Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

our century, by this standard, Bezukhov would have been indicted for both his love and his hatred of Napoleon. And also for his drunk-ennness, since, being absolute, the trial concerns private life as well as public; Brod condemned K. to death for seeing in women only the 'lowest sexuality'; I recall the 1951 political trials in Prague; biographies of the accused were distributed in enormous printings; that was the first time I read a piece of pornography: the account of an orgy during which the naked body of a female defendant was coated with chocolate (at that peak of shortages!) and licked by the tongues of other defendants, soon to be hanged; at the start of the gradual collapse of the Communist ideology, the trial of Karl Marx (a trial that has lately culminated in the razing of his statues in Russia and elsewhere) opened with an attack on his private life (the first anti-Marx book I ever read: the account of his sexual relations with his housemaid); in The Joke, three other students are trying Ludvik over a sentence he has written his girlfriend; defending himself, he says he dashed it off in haste, without thinking; they answer: 'you could only have written what was inside you'; because everything the defendant says, murmurs, thinks, everything he has hidden inside him is to be put at the tribunal's disposal.

The trial is absolute as well in that it does not keep within the limits of the defendant's life; thus K.s uncle says: 'Do you want to lose this trial?… It means that you will be absolutely ruined. And all your relatives along with you.' The guilt of one Jew contains within it that of the Jews of all times; the Communist doctrine on the influence of class origin includes within the offense of the accused the offense of his parents and grandparents; in the trial of Europe for the crime of colonialism, Sartre accused not the colonists but Europe, all of Europe, the Europe of all times; because 'there is a colonist in each of us,' because 'being a man here means being an accomplice since we have all profited from colonial exploitation.' The spirit of the trial recognizes no statute of limitations; the distant past is as alive as today's event; and even in death you will not escape: there are informers in the cemetery.

The trial's memory is colossal, but it is a very specific memory, which could be defined as the forgetting of everything not a crime. The trial thus reduces the defendant's biography to criminography; Victor Farias (whose Heidegger and Nazism is a classic example of criminography) locates the roots of the philosopher's Nazism in his early youth, without the least concern for locating the roots of his genius; to punish someone accused of ideological deviations, Communist tribunals would put all his work on the index (thus, for instance, the ban on Lukacs and Sartre in Communist countries covered even their pro-Communist writings). 'Why are our streets still named for Picasso, Aragon, Eluard, Sartre?' a Paris paper asked in a 1991 post-Communist intoxication; it's tempting to answer: because of the value of their works! But in his trial against Europe, Sartre said exactly what values mean now: 'our cherished values are losing their wings; looked at closely, every one of them is blood-stained'; values stained are values no longer; the spirit of the trial is the reduction of everything to morality; it is absolute nihilism in regard to craft, art, works.

Even before the intruders come in to arrest him, K. sees the old woman in the house across the way gazing at him 'with totally unusual curiosity'; thus, from the beginning, the ancient chorus of concierges enters the game; in The Castle, Amalia is neither accused nor convicted, but it is widely known that the invisible tribunal dislikes her, and that is enough to keep all the villagers away from her; because if the tribunal imposes a trial-regime on a country, the entire population is dragooned into the grand machinations of the trial, increasing its efficacy a hundredfold; every single person knows that he could be accused at any moment, and he ponders his self-criticism in advance; self-criticism: the subjection of the accused to the accuser; the renunciation of his self; a way of nullifying himself as an individual; after the Communist revolution of 1948, the daughter of a wealthy Czech family felt guilty about her undeserved privileges as a child of affluence; to show her repentance, she became so fervent a Communist that she publicly repudiated her father; now, after the disappearance of Communism, she is again undergoing judgment and again feeling guilty; ground between the millstones of two trials, of two self-criticisms, all she has behind her is the desert of a repudiated life; even though in the meantime all the houses once confiscated from her (repudiated) father have been returned to her, today she is merely a nullified creature; doubly nullified; self-nullified.

For a trial is initiated not to render justice but to annihilate the defendant; as Brod said: he who does not love anyone, who only dallies, must die; thus K. is stabbed in the heart; Bukharin is hanged. Even when the trial is of dead people, the point is to kill them off a second time: by burning their books; by removing their names from the schoolbooks; by demolishing their monuments; by rechristening the streets that bore their names.

The Trial Against the Century

For nearly seventy years Europe lived under a trial-regime. From among the great artists of the century, how many defendants… I shall mention only those who had some significance for me. Starting in the twenties, there were those hounded by the tribunal of revolutionary morality: Bunin, Andreyev, Meyerhold, Pilnyak, Veprik (a Jewish-Russian musician, a forgotten martyr of modern art; he dared to defend Shostakovich's opera against Stalin's condemnation; they stuck him in a camp; I remember his piano compositions, which my father liked to play), Mandelstam, Halas (the poet who was adored by Ludvik in The Joke., hounded after his death for gloominess seen as counterrevolutionary). Then there were the quarry of the Nazi tribunal: Broch (he gazes at me, pipe in mouth, from a photo on my worktable), Schoenberg, Werfel, Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Musil, Vancura (the Czech writer I love most), Bruno Schulz. The totalitarian empires and their bloody trials have disappeared, but the spirit of the trial lingers as a legacy, and that is what is now settling scores. Thus the trial strikes at: those accused of pro-Nazi sympathies: Hamsun, Heidegger (all Czech dissident thought, Patocka most notably, is indebted to him), Richard Strauss, Gottfried Benn, von Doderer, Drieu la Rochelle, Celine (in 1992, a half century after the war, an indignant official refused to designate his house a historical monument); supporters of Mussolini: Malaparte, Marinetti, Ezra Pound (the American military kept him, like an animal, in a cage for months under the blazing Italian sun; in his Reykjavik studio, the painter

Kristjan Davidsson showed me a large photo of him: 'For fifty years it has gone with me everywhere I go'); the Munich appeasers: Giono, Alain, Morand, Montherlant, St.-John Perse (a member of the French delegation to the Munich conference, he was closely involved in the humiliation of my native country); then, the Communists and their sympathizers: Maya-kovsky (who today remembers his love poetry and his amazing metaphors?), Gorky, Shaw, Brecht (who is thereby undergoing his second trial), Eluard (that exterminating angel who used to decorate his signature with a drawing of crossed swords), Picasso, Leger, Aragon (how can I forget that he offered me his hand at a difficult time in my life?), Nezval (his self-portrait in oils is on the wall by my bookshelves), Sartre. Some of these people are undergoing a double trial, first accused of betraying the revolution, then accused for services they had rendered it earlier: Gide (in the old Communist countries, the symbol of all evil), Shostakovich (to atone for his difficult music, he manufactured rubbish for the regime's needs; he maintained that for the history of art a worthless thing is null and void; he didn't know that for the tribunal it is the worthlessness itself that counts), Breton, Malraux (accused yesterday of having betrayed revolutionary ideals, accusable tomorrow of having held them), Tibor Dery (some works of this Communist writer, who was imprisoned after the Budapest massacre, were for me the first great literary, nonpropagandistic reply to Stalinism). The most exquisite flower of the century, the modern art of the twenties and thirties, was even triply accused: first by the Nazi tribunal as Entartete Kunst, 'degenerate art'; then by the Communist tribunal as 'elitist formalism alien to the people'; and finally by the triumphant capitalist tribunal as art steeped in revolutionary illusions.

How is it possible that the Soviet Russian chauvinist, the maker of versified propaganda, he whom Stalin himself called 'the greatest poet of our epoch'-how is it possible that Mayakovsky is nevertheless a tremendous poet, one of the greatest? Given her capacity for enthusiasm, her emotional tears that blur her view of the outside world, wasn't lyric poetry-that untouchable goddess-doomed one fateful day to become the beautifier of atrocities, their 'warmhearted maidservant' (Baudelaire)? These are the questions that fascinated me when, some twenty- five years ago, I wrote Life Is Elsewhere, the novel in which Jaromil, a poet under twenty years old, becomes the elated servant of the Stalinist regime. I was aghast when critics, although praising my book, saw my hero as a fake poet, a bastard even. In my view, Jaromil is an authentic poet, an innocent soul;