576
PAUL NEUBURG
above the Party.... Even if I had known the true state of affairs, I
would not have been able to say anything. I would like to know why.
. . . I know this is a chaotic letter, but it cannot be otherwise because
there is chaos in my mind. However, I can see a certain fac t emerging
from that chaos. You see it a lso: a ll a long the line, from the basic
Party organizations up to the Secretary of the Central Committee, there
are no authorities."
The effects of the shock a lso rema in ineradicable. "I'll tell you why
I don' t think there'll be grea t trials here," a twenty-seven-year-old
Prague journa list said to me in 1970. "One of the reasons is, of course,
that whether or not the people at the top know what it means to be
involved in such t ria ls from personal experience, they know that once
they stan real terror they can never stop it before they themselves have
been destroyed. But the other reason is that show trials would be
pointless. I n the fifties , a lot of people really did believe tha t Slansky
and the others had been guilty. My own fa ther believed it. But today,
even if they could prove Dubcek Had been selling the country to the
Americans, bit by bit, and show receipts with his signature for e\'ery
dollar he got, people would say, thanks very much, we've heard and
seen a ll that before."
Another basic reason why Sta linism could not agai n inspire the
same heroic passions has to do with the change from a continuous
emergency situation to a time of peace a nd a much richer life. The
new generation has grown up in increas ing prosperity and has acquired
ambitions a nd concerns very different from those of its elders. " I think
one of the reasons we ca red more about books and ideology and religioll.
reflec ted the twenty-eight-yea r-old Budapest woman I quoted earla:•.
"was that we were poor. Little Communists or reactionaries, a ll
01
u,.
We had little else to pl ay with, you might say. My parents \\'e re both
teaching at the uni\'e rsity, so
\\'e
lived well enough: still, when I was
thirteen my pocket money for th e wee k would have bought me a bar
and a half of chocol a te. I don' t think I knew a nybody my age who
had a radio of his own, never mind ta pe reco rders."
Nor has enrichment been just material. With the passing of heroic
isola tionism have gone its hysterically simplified images of the world,
and the school curriculull1 as much as the scope of what the young
can read a nd hear and see has enormously widened. "What do you
envy them most?" I asked the thirty-three-yea r-old Bulga rian poet about
the boys who no\\' brought their poems to him for an opinion. "Their
greater knowledge," he said. "Their much wider horizons." Knowledge
which, less enclosed by a rigid framework , has also been kept in motion
by doubt. "Do you think a n intelligent ma n should always be sure of
