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monuments, galleries and museums," he told me at the outset, "and we do not
expect to regulate culture but to nurture it. Our most immediate problems
derive from the pressure of our new market system - which frightens even
our artists. We have to fight against this fear, quietly, even though no one
knows exactly how to proceed. For instance, the City of Prague needed
space for business, for German or American or French firms to open offices,
etcetera, so a law was passed to have artists vacate their studios and move
them to the outskirts of the city. Now some of them demonstrate and write
letters." Minister Uhde's own discomfort at the situation was palpable. He
understands why his constituents are disappointed in the revolution, that they
need rooms, that some fear they cannot work in unfurniliar surroundings and
are correct in estimating that the inefficient building industry will not be able
to provide them with new studios for ten years. "We also need theaters,"
continued Mr. Uhde. "In the past every accepted company was subsidized by
the government or by one of its agencies, and was entitled to its own
premises, to put on plays of its own, to have a steady repertory. Now that
we have freedom, our audience wants interesting plays only, and directors
and dramaturgists have to find good ones; actors may no longer be signed up
for unlimited contracts; and they wonder whether it would be more advan–
tageous to belong to local or national companies. All of this exacerbates their
fears, particularly in older people. Thus they say that functionaries lack taste,
don't know what art is, what a play is."
Minister Uhde is in a particular dilemma because the theater people are
his friends, and he would like to help them all but doesn't have the funds. His
own plays, banned for twenty years, are now being performed, as are those
by other former dissidents - not because they now are in charge but because
the plays are appealing. "The main obstacle arises from the fact that people
are not accustomed to taking risks," says Uhde, who considers it his job to
remind his colleagues that "such a situation is better than the totalitarian one
where we were under constant threat." Taking risks, it seems, is a demo–
cratic right no one appreciates. In answer to my questions about the dangers
ofconsumerism and of the levelling of taste, Minister Uhde responded that he
could only guess at it, because currently there is a hunger for the best of
Czech literature that so far has been banned - Kundera, Skvorecky, Seifert,
Capek, Kafka. ''The present situation where, for instance, Roman Vasulik's
book,
Daydreams,
will have a print run of 150,000 is extraordinary," he
went on, "but in the future we may well have to deal with the dangers of
consumerism."
In the meantime, Minister Uhde trusts Prime Minister Dr. Petr Pithard
to guide the economy and to receive outside help through loans and invest–
ments. He is afraid only "of the moral side of the problems, of the exhaustion
of people who for forty-two years have lived under the pressure of a totali–
tarian regime and who may give in to naive notions, who may lack the nec-
