A .J . LIEHM
409
delegate of the East German Communist Party at the French Communist
Party Congress which expelled Garaudy.
But all that was still in the future. When Kurella's article originally
appeared,
Sonntag
had the advantage-or disadvantage-of being an ex–
ceedingly boring product of official journalism which nobody read, even in
East Germany. In contrast,
Literarni Noviny,
the weekly published by the
Czechoslovak Writers' Union, was an exceptionally good newspaper with a
circulation of 140,000 . It always sold out as soon as it reached the newsstands .
Kurella's article in
Sonntag
provided
Literarni Noviny
with a unique oppor–
tunity to tell its readers about what had really happened at Liblice and to make
Kafka 's rehabilitation in Eastern Europe not just a matter of literary interest,
but a political event as well.
Literarni Noviny
published a translation of the full text of Kurella's
article. At first the censors, who were too obtuse to realize what was going on,
were delighted ; they never expected such cooperation and understanding
from the editors of
LiterarniNoviny,
of all people . But readers in Prague were
shocked. Kurella's dogmatism and his vulgarized version of Marxism, not to
mention his language , were at that time already like a voice out of another
century. What was more, the article was published with a footnote inviting
rebuttals by those whom Kurella had attacked . Indeed, their replies were
already on the editor's desk .
Fischer, Garaudy, Pavel Reiman , a charter member of the Czechoslovak
Communist Party , and others involved "in Sache Kafka" not only told
Kurella what they thought of him, his article, and his methods, but also gave
their own views on literature, Marxism , socialism, alienation in a socialist
society, and so on. Their replies went out in the 140,000 copies of
Literarni
Noviny
and reached almost half a million Czechs and Slovaks out of a total
population of almost fourteen million .
The Czechs and Slovaks could hardly believe their eyes. Most of them
knew nothing about Kafka, or very little . But now, in a newspaper debate
which had started about an author who had evidently lived in the same kind of
society as they did , had had many of the same experiences, had found things
just as puzzling, and in general had felt the same way they did , truths were
suddenly being told which hadn't been uttered for the past twenty years.
Soon Kafka became the most popular author in the country where he had
been born . Thousands of these people had never even heard of
The Trial, The
Castle,
or
Metamorphosis,
but now, when they got together in their offices or
shops or in the streetcar and confronted man's alienation and the way they
were all being manipulated by society in their daily lives , they would cast up
their eyes and confide in a whisper to the first stranger they met, "This is just
like Kafka! "
