408
PARTISAN REVIEW
Although Same's address was not published in the USSR, it was brought
to
Prague by artist and author Adolf Hoffmeister, a friend of Sanre's and a
member of the Czechoslovak delegation to the Peace and Disarmament
Congress . Its publication in Prague stirred interest in Kafka, which at first
manifested itself in a proposal for a meeting of Czechoslovak and Soviet
literary critics to deal with the Kafka question. Soon , however, the authors of
the original proposal-among whom Professor Goldstuecker was the most
prominent-raised their sights somewhat higher. They passed the word that a
conference was to be held and invited all Eastern European countries to send
representatives, then sat back
to
await the response. When there were no
objections from Moscow they proceeded
to
extend invitations to a number of
eminent Communist Marxists from the West . Among those who attended
were Garaudy, at the time a member of the politbureau of the French
Communist Party, Ernst Fischer, who was then on the Central Committee of
the Austrian Communist Party , and Roman Karst , the Polish critic and
German scholar who was at the time deputy editor-in-chief of the Warsaw
literary review
Tworczosc .
Moscow promised to send four or five participants,
but a few days before the conference started a telegram arrived saying that
only one person would be coming . In the end, he didn't come either.
Although the Liblice Conference aroused considerable international
interest, its initial repercussions in those countries with a censored press were
restricted
to
just a handful of the initiated. Thirty-four hundred copies
of the proceedings of the conference were published one year later and
official reaction in the press was limited to a few bland commentaries and facts
about who participated and about the closing reception. The overwhelming
majority of the fourteen million Czechs and Slovaks hadn 't even realized that
a conference had been held in their country about this writer who had been
born in Prague and written in German. Most of them had never even heard of
him . There seemed little hope of changing this.
But as often happens, help came from the least expected quarter. The
" comrades in the German Democratic Republic, " where, as we shall see ,
hostility
to
Kafka ran deep, had not said their last word . Alfred Kurella , who
was then chief of the ideological department of the East German Communist
Party , was infuriated by Prague's revisionism' 'in Sache Kafka. " He gave ven t
to his wrath in four pages of the East Berlin cultural weekly
Sonntag,
under a
headline paraphrasing Garaudy's article on the Liblice Conference in
Les
Lettres/ranfaises .
Garaudy and Fischer were the main targets of his attack . But
it was not until later that the connection between the absence of Soviet
representatives , the role of the East German delegation (which will be dis–
cussed later), and Kurella's proxy attack in
Sonntag
on two top West
European Communists became apparent . In 1970 Kurella was an official
l
