WRITERS IN EXILE
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there were only Am'erica and the Soviet Union, each with its
client states. But geographically, this kind of labeling is com–
pletely nonsense. Vienna is supposed to be a Western city, but
when we go from Prague (which is supposed to
be
an Eastern
city) to Vienna, we don't travel west, but rather two hundred
miles to the east. In Berlin, whether Berlin is East or West depends
on what street you happen to be standing. What is worse, it makes
no sense culturally. There is a clear distinction in the cultural
heritage of Europe between an Eastern and a Western tradition.
The core of the Western heritage is very much the idea of a
sovereign conscience-a conscience that is capable of rationality
and morality. The basis of what we call the cultural West is
precisely the conception of the human as a sovereign moral sub–
ject, and of the state simply as an administrative arrangement
designed to serve but not to be the bearer of value. In this sense we
can speak of Western Europe, certainly; but, in this sense,
Czechoslovakia also is very much a part of the historic West.
But there is also an idea of Eastern Europe as the heir of
Byzantium. What developed there was the sense of a state-church,
or church-state-indivisible.
It
provided the basis for an ide–
ological state-the state that is the bearer of conscience and the
bearer of value-and of the citizen as someone whose task is
to conform.
In this sense, you can speak of an East and a West, but then
the labels are really not so much geographic as cultural. And you
can argue that in the traditionally European West, whenever the
West becomes fearful, whenever it is seized by the vertigo of
freedom-by the really frightening isolation of individualism-it
is a very great temptation to draw on the security of what the old
imperial Russian government used to call "autocracy and true
faith." After WorId War II we in Czechoslovakia were pro–
foundly shaken by our encounter with German National Soc–
ialism. We wanted security, and there was a genuine Communist
movement. The first client regimes responded just as much to our
own longing for security as to the reality of the Soviet army. But
we found our human face again. The West-Germany, Hungary,
Poland, Czechoslovakia-has recovered its Western conscience.
But the reality of Soviet power is such that the facade of
the ideological state remains, though now it is only a facade;
