This June, our country held its first free elections in
many long decades. Demanding days of putting together a new coalition
government followed. On July 5, a freely elected Parliament reelected
me president of Czechoslovakia, and shortly thereafter approved
the new Cabinet. These events marked the culmination of one of
the most dramatic periods of our modern history: the shattering
of the totalitarian system. It was a time of excitement, swift
decision, and countless improvisations; an utterly thrilling,
even adventurous time. It was a little like a mildly bewildering,
but essentially wonderful, dream. It was, in a way, a fairy tale.
There were so many things that could have gone wrong. We were
traveling on totally unknown terrain, and none of us had any reason
to believe that it wouldn't collapse under our feet.
It didn't, though. And now the time has come when there
is indeed reason to rejoice. The revolution, with all its perils,
is behind us, and the prospect of building a democratic state,
in peace, is before us. Could there be a happier moment in the
life of a land that has suffered so long under totalitarianism?
And yet precisely as that splendid historical moment dawned,
a peculiar thing happened to me: When I arrived at work for the
first time after my election, I found I was depressed. I was in
some sort of profoundly subdued state. I felt strangely paralyzed,
empty inside. I suddenly seemed to have lost all my ideas and
goals, my skills, hope, and resolve. I felt deflated, spent, lacking
in imagination. Even though just a few days earlier I had been
terribly busy, I suddenly had no idea what I was supposed to be
doing.
The pressure of exhilarating events, which until then
had aroused in me a surprising level of energy, abruptly vanished,
and I found myself standing bewildered, lacking the inner motivation
for anything at all, feeling exhausted, almost irrelevant. It
was an extremely odd sensation, comparable to a bad hangover after
some wild binge, to awakening from a pleasant dream to the ugly
reality of cold daylight, to the shock of a man in love discovering
his sweetheart's treachery.
I wasn't the only one with these strange feelings; many
of my colleagues at Prague Castle felt the very same way. We realized
that the poetry was over and the prose was beginning; that the
county fair had ended and everyday reality was back. It was only
then that we realized how challenging, and in many ways unrewarding,
was the work that lay ahead of us, how heavy a burden we had shouldered.
It was as if up to that moment the wild torrent of events had
not allowed us to step back and consider whether we were up to
the tasks we had undertaken. We had simply been tossed into the
current and forced to swim.
It seemed to us that only now could we begin to appreciate
fully the weight of the destiny we had chosen. That realization
brought with it a sudden, and under the circumstances seemingly
illogical and groundless, sense of hopelessness.
Somewhere in the depths of this feeling lay fear: fear
that we had taken on too much, fear that we wouldn't be up to
the job, fear of our own inadequacy; in short, fear of our very
selves.
At the very deepest core of this feeling there was, ultimately,
a sensation of the absurd: what Sisyphus might have felt if one
fine day his boulder stopped, rested on the hilltop, and failed
to roll back down. It was the sensation of a Sisyphus mentally
unprepared for the possibility that his efforts might succeed,
a Sisyphus whose life had lost its old purpose and hadn't yet
developed a new one.
About a year ago, when I was asked to launch this august
festival with a brief lecture, I never considered that I might
be able to attend in person. Still, I was pleased to accept the
offer and planned to submit my contribution in writing. During
the tranquil Christmas season I would calmly compose a little
essay on the theme of fear and the sense of danger in Central
European literature. But history got in my way, robbing me of
both time and concentration. So I decided to complete the task
after the elections; in fact, I was truly looking forward to it,
because it would allow me to enjoy a brief return to my original
profession as a writer and because I planned to use the occasion
as a dividing mark between the first, revolutionary, stage of
my political commitment and the second stage, a calmer one, which
involved building up rather than tearing down.
I did, in fact, find the time to write. But the time I
found was the period of my peculiar political hangover. First
history got in my way; now I was getting in my own way: I was
simply unable to write anything; I was depleted, paralyzed, powerless.
What a paradox: I had wanted to write about fear, and
here it was fear that was incapacitating me in my writing. Fear
of my subject matter, fear of the act of writing itself, fear
of my own inadequacy, fear of myself.
All I could do about this paradox was try to approach
the topic paradoxically: by describing the situation that led
to my inability to approach it. There is nothing new in that.
In fact, part of why most writers write is to divert their despair
into their work and thus overcome it. Perhaps this explains why
I am talking so much about myself here. It isn't out of any complacent
egocentrism but because, simply, I have no other options.
No inventory of the various characteristics specific to
Central European culture and literature would be complete without
one particularly important one: an increased perception of danger,
a heightened sensitivity to the phenomenon of fear. It makes perfect
sense. In a place where history has always been so intricately
tangled, in a place with such complex cultural, ethnic, social,
and political structures, in a place that saw the origins of the
most varied of European catastrophes, fear and danger are the
very dimensions of human experience that must be felt and analyzed
most intensely.
The heterogeneity of Central Europe explains clearly enough,
I think, the two characteristic poles of its life and thus of
its literature as well. On the one hand history is miniaturized;
it becomes idyll, anecdote, an almost folkloric cult of locality.
On the other hand, there are obsessive and often quite terrifying
prescient fears of the dangers presented by the so-called great
movements of history. A jovial neighbourliness typical of this
region has its inevitable counterpart, deriving precisely from
this heightened fear of history, in varieties of fanaticism and
nationalism. At the same time, the nations and ethnic groups
living under this constant sensation of threat seek to defend
themselves by national or nationalistic self-affirmation. Ethnic
groups that could never develop politically in freedom wage a
constant struggle to affirm their identity, and one of the ways
they do this is by dwelling on their own differences and being
hypersensitive to the danger they feel from the differences of
others.
I believe that even the kind of fear I experienced is
typical of the Central European spiritual and intellectual world,
or at least is understandable against its background. Certainly
it would be hard to imagine that in England, France, or the United
States a person could be depressed by his political victory. In
Central Europe, on the other hand, it seems perfectly natural.
For that matter, the experience of the hangoverlike void
is certainly not unique to me, nor is that odd sense of fear.
I have observed variations of that fear and emptiness quite often,
not only in Czechoslovakia but also in the other countries of
Central and Eastern Europe that have shaken off totalitarianism.
It was with a great deal of effort that people in these
lands attained the freedom they yearned for. The moment they gained
that freedom, however, it was as if they had been ambushed by
it. Unaccustomed to freedom, they now, suddenly, don't know what
to do with it; they are afraid of it; they don't know what to
fill it with. Their Sisyphean struggle for freedom has left a
vacuum; life seems to have lost its purpose.
Similarly, in this part of the world we observe symptoms
of a new fear of the future. Unlike totalitarian times, when the
future, though wretched, was certain, today it is very unclear.
The single (if ubiquitous) familiar danger represented by totalitarian
oppression seems to have been replaced by an entire spectrum of
new and unfamiliar or longforgotten dangers: from the danger
of national conflicts to the danger of losing socialwelfare protection
to the danger of the new totalitarianism of consumption, commerce,
and money.
We were very good at being persecuted and at losing. That
may be why we are so flustered by our victories and so disconcerted
that no one is persecuting us. Now and then I even encounter indications
of nostalgia for the time when life flowed between banks that,
true, were very narrow, but that were unchanging and apparent
to everyone. Today we don't know where the banks lie and are slightly
shocked by it.
We are like prisoners who have grown used to their prisons
and, suddenly given their longed-for freedom, do not know what
to do with it, and are made desperate by the constant need to
think for themselves.
I repeat that the existential situation I illustrated
for you from my own experience, and which I have also observed
in various forms in my fellow citizens, is, in my opinion, a particularly
Central European one. Our literature contains innumerable examples
of it in our not-too-distant past, in the atmosphere following
both World War I and World War II.
In short, it seems that fate has ordained that we, more
frequently than others, and often in unexpected situations, shall
be afraid.
For us, fear of history is not just fear of the future
but also fear of the past. I would even say that these two fears
are conditional, one on the other: A person who is afraid of what
is yet to come is generally also reluctant to look in the face
of what has been. And a person afraid to look at his own past
must fear what is to come.
All too often in this part of the world, fear of one lie
gives birth to another lie, in the foolish hope that by protecting
ourselves from the first lie we will be protected from lies in
general. But a lie can never protect us from a lie. Just as in
Czechoslovakia, nothing protected us from the Stalinist lie about
the socialist paradise on earth, we will not be protected by the
lie about Hitler's racist allies as alleged inheritors of an ancient
princely throne. Those who falsify history do not protect the
freedom of a nation but rather constitute a threat to it.
The idea that a person can rewrite his autobiography is
one of the traditional selfdeceptions of Central Europe. Trying
to do that means hurting oneself and one's fellow countrymen.
When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
One way or another, many of us are guilty. But we cannot
be forgiven, nor can there be peace in our souls, until we at
least confess our guilt.
Confession is liberating. I know how it once liberated
me when I found the strength to admit my own mistake. I have many
reasons for believing that truth purges one from fear. Many of
us who, in recent years, strove to speak the truth in spite of
everything were able to maintain an inner perspective, a willingness
to endure, a sense of proportion, an ability to understand and
forgive others, and a light heart only because we were speaking
the truth. Otherwise, we might have perished from despair.
Our specific Central European fear has led to many a misfortune.
It could be shown that in it lies the primal origin of not only
countless local conflicts but also some global ones. Here, the
fear that possesses petty souls has often led to violence, brutality,
and fanatical hatred.
But fear is not only a destructive condition. Fear of
our own incompetence can evoke new competency; fear of God or
of our own conscience can evoke courage; fear of defeat can make
us prevail. Fear of freedom can be the very thing that will ultimately
teach us to create a freedom of real value. And fear of the future
could be exactly what we need to bring about a better future.
The more sensitive a person is to all the dangers that
threaten him, the better able he is to defend against them. For
that matter, I have always thought that feeling empty and losing
touch with the meaning of life are in essence only a challenge
to seek new things to fill one's life, a new meaning for one's
existence and one's work. Isn't it the moment of most profound
doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness
is the very soil that nourished human hope; perhaps one could
never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.
In spite of having spoken in such an un-statesmanlike
manner about my moments of hopelessness, I will conclude on a
constructive note, that is, with an appeal to all of us, Central
Europeans. Let us endeavor to confront our traditional fears by
systematically eliminating every possible reason we might have
for harboring them. Let us try, quickly and together, to build
the kind system of mutual political, cultural, and economic ties
that will gradually, once and for all, eliminate all the potencial
dangers that lurk in our common future. Only thus will we eliminate
the reasons for our potential fears.
Let us finally endeavor, in this sorely tried place, to
get rid of not only our fear of lies but also of our fear of truth.
Let us finally take a direct, calm, and unwavering look into our
own countenances: our past, our present, and our future. We will
only be able to escape their ambiguity when we understand them.
Let us try to delve into the core of our doubts, our fears,
and our despair to come up with the seeds of a new European selfconfidence
the selfconfidence of those who are not afraid of looking beyond
the horizon of their personal and community interests, beyond
the horizon of this moment.