falsified it was; it enhanced resentments and a desire for revenge. Sometimes it even replaced the old hypocrisy and opportunism with new ones. The truth is that what came to be known as the “post-communist transition” shattered more than families, friendships, biographies, and even language; it also, and rightly, shattered cultural borders that had been closed for too long. A free press and an incomparably more diverse publishing industry, freed from censorship, became the new channels for information, entertainment, and debate. Books and authors banned for decades arose from the dead. Great books and mediocre books and garbage books, religious books and cookbooks and pornographic books, and forgotten masters of free thinking and of superb artistry.
I still recall the excitement of the late 1970s, when the Genius of the Carpathians, our Romanian buffoonish leader, had one of his sudden bizarre inspirations and decided that the socialist conscience of his socialist citizens had reached such a level that censorship was no longer necessary. It had to be replaced by committees of brave citizens in every institution who would check every little sentence destined to go into print. But this thaw soon proved to be a chaotic exercise in cowardice and conformity. Soon everybody started to want the restoration of the old state institution of censorship.
It happened that I was participating in a literary colloquium in Belgrade, in the early 1980s, when an official representative of the Romanian State Publishing Industry delivered a pathetic speech praising the wise and luminous initiative of banning censorship in Socialist Romania. Asked if it were possible to publish religious or pornographic books in Romania he was quick to answer that it might be possible, but that nobody in Romania wanted such books.
Today, of course, porn and smut do seem to be wanted, as a quick glance at any Bucharest kiosk will show. To move from a society based on mendacity and self-deception to one founded on money is to adjust to a different vision and a different speed of life. At that still fluid border between old and new, people craved what they didn’t have before: freedom of thought and expression, prosperity, information, the right to be an individual not a sleepy part of a sleepy mass, the right to pursue happiness as they saw fit, even to look at pornography. Here was Happiness not as defined by the state and the Party but as defined by one’s own will and wishes, in whatever way you dreamt of them being fulfilled.
My dream throughout my postwar life was to find an inner resistance against the ubiquitous external pressure. Living within yourself, it turned out, was for me the mode of resistance; it formed a center for the moral being, a means of separating from a corrupt and corrupting environment, a hope, however uncertain, of maintaining one’s conscience with integrity. Reading and writing were a shelter, even if menaced, and the best therapy against the poisonous spread of lies and hypocrisy.
Forced to leave, once again, in 1986, as I had been more than fifty years before, when I was deported as a child to a concentration camp, I found myself leaving my place and my language — the only forms of wealth that really mattered. In 1986 my exile began in Berlin. The name of that city was a frightening word in my childhood and yet West Berlin became my first happy shelter in the Free World, two years before that joyful November of 1989. I used to take long walks with a French writer and neighbor. Our western side of the Wall was full of funny, amusing graffiti; the eastern side of the Wall wasn’t approachable, guarded by armed soldiers defending the socialist paradise. My French friend always complained about West Berlin as an artificial and closed enclave, one populated with spies and artists, and everywhere that oppressive Wall that kept us imprisoned and separated from the outside world snaking past. Even the train from East to West Germany, which passed through West Berlin, was completely locked, so that no one could escape it. But for me the Wall was a blessed protection against the poisonous environment that lay behind it — the German Democratic Republic and beyond that, the Soviet bloc of the so-called socialist countries.