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PARTISAN REVIEW
around fifty-three, like Havel. Oslzly, who founded a new theater company,
now negotiates with unions and
all
sorts of other organizations. He addresses
some of the same issues as Minister Uhde. In answer to my question about
the possible dangers of nepotism, he stated that the struggle against it - an
"ethical imperative" - is bound to be won, because different offices represent
local and national entities, so that it is possible to go against a minister as
easily as against anyone else. "By holding on to the many alternative levels
ofculture, to the unique experiences of the people in this government, to their
past experiences, we are militating against corruption ," he went on.
"Moreover, they
all
expect to go back to the theater, to writing, and to give
up governing. This too is reassuring."
All along, I was struck by the sincerity and the intelligence of my in–
terlocutors, and by their eagerness to hear about the rest of the world. They
all
had been deprived of their passports and of their drivers' licenses, Uhde
after 1970, the others after 1977. To be able to take a trip , to see even
other Soviet-dominated countries, had been impossible, and this appears to
add yet another dimension to their current pleasure at liberation. (Oslzly has
had some contact with a number of experimental theater groups in the
United States.)
The forced isolation also explains the low level of awareness of practi–
cal matters mixed in with an inordinate amount of political savvy in the best
sense. "In our theater politics are central because the struggle always was
against totalitarian and for democratic ideas. We always were politicians, and
will continue to be politicians, whether we write on environmental issues or
discuss conceptions of cultural life," Oslzly asserted. "The position of Czech,
Jewish, and German intellectuals must be recreated in Central Europe in or–
der to create the character of Central Europe," he went on, "but this cannot
be an immediate project because we lost our memory and this memory is still
a mystery."
In different ways, Huckova, Oslzly and Uhde stated that anti-Semitism
is still alive, though no more than during the Hapsburg Empire. "Now it is
part of a large and nonvisible problem of racism which includes Gypsies,
Vietnamese, Blacks, and Poles. Anti-Semitism was strong under the
communists, when even a play about the children of Theresienstadt was
banned and everything referring to Jewish tradition was forbidden." Oslzly
thought that intellectuals were hungry for Jewish culture, and noted that
Prague had very few Jews. (Actually, Czechoslovakia had 70,000 Jews
before the Holocaust and now has 4,000 - many of whom for the first time
want to learn about the religion they were not allowed to practice after
1948.) Under the circumstances, I was struck by the brochure I bought
when visiting the Jewish Cemetery and the Jewish Museum, a few steps
from my hotel in the center of town. I read that "the State Jewish Museum in
Prague was founded on the basis of a decree issued by the government of
