When Marx called us to take leave of the past with a laugh, he surely did not suspect what “real socialism” would look like, or that its citizens would feverishly come to desire its complete destruction. The world’s first socialist state — which was to be the Soviet Union and not Germany, as many socialists believed at the beginning of the century — dissolved before the new millennium could herald its surprises. Foolish history once again aimed its sarcasm at the dreams of perfection and the rationalized schemata of its imperfect guinea pigs. The abandonment of socialism was not brought about by a “leap forward” into communism, where laughter would probably have been rationed and collectivized; rather, it occurred as a “regression” to capitalism, the first phases of which Marx himself had analyzed and chastised with unparalleled acuity.
The euphoria of this abandonment followed hard on the heels of a punishing transition. Perhaps abandoning socialism requires a painful step back before it can promise two steps forward. The transition, with its misery, confusion, and humiliation, has provoked pity rather than laughter. But above all it has inspired well-founded concern — as much in those who must endure the hardship of the transition as in outside observers. After the utopia, the masquerade, and the terror or totalitarianism, a post-communist kitsch has sardonically perfected the tragicomedy of our tormented century. Whether they are artists, scientists, or even farmers, intellectuals are confronting the parody that predestined them to be heroes, aware now of their roles in the farce.
Poverty. Profiteering. Demagogy. Diversionary tactics. Rebirth. Renewal. Hope. The burden of the past: mistrust, guilt, vengefulness. The confusion of the present: new hierarchies and new truths, and, with them, the uncertainty of the future. The isolation and instability of freedom threaten the ease which succeeded the routine of subjection, a routine which also brought the comfort of fatalistic apathy. Freedom is what each of us is able to realize out of our fleeting assumptions. Supporters of democracy are more often motivated by the prospect of wealth than by the complicated rules of respecting individuality or fostering pluralism. Now, an astonishing number of “heroes” have already replaced an enormous number of opportunists under the dictatorship. Former activists or political functionaries — now unscrupulous businessmen — hold in contempt their old comrades who insist on dreaming of restoration. Former dissidents have blossomed into shrewd politicians or remain relicts of a reverse Stalinism. Impassioned politicians creep off into introspection and silence; timid loners are promoted as the champions of the hour. Impromptu liberals are confronted with old and new conservatives, extremists, idealists, ideologues. Old and new profiteers, the formerly and the newly naïve, stir up the great and by no means innocent masses, who in turn regenerate their own adaption instincts.
Those who for years were forced to suffer through tedious lessons in Marxism and political economics discover that capitalism, not socialism, teaches that “existence determines consciousness” and that the workers of the world never did unite, precisely because they were interested primarily in their own material lives, which differed enormously from one country to the next. Should we still be surprised by the recent threats of extremism under different banners or by the potential explosiveness of discontent that could pave the way for new forms of dictatorship? After the failed experiment in “abolishing man’s exploitation of man,” its survivors will be subjected to another painful experiment: the transition from state ownership of evil to individual and corporate ownership of good and evil.
However fantastic its stagings may often have seemed, totalitarian society was not an unearthly or demonic deviation, as many believe, but a human reality. The pulse of totalitarianism beats in man (and can be detected in the family, in schools, at work, and so on); otherwise, it could not have (and cannot) become an ideology and a system of government. “Social engineering” grew out of dissatisfaction with, and criticism of, democracy’s imperfections and was claiming to be a transcendent ideal. We should keep in mind that Hitler was elected to power in Germany at a time of acute industrial and political crises; that the Russian Revolution of October 1917 did not erupt in the most gruesome period of tsarism, but under Kerensky’s brief democratic government. As Lenin said, every revolution needs five minutes of freedom.
The fact that the first free elections in Algeria in 1992 gave fuel to the fundamentalists reminds us that the Ayatollah Khomeini first came to power when the Shah began to “liberalize” his rule. Are we allowed to see Nazism as a trivialized and diseased “Romanticism”? Or only as racist nihilism that led to the Holocaust? Should we consider communism a demagogic “humanism,” or only a simplistic rationalism that is subservient to tyranny, culminating in the Gulag? When Stalin called writers the “engineers of the human soul,” he styled, condensed, and revealed an entire pedagogy of terror, justifying its horror with a utopian vision.
It is no coincidence that intellectuals have experienced with particular intensity the contradiction between the “ideal” and the critical intelligence that reveals the ideal’s weaknesses. While many intellectuals from the East can be reproached with opportunism (one hardly needs an especially keen eye to recognize the perverted ideal in profane socialist reality), many intellectuals from the West simultaneously served as their accomplices in the free world by preserving, in a corrupt fashion, an already compromised communist ideal. They transferred their dissatisfaction with the imperfections of the democracy in which they lived and whose privileges they enjoyed to a specious ideal. Yet it would be as false once again to hold intellectuals entirely responsible for the “totalitarian compromise,” as it would be to credit them with all anti-totalitarian heroism. There were enough blue-collar, as well as more or less influential white-collar, workers in the East and in the West, who played the same double-dealing game. Situations must be judged within their historical contexts, for only thus do they gain the complexity and clarity that justify analysis. Those rushing to condemn or glorify today should be reminded that, for the totalitarian regime, an intellectual was, at best, a fellow traveler, and for democratic society he remains an odd, marginal figure.
Lorca and Mandelstam symbolize the martyrdom of thousands of artists and intellectuals. This does not excuse those who collaborated with power out of naïvety, fear, or greed. And many did — from all social strata. The totalitarian system sadistically manipulated basic preconditions of humanity and relied on the apathy, confusion, egoism, and enslavement of the masses. For intellectuals, the pitfalls of intimidation, temptation, and remuneration were also constructed upon basic human preconditions. It is hardly surprising that nonetheless intellectuals stood up before those who opposed tyranny, either in secret or in open confrontation. They simply followed their vocation. Freedom is in fact the main precondition for intellectual works in which the ideal and critical intelligence reinforce each other. They are ultimately inseparable.
Politics is obsessed with power. Creativity is synonymous with freedom. The totalitarian state represents absolute power; under a totalitarian system, art is not only a provocation, as it is for any form of authority; it is, purely and simply, the enemy. Remaining honest and maintaining one’s moral and artistic integrity, under continual surveillance and censorship, under the pressure of constant risk and growing taboos, requires a silent, lonely heroism. There were many clear instances of defiant courage, however: some artists and scientists rebelled against the terror, boldly opposed the opportunism of their surroundings, and overcame their own mistrust of rhetoric by explicitly opposing tyranny.