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PAlUISAN REVIEW
Communism claimed a humanist vision of progress, came to power
by revolution, and was maintained in power by force. As the contrast
between the ideal and the real sharpened, and as the prohibition to re–
veal and discuss this contrast increased the terror and the economic
bankruptcy, the Communist society developed a pathology of ambiguity
in which apathy, hypocrisy, and duplicity became the ground rules of as–
similation - that is, alienation. The centripetal Communist system did
not solve, as it had promised, the old contradictions, but supplemented
them with new ones. The question of the stranger in a society that es–
tranges everyone from it - while forcing everyone to assimilate their own
alienation - takes cover under dubious and sinister masks . Today's na–
tionalist and extremist explosions in the former Communist states can
surprise only those who have not directly experienced the atomization of
a society in which the indoctrination of duplicity began in the cradle.
Bertold Brecht considered exile "the best school of dialectics." In–
deed, the exile, the refugee, becomes a stranger as a result of change. By
his very existence, the stranger is always forced to think about change.
In Berlin, during my first year in the West, I pondered daily the
question of estrangement. I thought not only about the internal exile
from which I had just escaped, but also about the concept of exile itself.
I felt that, once again, history had spurned my aspirations and was forc–
ing me into an adventure I had not desired . During my entire postwar
life I had searched, thanks to reading and writing, for an inner resistance
against often unbearable external pressure.
It is hard to believe that in a tota litarian society the "I" could sur–
vive, and yet interiority was a mode of resistance, however unavoidably
imperfect. It acted as a center for our moral being, as a means of separa–
tion from the corrupting aggressiveness of the environment; as a hope,
however uncertain, for the integrity of conscience. The "I" persists, even
in the totalitarian environment where external pressures are always dan–
gerous - perhaps especially there, the site of struggle between the cen–
tripetal necessity to preserve a secret, codified identity and the centrifugal
tendency towards liberation.
During my agonizing Berlin transition, I was overwhelmed by
doubts and questions from the past. And precisely because it happened in
Berlin, I also had to confront my ethnicity, as I had already confronted
the invective "alien" in my own country. Thus I already had a redundant
foreknowledge of my new predicament. And precisely because the need
for a homeland is more acute in those whose belonging is questioned,
losing it also pains them more . On the threshold of a momentous deci–
sion, facing a new and possibly final dislocation, I had to ask myself once
more who I was.
