A.J. LIEHM
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ever they may seem many years after and
in
another context) when there were
constant reminders that while the Cold War may have ended, a "relentless
ideological struggle" would still go on. Sartre told the Congress:
Our guilt is great. We have all these many sins on our conscience because
we are living at a time when culture is used as a weapon .... Take Kafka
for example. This brilliant author wasJewish. He was tortured by the fate
of the Jewish community in Prague during the Hapsburg reign and
during the early years of the bourgeois Czechoslovak Republic. Gnawed
by family conflicts and religious disagreements , the testimony he left us is
all the more universal because it is so deeply individual. But what have
our critics done? From the way they have described his books , one would
think they were hoping they would explode in the hands of Russian
readers. They started insisting that bureaucracy is an inevitable sin of
soc ialism-as though this weren ' t one of the vices of every industrialized
society . Then they identified Kafka as an author who derided and
exposed bureaucrats. After such an introduction, all they needed to do
was to ship him off to the Russians, in hopes that now everybody would
recognize their own country when they 'd read
The Tnal.
It wouldn 't
have mattered so much if this deliberately aggressive attitude had not
called forth a defensive response which, no matter how understandable
in itself, was belligerent :-Well, if these books are supposed to offend
us , then we needn't translate them! The result) Almost half a century has
passed since
The Tnal
was written and many people in a country which
stands in the forefront of social, scientific, and technical progress have
never even heard of Kafka. Thus, a double injustice has been committed
against this author. In the West he is distorted and misconstrued and in
the East he is passed over in silence.
Echoing Sartre, Professor Eduard Goldstuecker, head of the German
department at Charles University and later chairman of the Czechoslovak
Union of Writers, points out that after World War II "the official cultural
position of the socialist countries was a sharp rejection of Kafka as a decadent
antirationalist, as a divisive force out of place in a society intent on building
socialism." As a result, Goldstuecker goes on
to
say:
From 1948
to
1957 , nothing written by or about Kafka was published [in
Czechoslovakia]. except for some indirect assaults in pamphlet form . It
was only after the Twentieth Congress that sporadic articles started
appearing, and even then there was the feeling that these represented
something forbidden or at best barely tolerated. Sartre's statements at
the Moscow Peace Congress of 1962, in which he called for the demilitari–
zation of culture, had an important effect on further developments .
Kafka was the very case in point he cited.
In short, Kafka had
become a central point in the battle for breaking down the isolation
ca used by years of Stalinism and the Cold War.
