ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
569
ZH:
My intellectual ally, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, has analyzed
this phenomenon . He helped me to understand this Western pesti–
lence, unlike those pompous muddleheads who made the whole mess
and now walk in the glory of martyrdom. The martyrs of their own
mistake? Perhaps they should rather go to the desert and do peni–
tence. That is what I would do. I would keep silent-at least for
some time.
JT:
Was a better alternative possible for those years? We are allowed
to speculate about history because we are not historians. I am sure
you will defend the idea that man is always free to choose. Otherwise
what we are saying here would have no sense.
ZH:
One could translate the classics, opera librettos, one could write
for the drawer .
JT:
And yet it did not happen. Why? You have told me what was
decisive for you, why you could not act in any other way. But those
who could and did? I think that some of them would be able to sum–
mon their courage if they were more mature . But that implies a dif–
ferent moral dimension because meanness is in us. It is there.
It
waits.
ZH:
All it took was a gesture. In times of terror every moral gesture
is a risk - that's obvious - but it is also surprisingly funny. As if a
knight in armor walked on stage in a contemporary play . A comic ef–
fect. Even today, when we agree that one should declare oneself on
the side of truth and freedom, it sounds somehow embarrassing. But
there was and is no other way. Freedom is always tragic. A free man
is lonely. He is like someone stricken with a deadly disease , like a
madman or an anchorite. As an alternative there was the collective
life on the "right" side of history. Yet it was an illusory and dubious
life full of intrigue, insidious maneuvers and personal compromises.
When you ask an eyewitness of those times , he'll shower you with
anecdotes, jokes, allusions, fragments of old courtly intrigues and
games. This conversation should have taken place in
1955
or
1956.
We are thirty years late. A nation that loses memory loses its con–
science. Crimes committed against society seem to be exempt from
punishment. The opportunity for a truthful analysis of the origins of
Polish literature was missed in
1955-1956.
I do not ask for any self–
criticism, only for common decency and a sober judgement. When I
visited Germany for the first time my publisher asked me where I
would like to go-to an opera, to a theater? No-I said-to the
Frankfurt trial.
It
was a trial of the henchmen from Auschwitz .
Well, I went and I left disgusted. I did not see even a touch of de–
monism . Here I agree with Hannah Arendt about the banality of
