Once, the Czech philosopher Karel Kosík had been a young Stalinist. Later he became a revisionist hoping for a more humane socialism. By 1975, as he neared the age of fifty, he found himself a dissident. One day the Czechoslovak secret police came to his apartment and confiscated some thousand pages of his manuscripts-in-progress, ‘On Praxis’ and ‘On Truth’. Kosík was distraught. He cared less about what happened to him, and more about what happened to the manuscripts – he had only one copy. At a loss as to what to do, Kosík wrote to Jean-Paul Sartre. In those days, Milan Kundera explained, that was an intellectual's last resort: he could write to Sartre. And when Sartre died a few years later, there was no longer anyone to whom one could send such a letter.Footnote ¹

The then seventy-year-old French philosopher was the closest thing Kosík and his circle had to God. Sartre, for his part, had taken a special interest in the history of communism as it was playing itself out in Europe's more easterly parts. On one occasion he told Kosík's colleague, the Czech editor Antonín Liehm, that ‘human history should be rewritten from the point of view of generations’.Footnote ² Afterwards Liehm came more and more to believe that this was true. Between 1966 and 1968, while in his early forties, Liehm conducted extended interviews with a good number of his friends and colleagues, including Karel Kosík. Liehm's intention was to collect the stories of his own generation – those, he explained, who had been so enthusiastically engagé in the post-war Stalinist years and who, twenty years hence, had made such great efforts to negate the effects of their own prior engagement. The resulting collection of rozhovory (literally ‘conversations’, that special east-central European genre mixing history, literature, and [auto]biography) with Czech and Slovak writers, is entitled Generace. In his introduction, Liehm notes that in Czech ‘generace’ is both singular and plural: it means both ‘a generation’ and ‘generations’.Footnote ³

In fact members of at least three different chronological generations appear in the book. The ambiguity of the title, though, is not only chronological. For Liehm the plurality within generace is both diachronic and synchronic: the same formative experiences can produce different responses. This reflects the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim's formulation: for Mannheim, contemporaneity is a necessary but insufficient criterion of generational membership. His notion of generation is rather one of individuals ‘similarly located’, endowed with ‘a common location in the historical process’. Assuming a generational identity is an active process: it involves encountering ‘afresh’ an accumulated cultural heritage, coalescing early impressions into a ‘natural view’ of the world through dialectical confrontations with new experiences. To belong to a generation is to take part in a common destiny; a given generation's ‘style’, its actualisation (or ‘entelechy’ in Mannheim's term) develops through this taking part.Footnote ⁴ At issue is not only age, but also milieu – and in east-central Europe, milieu means everything.

Prehistory

The history of communism has always been a generational history. Marxism, after all, was a spectre to come; from the outset, its precondition was a conception of time as irrepressibly forward-moving.Footnote ⁵ The old world was due to expire; one need not be sentimental. This was Enlightenment philosophy radicalised: Denis Diderot explicitly addressed his famous Encyclopédie to future generations, those ‘in those interests we have sacrificed ourselves, whom we esteem and whom we love, even though they have not yet been born’.Footnote ⁶ This sense of oneself as merely a stepping stone to the future (contested by Alexander Herzen, who insisted that ‘the end of each generation was itself’) was common to both the Bolshevik and French revolutions – as was the idea that it would be difficult to make the new world with people already formed by the old.Footnote ⁷ It was a problem for Robespierre that the French revolutionaries had ‘raised the temple of liberty with hands still withered by the irons of despotism’.Footnote ⁸ It was a problem, too, for Lenin. The new society had to be built with ‘old material’, Antonín Zápotocký of the Czechoslovak communist government announced in 1949. That is, Zápotocký cited Lenin, with ‘sinful people’.Footnote ⁹

The history of communism, in fact, was a generational history before it was communism.

Isaiah Berlin tells how it was only in the 1840s that French Enlightenment ideas began to reach Russia. By that time, French Enlightenment had already blended with German Romanticism – and the Russian intelligentsia, ‘an astonishingly impressionable society with an unheard-of capacity for absorbing ideas’, proved especially susceptible to the latter.Footnote ¹⁰ In particular, Russian intellectuals took to Hegel entirely too well. Hegel was not only Erfahrung, something to be learned, but also Erlebnis, something to be lived. ‘I even think’, Alexander Herzen, born in 1812, writes in his memoirs, ‘that a man who has not lived through Hegel's Phenomenology and Proudhon's Contradictions of a Political Economy, who has not passed through that furnace and been tempered by it, is not complete, not modern’.Footnote ¹¹ In Berlin's narrative, the fatal cultural transfer was not the arrival of Marxism, but rather that of Hegelianism.Footnote ¹² Only a few recovered. For Hegelianism, Berlin explained, was a ‘very dark wood . . . those who once enter it very seldom come back to tell us what it is that they have seen’.Footnote ¹³

For Herzen's generation, the teleology of liberalism was itself radical. Henceforth time moved quickly. The generation of Russian radicals who came afterwards was called by Herzen, rather unflatteringly, ‘the syphilis of [the] revolutionary passions’ of his own.Footnote ¹⁴ After the liberals came the radical democrat ‘enlighteners’, after the radical democrats came the populists and after the populists came the Marxists – a good three decades after the 1848 publication of The Communist Manifesto, barely noticed amidst Europe's Springtime of Nations. The Marxists shared with their populist predecessors the dilemma of consciousness. That is, it was all very well for the revolutionary intelligentsia – mostly young aristocrats who ‘converted’ to radicalism, ‘superfluous people’ (lishnie liudi) – to call for the people's liberation.Footnote ¹⁵ But what if ‘the people’ had not yet become so conscious of their own oppression? What if they (still) lacked a desire for liberation? Should a revolutionary wait for the masses? (If so, for how long?) Perhaps consciousness could somehow be reified – and then brought to the masses, as a gift. This made the Hungarian writer Anna Lesznai uncomfortable. ‘To awaken people's consciousness before their time’, Lesznai wrote, ‘is like trying to open the bud of a flower with one's fingers’.Footnote ¹⁶ Lenin disagreed. He was impatient; inexorable forward motion was not enough. He wanted acceleration.Footnote ¹⁷

Lenin was born in 1870. Anna Lesznai, together with her friends Karl Mannheim and Georg Lukács, were younger than Lenin by some fifteen to twenty-five years. The intellectuals of this generation, coming of age at the fin de siècle, were born of liberalism and absorbed by its crisis.Footnote ¹⁸ Liberalism, in eastern Europe, all the more so in Russia, was a latecomer. Post-liberalism, in contrast, proved quite precocious, and so was liberalism nearly over almost as soon as it arrived. The crisis was in part a psychological one: liberalism – with its positivist faith in reason, in progress, in science – revealed itself to be emotionally inadequate. A certain something was missing. Lukács and his friends were afflicted with a hypersensitivity to this absence; they suffered from alienation, and longed for wholeness. Mannheim believed that his generation had a particular historical mission; Béla Balázs agreed: theirs was a common fate.Footnote ¹⁹ Mary Gluck describes an ‘extreme estrangement from the world of their parents’.Footnote ²⁰ Beyond estrangement, there was also disgust: a loathing of the bourgeoisie and all that it stood for, a passionate rebellion against not only bourgeois liberalism, but also bourgeois morality – sexual and otherwise.Footnote ²¹ Their loathing of the bourgeois, moreover, was less Marxist than it was Rousseauean. For the young Lukács, exploitation of the proletariat was secondary to duplicity: the detested bourgeois was always false, never authentic.Footnote ²² Theirs was a revolt, among other things, against inauthenticity. Of the fathers of Lukács et al. Yuri Slezkine writes, ‘[F]ew generations of patriarchs were as good at raising patricides and gravediggers as first-generation Jewish liberals’.Footnote ²³ Miklós Sika concurred: this generation ‘actually killed the fathers’.Footnote ²⁴

The avant-gardists – futurists, Dadaists, surrealists – who embraced the revolution were just a few years younger than Lukács's circle of modernists. To the futurist linguist Roman Jakobson, born in 1896, it was noteworthy that his generation came of age so very early: ‘It was a very unusual epoch . . . when, for various reasons, the youth of the day suddenly became the lawgivers.’Footnote ²⁵ Jakobson and his friends took the absolutist impulse of Lukács's generation still further: they broke with representation. In its uncompromising iconoclasm, the avant-garde insisted on liberation from everything: religion, bourgeois morality, family ties, grammar, realism, the referentiality of language. The menage à trois (in the literal sense of the phrase) of Georg Lukács, his wife Ljena Grabenko and her musician lover in Heidelberg was followed by a still more intriguing one in Petersburg: Lilia Brik, her husband Osip Brik and the breathtakingly handsome futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.Footnote ²⁶ Their circle came to communism with the 1917 Revolution, and in the 1920s, when no one yet quite knew what communism was – or what it would be. They, too, hated the (nascent) bourgeoisie. ‘To be a bourgeois’, Mayakovsky wrote, ‘does not mean to own capital or squander gold. It means to be the heel of a corpse on the throat of the young.’Footnote ²⁷

In 1920 Jakobson left Lenin's Russia for Masaryk's Czechoslovakia. There he soon found himself inside a circle of Czechoslovak avant-gardists who loved Mayakovsky from afar. The avant-garde writers and artists who joined together in 1920 to form Devětsil were, like the Lukács circle, searching for wholeness. Yet unlike the young Lukács, the Devětsil intellectuals were self-proclaimed collectivists. Upon coming together in December 1920 they announced,

They rebelled against aestheticism and ‘art for art's sake’ in favour of dissolving the boundary between art and life. Like Mayakovsky, they gave their hearts to the Revolution.

For this generation life after futurism turned out quite badly. In spring 1930 Lilia and Osip Brik were abroad in Berlin when, on 14 April at 6.47 in the evening, the telegram arrived from Moscow: ‘this morning Volodia took his own life’.Footnote ²⁹ In a 1931 collective eulogy to Aleksandr Blok, Sergei Esenin, Nikolai Gumilyov, Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Jakobson wrote, ‘It's our generation that has suffered the loss . . . Those who, already fully formed, entered into the years of the Revolution not as unmolded clay, but still not hardened.’Footnote ³⁰ Jakobson continued: his generation, which had emerged at such a very young age, had lunged too impetuously into the future, losing a sense not only of the past, but also of the present. ‘We knew’, Jakobson wrote,

His generation – the generation Mayakovsky had declared to be ‘the face of our time’, the one for whom ‘the trumpet of time blows’ – would soon be past: ‘desolate, orphaned, and lost’.Footnote ³²

Those just slightly younger, like Czesław Miłosz, born in 1911, had a different experience. For Miłosz and his friends at the University of Wilno, ‘the Hegelian bite’ came with the catastrophism of the 1930s, with the threat of Nazism.Footnote ³³ Opting for communism was a different kind of choice in the 1930s, a different kind of choice after 1933. The coming to power of Nazism was a defining moment not only for young intellectuals who found themselves geographically placed between Germany and Russia. For the French philosopher Raymond Aron, the twilight of Weimar was ‘the central moral and political reference for the rest of his life’. Tony Judt invokes Aron to contextualise British historian Eric Hobsbawn's ‘enduring fidelity to a single historical moment – Berlin in the last months of the Weimar Republic’.Footnote ³⁴ Stephen Kotkin agrees: a large part of the answer to why Hobsbawn throughout his life remained a communist was ‘because he was there, in 1933 Berlin’.Footnote ³⁵

Communism in practice

In eastern Europe there was a clear difference between those who had opted for communism before the Second World War and those who had been too young. With the exception of those in Czechoslovakia, many who chose to become communists in the 1920s and 1930s spent part of their young adult years in prison. For the inter-war communists prison was a formative experience, often an ersatz university education.Footnote ³⁶ In contrast, the generation born in the 1920s – the generation of Milan Kundera, Karel Kosík and Antonín Liehm – came of age only during the Second World War.Footnote ³⁷ It was the young men and women of the wartime years, those who came to communism through the anti-Nazi resistance, who were the heroes of Andrzej Wajda's 1954 film The Generation (Pokolenie). It was they who concluded, as they watched their friends being killed, ‘it's worth fighting, it's worth living [warto bojować, warto żyć]’. For the Czechs among this cohort, the founding moment of their political consciousness came in September 1938 with Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler: ‘the betrayal at Munich’.Footnote ³⁸ Bourgeois democracy had sold out Czechoslovakia; seven years later, the Red Army liberated her. This generation of young communists came to communism during the war, through the war, when communism was already Stalinism – and Stalinism was coming to power in eastern Europe. Some came directly from Auschwitz: in the camps, Arnošt Lustig explained, the communists were the best people. Heda Margolius Kovály felt similarly. She and her husband both survived the Holocaust to return to Prague and join the Communist Party. It was in the Nazi camps that she came to so admire the communists:

Nothing could be more telling than how one acted during the war. ‘For the generation which had reached adulthood’, the writer Jaroslav Putík, in 1967, explained of himself and his contemporaries such as Kovály, ‘these years presented the decisive test. And for me these still remain the decisive criteria: what did you do during the war?’Footnote ⁴⁰ Liberal democracy had failed to protect against fascism. Stalin had defeated Hitler. The war had sliced time in two; in the new world to come, the betrayal at Munich, the Nazi occupation, the gas chambers would never be repeated. At the 1949 Writers’ Union congress, the Czechoslovak poet Ivan Skála bade a final farewell: ‘To the past: may God be with you [S bohem, minulosti].’Footnote ⁴¹

Nineteen fifty-two saw the show trial of Rudolf Slánský in Prague. Heda Margolius Kovály's husband, Rudolf Margolius, was one of those hanged. Just months later, Stalin died. After nearly three more years had passed, Nikita Khrushchev gave his ‘secret speech’ at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There had been, Khrushchev acknowledged, ‘excesses’. In April 1956 the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union held a conference. The writers, though, were not ready to apologise. The poet Stanislav Neumann stood up to speak: ‘My generation grew up with Stalin's name, and with his name, in 1944, as seventeen year-old boys, we came to the Party. My best friends went to their deaths in Terezín with this name.’ He insisted, ‘I am not ashamed.’Footnote ⁴²

With time, though, there would be shame. In 1963 the victims of the Stalinist show trials in Prague were rehabilitated. Posthumously. Quietly. At the Writers’ Congress held that year the twenty-five-year-old Jiří Gruša turned to his more senior colleagues: ‘What kind of people were you, actually,’ he asked, ‘and what kind of people are you?’Footnote ⁴³ (Pavel Kohout was defensive. ‘Is it so strange’, he answered, ‘that my generation, who only listened, believed in the purity of the judges and the sincerity of the confessions?’ Gruša, Kohout added, was too young to remember the First Republic, to remember the social inequities, the poverty, the fatal weakness that left the country vulnerable to Hitler.Footnote ⁴⁴)

Gruša was not the only one to ask the question. Certainly Antonín Liehm, one of those to whom the question was addressed, asked it of himself – and his contemporaries. ‘My own youth, my own “lyrical age” and poetic activity coincide with the worst period of the Stalinist era’, Milan Kundera told Liehm. In Kundera's opinion, no one of their generation could really be satisfied with himself.Footnote ⁴⁵ Liehm, too, remembered those years – which at the time had been very happy ones – with pain:

These were the questions Liehm pursued in the interviews collected in Generace. His was a generation of guilt. Josef Škvorecký, one of those of Liehm's age who had not opted for Stalin, nevertheless found himself in Liehm's milieu. When in the 1960s Škvorecký began to meet with students twenty years his junior, he ‘observed another strange thing: they had no guilt feelings at all’.Footnote ⁴⁷

For Liehm's generation there was atonement as well as guilt, and Putík pointed out that it was ‘part of the irony of fate that it was precisely the generation of the young Stalinists that became the de-Stalinising vanguard’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Putík was among them. So, too, in Poland, was the brilliant Marxist philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, born in 1927. At a University of Warsaw lecture in 1966, Kołakowski remembered fondly that rare feeling of national unity that had been in the air a decade earlier, when Khrushchev had acknowledged Stalin's ‘excesses’ and Władysław Gomułka had come to power. Since then all had been a disappointment. Law remained little more than an instrument of repression – and hence a source of demoralisation. Poland suffered not only from material poverty, low rates of housing construction and high rates of infant morality, but also from ‘spiritual pauperisation’. Party representatives were chosen by the principle of ‘negative selection’, according to which ‘fawning, cowardice, absence of initiative, [and] willingness to eavesdrop’ were qualifying factors.Footnote ⁴⁹

For this Kołakowski lost his Party card. He was not alone. In Czechoslovakia, writers and artists who were long-time Party members now demanded a more open socialism – and a more open confrontation with Stalinism. Generace reflected this. Yet the space for dialogue was soon dissolved. In 1967, following protests against Party censorship at the July Writers’ Union Congress, Liehm was among those expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The periodical he edited, Literární noviny (Literary news), was taken from him. That October Liehm sent a long letter to his friends Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, Parisian fellow-travellers older than Liehm by some three decades. Triolet, the sister of Lilia Brik and the wife of Aragon, had been Mayakovsky's close friend, and one of Jakobson's greatest loves.

Yet within a few months, in January 1968, it seemed that Liehm and his friends had triumphed: the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia changed course and embraced reform. Alexander Dubček, the new Party leader, promised ‘socialism with a human face [socialismus s lidskou tváří ]’. The Prague Spring of 1968 was a time of great hope, and the once-young Stalinists-turned-revisionist Marxists were effusive in their support. It was an exceptional moment. That spring in Prague, Kundera wrote, ‘things did not go according to the old formula of one group of people (a class, a nation) set against another, but instead people (a generation of men and women) rebelled against their own youth’.Footnote ⁵¹

On 10 August that year, Liehm sent a second letter to his friends in Paris who had seen the Bolshevik Revolution:

Ten days later Soviet tanks, uninvited, rolled into Prague. The Prague Spring was over for ever. That winter the Czech student Jan Palach went to Wenceslas Square and set himself on fire. His death by self-immolation was a protest – not against the invasion itself, but against his country's resignation. The following year the poet Stanislav Neumann, who had seen his best friends go to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps with Stalin's name on their lips, took his own life.Footnote ⁵³ He was forty-three years old. In his suicide note he wrote,

Throughout Europe this was a time of revolt. In November 1967, a Warsaw theatre director staged Adam Mickiewicz's play Dziady (Forefathers’ eve); students attended the performances in large numbers, some cheering at those parts protesting against the tyranny of the Russian tsar. In January 1968 Gomułka's communist government forced the play to close. Students protested. The Party responded with brutal repression – and purges of both the universities and its own ranks. Communist authorities claimed that the demonstrations were incited by Zionist conspirators. There followed a strange merger of the ideologies of the far right and the far left; the communist regime began to popularise the theory of a Nazi–Zionist conspiracy.Footnote ⁵⁵ In a March 1968 speech, Gomułka spoke about opening the borders in order that those who ‘regard Israel as their homeland’ could leave Poland.Footnote ⁵⁶ Some 13,000 people – mostly Polish Jews from the intelligentsia, many lifelong communists – emigrated from Poland.

It is impossible to know, Kovály reflected much later, what ‘socialism with a human face’ would have been. She believed, though, that had things turned out well under Dubček, many would have been able to reconcile themselves with the past.Footnote ⁵⁷ After the invasion, the chess player Luděk Pachman of Liehm's generation, once an impassioned Stalinist and later an impassioned proponent of the Prague Spring, was arrested and tortured. Following his release he emigrated to West Germany, where, in 1973, he wrote to a Czechoslovak émigré journalist: ‘perhaps sometime in historical perspective it will be shown that our defeat in 1968 was necessary and useful’.Footnote ⁵⁸

In 1968 Marxism as belief was decoupled from communism as practice. The arrival of Soviet tanks in Prague meant, paradoxically, an end of European Marxism. It also meant the coming-of-age of a new generation: those born in the post-war years. The two suicides that followed the Soviet invasion of Prague – those of Jan Palach and Stanislav Neumann – reveal one way in which 1968 was a special moment: it was an encounter between the generation born in the 1920s and the generation born in the 1940s – between former young Stalinists and their now grown children, between those who had made choices during the war, and those who had been born only afterwards. For the first group 1968 was the end; they were largely broken by disillusionment. For the second group 1968 was the beginning; they experienced the formative moment of their consciousness. Ryszarda Zachiariasz was part of this younger group. The daughter of a committed Stalinist who had spent years in inter-war Polish prison, she grew up addressing everyone, excepting those most intimate, as ‘comrade’. ‘Rewolucja’ – ‘revolution’ – was the first adult word she learned.Footnote ⁵⁹ Her contemporary Henry Dasko was also the son of a devoted Stalinist; he, too, grew up in post-war Warsaw. Dasko was born after the war, yet for him the war never ended. It was what his parents spoke of every day, it was the game he played with his childhood friends:

Opposition

Dasko, then a student, was arrested in 1968. So were Adam Michnik and Jan Gross. When Gross was released after five months in prison, his mother insisted that the family leave Poland.Footnote ⁶¹ Dasko emigrated as well. Just as the history of communism is a generational history, so, too, is the history of opposition to communism: Michnik, together with other children of Stalinists from his generation, was part of a rather spectacular Oedipal rebellion collectively enacted. For a post-liberal generation of gravediggers had in its turn raised a new generation of patricides.Footnote ⁶²

The zeitgeist had changed. What was already true when Kołakowski gave his 1966 speech at the University of Warsaw became still truer in the years following 1968: the generation of true believers had passed. Rule by opportunists was a post-Stalinist malaise. Now the dominant metaphor became that of the naked emperor – or, still more poignantly, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor who has only one secret: he does not believe in God. The dissident philosopher Ladislav Hejdanek held that, in comparison with Stalinism, the two decades of so-called ‘normalisation’ (normalizace) that followed 1968 were ‘morally much worse’.Footnote ⁶³ Other dissidents agreed. Sincerity of ideology ‘definitely existed in the first generation . . . but nothing of it in the next’, said Jan Urban.Footnote ⁶⁴ Miroslav Kusý joined the opposition even while remaining a believer; he was the Marxist, while his younger interrogators were ‘pragmatic people’; they belonged to a ‘second generation [that] was agnostic with no ideals’. One of them had graduated from the law faculty. Why, Kusý asked him, had he joined the secret police? And his interrogator obligingly explained: it was a thousand-crown difference in salary.Footnote ⁶⁵

These were the years that Jiří Gruša's contemporary, the playwright Václav Havel, called ‘post-totalitarian’. Belief and praxis had parted ways. Marxism was dead – ‘really-existing socialism’ (reálný socialismus) lived on. These were the years Louis Aragon described as ‘a Biafra of the spirit’; they were years of living ‘as if’.Footnote ⁶⁶ No one any longer believed in communism – and no one, including those in power, any longer believed that anyone believed in communism. It was enough, though, that all pretended. In ‘The Power of the Powerless’, Havel sketched the paradigm of the seemingly innocent greengrocer, the ordinary man who every morning in his shop window hung the sign ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ The greengrocer did not believe this message, nonetheless he obliged the regime by hanging the sign. Such a gesture was profoundly in the greengrocer's self-interest: it enabled him to live in peace. If one day he buried his sign beneath a carton of rotten tomatoes, he would face harassment, eventually arrest. That the greengrocer would be persecuted suggested that the hanging of the sign – seemingly meaningless because no one any longer believed in what the sign said – was in fact extremely important to the regime. It so appeared that the greengrocer, seemingly insignificant, nevertheless had the potential to threaten the regime with an action as small as neglecting to display a certain sign in his shop window. If one day all the greengrocers refused to hang their signs, this would be the voice of the child who says what everyone sees and knows: that the emperor is naked. And this would be the beginning of a revolution. Thus in fact the greengrocer was not so powerless after all. Because he was powerful, he was also responsible – and therefore guilty: for it was the greengrocers who allowed the game to go on in the first place.Footnote ⁶⁷ ‘Thus’, Havel writes,

Stalinism and ‘post-totalitarianism’ were morally corrupting in very different ways. Jan Urban understood that the greengrocers were in the majority, and that he and his dissident friends were living in a ghetto. Most people in communist Czechoslovakia, Urban believed, were happy – or at least content, in some way comfortable. ‘It's very difficult to quarrel with or explain something to people who don't believe in anything’, he said, adding, ‘Of course the regime was oppressive, of course it was built on humiliation and violation of human rights. But [many people] didn't mind.’Footnote ⁶⁹

Among intellectuals, though, the death of authentic faith in any kind of Marxism left a palpable void. There was nostalgia for the Habsburg empire, whose failure, Kundera wrote, ‘has been the misfortune of the whole of Europe’.Footnote ⁷⁰ A discourse of ‘central Europe’, human rights and truth moved into the space left by Marxism. Accompanying this allegedly ‘anti-political’ discourse was at times Catholicism, phenomenology and existentialism, in various combinations. In ‘The Power of the Powerless’ – perhaps the most important piece of writing published in eastern Europe during the last two decades of communism – Havel insisted that ‘[i]f the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.’Footnote ⁷¹ The moral imperative to ‘live in truth’ was a Heideggerean variation: it was to resist the pull of das-Man-selbst – the conformist self, the ‘they-self’ – in favour of opting for the anguished but noble Eigentlichkeit, authenticity.Footnote ⁷²

‘The Power of the Powerless’ was dedicated to Jan Patočka. Nineteen seventy-seven was the year of the great Czech phenomenologist's seventieth birthday. It was also the year of his death, during brutal police interrogation. The funeral of Heidegger's former student became a founding moment for the opposition. For the dissident intellectuals, Patočka was more than a good and wise father – he was Socrates, whose legacy they would honour. And they did. The dissidents embraced a non-violent ‘anti-politics’, explained the philosopher Bohumír Janat of Adam Michnik's generation, because ‘violence was a tool used by cowards who refused to carry their own existential burden’.Footnote ⁷³ When Havel's letters from prison to his wife Olga were published, Janet Malcolm commented somewhat snidely – although not unjustly – that ‘portions of them read more like papers for a Heidegger colloquium than like letters to a spouse’.Footnote ⁷⁴

1989

In 1989 it was not without some sadness that Miroslav Kusý understood that it was too late for socialism with a human face. The generations of believers had passed, and the next revolution would not be about any kind of socialism at all. Throughout the long decades of the 1970s and 1980s, there were many people who believed that ‘it’ – communism – would one day come to an end. There were very few, however, who believed that it would come to an end in their lifetime. Zdeněk Novák, a lawyer in a provincial west Bohemian town, said, ‘I didn't believe that I would live to see it. Time seemed to have stopped here.’Footnote ⁷⁵ ‘We thought that communism was forever’, said the Czech political theorist Pavel Barša. This was true despite those in Czechoslovakia who believed in the magical quality of years ending in ‘8’ – 1918, 1938, 1948, 1968 – and who were waiting – contra spem spero – for what the next would bring.Footnote ⁷⁶

In the late 1980s Miloš Vajda was a mediocre physics student in Bratislava who began a film club at Comenius University. American films were generally banned, as were films from the Czech New Wave of the 1960s. But Vajda was amiable and gregarious; he befriended the head of the film archive and in this way managed to show some censored films such as the adaptations of Kundera's novel The Joke and James Simon Kunen's The Strawberry Statement. When in autumn 1989 demonstrations began in Prague, the Party still controlled the newspapers. Vajda, though, had friends in Prague who brought news in person; and computer-savvy students at the technical faculty bypassed censorship by communicating with Prague via proto-e-mail connections. Soon Vajda found himself, as if inadvertently, in the middle of the revolution. In Bratislava he organised student meetings and was among those who presented a proposal to parliament demanding that the Communist Party relinquish its leading role in the state. The parliament conceded. ‘This was very funny’, Vajda recalled, ‘because we didn't expect this.’Footnote ⁷⁷

Jan Urban, of a different generation and a different milieu, nonetheless understood that moment similarly: ‘It's not that we won – it's that they collapsed. And we just had to step in, because there was no one else around.’ It was all improvisation, ‘just total chaos, but great fun’.Footnote ⁷⁸ No one knew, though, what would come next. ‘I mean’, Urban explained, ‘we knew what we didn't want. But that was obvious, everybody knew it. The only difference is that we said it.’ ‘None of us’, he said nearly four years after the Velvet Revolution, ‘remembered any occasion from the old days when we talked about the future . . . We didn't have any project, we didn't have any future of our own. We were only reacting to the stupidity of the regime. So there were no expectations. And it was our great mistake – intellectually, at least.’Footnote ⁷⁹ His counterparts in Poland agreed. When questioned in the early 1990s, former Solidarity activist Wiktor Kulerski, born in 1935, said, ‘I never thought about the future. I didn't want to think about it. That's how I psychically positioned myself. For I was convinced that my generation, and perhaps the ones that followed, would live out their lives under communism.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Inexorable movement towards the end of History had become a futureless eternity.

After the revolution(s)

The revolutions of 1989 brought not only changes in government, but also changes in space: the border to ‘the East’ now shifted eastwards. The revolutions, brought, too, changes in time. In the Stalinist years billboards in Czechoslovakia proclaimed ‘with the Soviet Union for time eternal! [Se Sovětským Svazem na věčné časy!]’ Cyclical time had come to an end with the onset of modernity; soon linear time would come to an end as well: the Hegelian telos was drawing near. Paradise was to be for eternity. Yet in contradiction to all official pronouncements, under ‘really existing socialism’ time seemed barely to move. Even in an economy of scarcity, time was available in excess.Footnote ⁸¹ Then, in 1989, time suddenly sped up. Exponentially. Much as the Russian intelligentsia of Bakunin's generation leapfrogged from French Enlightenment to German Romanticism, so the generations of 1989 leapfrogged from telegrams to cellular phones. In an extraordinary case of private wealth employed for social engineering, George Soros, within a few short years, almost singlehandedly created a young anglophone intelligentsia committed to both Western-style liberalism and a European identity.

Jolanta Mickute, a member of the new anglophone intelligentsia whose young adult years coincided with this leapfrogging, describes herself as belonging to the ‘transitional’ or ‘bridging generation’, ‘with one leg in the Soviet world of our parents . . . and the other in the new orbit of mobile phones, high-speed internet and a set of confusing and crystallising values . . . That is why, without much effort, I understand completely both the Soviet and post-Soviet generations, whilst belonging to neither of them.’ For Anna Muller, Mickute's contemporary in Poland, this understanding of the old world makes her feel closer to those in their forties, some dozen years her senior, than to those in their twenties, just several years younger. Mickute understands her generation as possessing a comparative perspective at once exciting and painful. She saw that those just several years older – who were already completing their studies, or who already had begun to establish careers that were suddenly rendered superfluous – did not emerge from the changes as unscathed as herself. ‘Iskalechnye sud'boi’, she writes, ‘that's how my friends call them.’ Broken by fate.Footnote ⁸²

Whether one was about to enter or about to complete university at the moment communism ended mattered very much. ‘My generation won the lottery’, said the poet Kacper Bartczak in Łódź, born in 1972. In a somewhat ironic coincidence, the dramatic upward (and downward) mobility of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s was revisited. Bartczak's classmates, entering university in the wake of 1989, studied economics, English and German. They found well-paying jobs in multinational businesses – while their parents often remained in small apartments in communist high-rises, struggling to meet a soaring rise in cost of living, increasingly dependent on their children.

Libor Valečka grew up in a village in western Bohemia, not far from the West German border. As an adolescent he was sent to a vocational school, where he was trained to work with machinery. He was eighteen when the revolution came; it freed him from an officially assigned job. Instead he parlayed his charm into a relatively well-paying position at an insurance company. Before the revolution he was unconcerned with politics; he had been a teenager: there was first love, there were sports. After the revolution he was only slightly less unconcerned with politics. (The relative absence of interest in revolutions and politics was not unusual. A seventeen-year-old girl living not far from Valečka explained matter-of-factly in autumn of 1994, ‘There was no revolution in our town. Everything happened in Prague.’Footnote ⁸³) He did appreciate, though, that money had now become very important – and that because of this, relations among people had changed. Once, he explained, no one had had very much money, but everyone had had some. Now some people had a lot of money, and some had almost none. ‘My parents’, he said, ‘don't understand why this is so . . . For me, it's not a problem.’ On the contrary, he preferred it this way.Footnote ⁸⁴

The revolutions had their winners and losers; and the 1990s saw abrupt socio-economic stratification.Footnote ⁸⁵ To be elderly, sick or handicapped was to have lost. Suddenly prices were many times higher than they had been, and pensions worth almost nothing. For those who had worked their entire lives under the communist regime, and who had expected to be taken care of in their old age, the revolution was at best unfortunate, at worst a betrayal. The social contract had been broken. For many of those born before the Second World War, the revolution came too late. For some it would have been better had it not come at all.

Instead, power shifted into the hands of those who were young and flexible enough to start over when all the rules changed. When an exclusive Western cosmetics company opened a store in Prague, the management deliberately hired shop assistants with no prior experience. They wanted employees untouched by the communist regime's antisocial attitude towards retail. Job advertisements for businesses, shops and restaurants in Prague specifically asked for young applicants – and sometimes for attractive ones as well.

Miloš Vajda never became a physicist. In July 1992 he did, though, successfully run for parliament on the ticket of Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (Hnutie Za Democratické Slovensko), a populist party led by a demagogue named Vladimir Mečiar. In January 1993 there was a ‘velvet divorce’: Czechoslovakia ceased to exist, and Vajda – who had little political experience but was handsome and cheerful – became newly independent Slovakia's representative to the Council of Europe. In the years that followed the volatile Mečiar was in and out of power, and Vajda lost his seat in parliament. Subsequently he made enough money as a businessman to retire to the countryside around the age of forty.

To be young and unencumbered in the 1990s was to be able to travel, to study abroad, to learn Western languages, to train for a career in a multinational firm. It was to have failed to internalise limitations, to be unburdened by the old rules that could only be disadvantageous in the new world. It was to be undefensively European, to feel that ‘Europe’ belonged equally to oneself. ‘I have this feeling’, Anna Muller writes, ‘that twenty-five-year-olds perceive Europe as part of their horizon, as their own, as a self-evident element in their lives. For those in our thirties, it's still more a diversion and a kind of ornament in our lives than it is something self-evident.’Footnote ⁸⁶ In fact the 1990s revealed that the opposite of communism was not capitalism, but rather ‘Europe’.Footnote ⁸⁷

Pandora's box

Jan Urban believed that the dissidents who had been schooled by pushing against the ancien régime failed miserably once in power: ‘The moment when the dissidents stepped out from their unreal world and through the few miraculous weeks of the Velvet Revolution entered the real world of the normality of political and public life, they were lost. Their old instincts did not work.’Footnote ⁸⁸ In a sense they were already spoiled, already passé. Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, separates people into two kinds: those for whom life is heavy, and those for whom life is light. To have been formed by communism was to have an internal sense of life's heaviness. It was to have an internal sense as well of the limitedness of possibilities. In contrast there are the younger ones, the ones unformed by communism, who feel less fear and more openness, less insecurity and more entitlement. This is the generation in whom Václav Havel placed his hope.Footnote ⁸⁹ Like the French revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks who came before him, Havel, too, was sceptical as to whether the temple of liberty could be raised by hands withered by the irons of despotism. In Auschwitz, Arnošt Lustig watched the smoke that had once been his father drift out of the crematorium's chimney.Footnote ⁹⁰ Of his own generation Lustig said, ‘No one who survived the war is normal. It is impossible.’Footnote ⁹¹ For Havel, this was in some sense true of those who survived communism as well. He believed that they needed to wait for the next generation to come of age. All the others, himself as well, were permanently scarred.

The new post-communist generation, Havel's great hope, possessed the virtue of openness. Openness, however, proved a double-edged sword: as eastern Europe opened to the West, it also opened to itself. As it opened towards the future, it also opened towards the past. The turn was both outwards and inwards – with the latter being the far more wrenching. If the former was the opening of a treasure chest, the latter was the opening of Pandora's box – inside which was everything from pornography to Hannah Arendt. It was a time of revealing secrets; the hell of both the Second World War and Stalinism were revisited. Havel's public apology for the so-called ‘divoký odsun’ – the ‘wild transfer’, a euphemism for the post-war violent expulsion of ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland – turned many Czechs against him. Lustration saw lists of collaborators made public, and thus men and women learned that their best friends – perhaps their children, their parents, their husbands or wives – had been informing on them. It was a time of opening archives, a time of voyeurism. Excerpts from Franz Kafka's love letters to Milena Jesenská were used to decorate a tourist café.Footnote ⁹²

When the communists came to power after the war, the centre-left politician and women's activist Milada Horáková was arrested. Stalinist interrogators tortured her; eventually she broke – and gave a false confession of conspiracy on behalf of Western imperialism. In the few days between the conclusion of her show trial and her hanging in June 1950, she wrote letters to her family – to her mother-in-law, her father, her daughter, her husband. The letters were never delivered to those to whom they were addressed – but nor were they destroyed. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, historians dug the letters out of the archives, and so in 1990 Horáková's last words to those whom she most loved were published in Prague.Footnote ⁹³

In Warsaw in the 1990s, belated monuments were erected to the victims of Soviet deportation, to the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising, to Shmuel Zygielbojm, Bundist representative in the Polish government-in-exile. Zygielbojm, on learning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, committed suicide in protest against the Allies’ passivity as Polish Jewry perished. In 1992 Russian president Boris Yeltsin turned over to Polish President Lech Wałęsa Soviet documents revealing the truth about the 1940 massacre of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyń woods: the Soviets had done it. The documents were published the same year.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the years that followed, Andrzej Wajda at long last made the film he had wanted to make for decades about Katyń. In one of the film's post-war scenes a young woman who has accepted communist rule tells her sister, who has not, ‘There will be no free Poland. Not in our lifetime, not in the lifetimes of our children.’ By the time Wajda's Katyń opened in 2007, few belonging to the generation of those sisters – the generation old enough to remember the war – were still living. He wanted, Wajda said, to make the film for young people, for young Poles, so that they would know what it means to be ‘a society, and not just an accidental crowd’.Footnote ⁹⁵

When Solidarity won the first free elections in Poland, Bogna Pawlisz was soon to enter university. She described communism as a ‘frozen time’. The ideologies and emotions she encountered as a student in the 1990s, she believed, were the same ones that had been frozen some half-century earlier, ‘as if that time hadn't been, as if there hadn't been those fifty years’.Footnote ⁹⁶ It was the return of the repressed. The post-revolutionary decade saw the reign of robber-baron capitalism – a wild free market, full of corruption and free of accountability. Flooding across the now-defunct Iron Curtain was all the best and worst of the West – and of the East as well. During normalisation, the Czech Catholic philosopher Václav Benda had spoken of a ‘parallel polis’ where one could live in truth.Footnote ⁹⁷ Now a new parallel polis formed in Prague: thousands of English-speaking foreigners, mostly twenty-something Americans, at once pretentious and sincere. Self-consciously they tried to recreate Paris's Left Bank of the 1920s: they were all writing novels. They opened English bookstores, vegetarian cafés and American-style laundromats, published English-language newspapers and organised poetry readings.Footnote ⁹⁸ A certain kind of innocence was part of eastern Europe's attraction – but that remained only for a moment. In the 1990s pick-pocketing, prostitution and sundry violent street crimes were on the rise. As Polish teenagers and Mafia-style gangsters in Adidas tracksuits murdered one another with newly imported baseball bats, a billboard campaign presented a picture of a baseball bat and the rhyming slogan ‘Służy do grania, nie do zabijania [this is for playing, not for killing]’ – as if the killings had been simply a misunderstanding.

This was the time in the Czech Republic when telephone cards, matchboxes and plastic bags at supermarkets came decorated with pornographic pictures. In 1995, a Prague billboard advertisement for Sony stereos featured a half-naked woman and the slogan ‘Muži chtějí ženy, které poslouchají . . .’. The advertisement – ‘Men want women who listen . . .’ (ostensibly to Sony stereos) – was a play on words: in Czech the word ‘listen’ is the same as the word ‘obey’. This was also the time when the seventy-year-old Arnošt Lustig – the Holocaust survivor, famous novelist who was among the heroes of the 1967 Writers’ Union Congress, and one-time young communist-turned-post-1968 émigré – became the editor of the new Czech Playboy.

If pornography was crossing borders, though, so was feminism, and these were years of impassioned discussions among feminist activists and first-generation gender studies scholars about how much feminist consciousness should be imported from the West, and how much should be developed at home.Footnote ⁹⁹ In 1994 Erica Jong's feminist classic of the 1970s, the audaciously sexually explicit Fear of Flying, appeared for the first time in Czech translation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In January 1995, a Czech literary newspaper published an interview with Jong's Czech translator, Eva Věšínová. Jong's protagonist Isadora's escape into fantasies of the ‘zipless fuck’, Věšínová explained, came from the feeling that she was not able to take the whole of her life – not only her sexual life – into her own hands. For Isadora, to ‘fly’ was to act purely from her own will. Among the many critical reviews Věšínová had noticed only one that grasped the novel's essence – and this was the one published in Playboy. Yet the letters Věšínová received from ordinary readers had been very positive. There were Czech women who appreciated what she had done for them.Footnote ¹⁰¹

At the new Prague Gender Studies Centre, scholars began an oral history project, ‘Pamět’ zen’ (the Memory of Women), about women's lives under communism. Some interviews included grandmothers, mothers and daughters from the same family. The topic of domestic violence gradually entered the public realm.Footnote ¹⁰² Young punk anarchist feminists, who were still children in 1989, began in 2000 to publish a journal with the English title Bloody Mary and the slogan ‘only a dead fish flows with the stream’.Footnote ¹⁰³

Inside Pandora's box was not only the gender question, but also the Jewish question – both part of an emerging, post-communist identity politics that included both feminism and anti-feminism, philosemitism and antisemitism. East European Jewish culture experienced a revival, and it was not only Jews who were enthusiastic participants. A week-long Jewish cultural festival, drawing hundreds of foreign visitors every year, became a highlight of the Krakowian summer. Jewish studies programmes opened at universities. Synagogues were renovated and new museums opened. Yiddish literature was published and republished in Slavic translations. At the very same time Radio Maryja, a Toruń-based radio station founded in 1991, propagates an ultra-nationalist, arch-conservative and antisemitic Catholicism that has earned even the Vatican's explicit disapproval.

In 1998 Poland's eminent literary scholar Michał Głowinski published The Black Seasons (Czarne sezony), a beautifully (and gently) written, evocative memoir about his wartime childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It was a received as a ‘coming out of the closet’ book of a prominent Polish intellectual – coming out of the closet as a Polish Jew. Together with the antisemitism that emerged in the 1990s – the antisemitism, Pawlisz was convinced, that had been ‘frozen’ with the onset of communism – were angst-laden struggles of identity among Poles of (as some learned only after 1989) ‘Jewish origin’. In 1997, one of the very first issues of a new Polish–Jewish magazine called Midrasz included a half-page advertisement for a ‘confidential hotline’. ‘Do you have Jewish roots?’ the advertisement read, ‘Is it a problem? Or a secret?’ Perhaps the reader had been afraid to tell friends or colleagues? Children? A husband or wife? The organisers of the hotline guaranteed discretion. It was not a joke.

Coming out of the closet in post-communist Poland could be particularly painful. For the Jews remaining in Poland – after some 90 percent of over 3 million were killed in the Holocaust; after trauma, isolation and antisemitism motivated waves of post-war emigration among the survivors – were hardly a representative sample of the pre-war Jewish population. On the contrary, the Jews remaining in Poland after 1989 were by and large the children and grandchildren of devoted communists. The parents of the twenty-something circle of young Jews such as Bogna Pawlisz had been members of the opposition; often they had cast their lot with Solidarity – in rebellion against, and perhaps atonement for, the choices made by their own parents, who had been among the builders of Polish communism.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In the 1980s the grandchildren of these communists ‘of Jewish origin’ had not infrequently been baptised: for their parents, it was a sign of moral freedom. Yet after 1989 these young people not infrequently spoke of their baptisms as of a rape, as an unforgivable violation. (‘Had I lived in a free country’, Pawlisz said, ‘there would have been no baptism. I would have been a religious Jew. Two years later, in 1984, when I was twelve years old, I would have had a Bat Mitvah. And this is a problem. This is what I resent.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶) They revolted against it: some became Orthodox Jews, some Yiddishists, some Hebraists, some Bundists, some Zionists. Sometimes they went to Israel to join the army, sometimes they went to yeshiva in Jerusalem or New York. Sometimes they came back to Poland – and sometimes they did not. Their debates among themselves – the Zionists, the Bundists, the acculturationists – were impassioned; and a remarkable phenomenon of the post-communist years was a certain kind of de-assimilation and re-creation: the re-creation of the ideological battles within the Jewish community of the 1930s among the handful of Polish Jews in their twenties.

In 1968 Jan Gross had been among the students imprisoned in Warsaw. Thirty-two years later, now a historian long living in the United States, Gross published in Polish a small book entitled Sąsiedzi (Neighbours), telling the story of the 1941 German-inspired but Polish-enacted massacre of Jews in the small town of Jedwabne. What followed was by far the most wrenching – and most substantive – debate about the Holocaust in post-communist Europe.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ One of Gross's fiercest attackers among right-wing Polish apologists was the historian Marek Jan Chodakiewicz. Born in 1962, Chodakiewicz was not only too young to remember the 1930s and the Second World War, but also too young to remember 1968 – and yet, following an elite post-communist education at Columbia University, he reached back and made the language of the Polish far right of the 1930s his own. Surely this means something.

‘We know ourselves [only] in so far as we have been tested’

When it did happen, it happened very quickly. The generational question of 1989 has been largely understood as a debate about authorship: how did 1989 come about? Who made the revolutions? Was it the ‘konkretny’ activists of the Orange Alternative (Pomaranczowa Alternatywa) in Poland or the older oppositionists of Solidarity?Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Was it the university students in Prague and Bratislava or the older dissidents clustered around Civic Forum (Občanské fórum) and Public Against Violence (Verejnosť proti násiliu)? Whose revolutions were they?Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As was Prague in 1968, so, too, was eastern Europe in 1989 made by a confluence of at least two generations.

Historians are at a certain disadvantage when it comes to causality: there is no control study that can be done on real life. Perhaps, in any case, the more interesting aspect of 1989 as a generational revolution is how important one's age in 1989 became in the years that followed. At moments of great historical change, generational cleavages emerge within very short spans of time: whether one was ten or fifteen or twenty in 1939, 1948 and 1968 made an enormous difference – likewise it made an enormous difference whether one was ten or fifteen or twenty in 1989. A few years suddenly mattered very much.Footnote ¹¹⁰

In a verse published in 1957, Poland's Nobel laureate poet Wisława Szymborska wrote, ‘tyle wiemy o sobie, na ile nas sprawdzono [we know ourselves [only] in so far as we have been tested]’.Footnote ¹¹¹ The most poignant generational question brought about by 1989 is not who has the right to claim authorship of the revolution, but rather who was old enough to be held responsible for the choices they made under the communist regime. There remains a division between those who have to account for their actions, and those who do not, between those who proved themselves opportunists, or cowards or heroes – and those who had no chance to do so. The Polish lustration law that was to take effect in March 2007 (before it was overturned by the Constitutional Tribunal at the eleventh hour) exempted all those born before 1 August 1972 – conjuring up a specific day as a mark of generational divide. The youngest generation had clean hands; they had no memories of suffering, of moral compromise, of a closed world – but also no experience of heroism, resistance, martyrdom. Not infrequently they maintain a self-confidence and presumptuousness: they would not have made compromises; they would not have broken. This is, perhaps, just one more way in which the history of communism – paradoxically enough – could be told as a Freudian history: a history of collective Oedipal revolt, each generation of sons in its succession.

‘Yet it's turned out’, in 1983 Solidarity activist Teresa Torańska told the then elderly Julia Minc, whose husband had been one of a triumvirate of Stalinist leaders in post-war Poland, ‘that almost none of the children of old communists belong to the Party, and the majority of them have emigrated to the West’. It was a family romance not devoid of regret – and much resentment. ‘Well and now I'm twenty-five and only now am I learning to be happy’, Pawlisz said in 1997. She explained,

Still, Pawlisz added, life was much better for her than for her parents. And so it was. Nineteen eighty-nine was a generational revolution not (or not only) because young people helped to make it, but rather because it became one of those historical moments at which time separated, and the age one was in 1989 became determinate. The generational separations that have followed are perhaps less political than they are psychological – or existential: there are those who are conscious of being ‘from the east’, and perhaps not quite good enough for the West, those who do not hold conversations too close to thin walls, who have an internal sense of the limitedness of possibilities, and those who are free of certain complexes; there are those who cry during Goodbye, Lenin, and those who do not. Marxism, once it was no longer a spectre to come, remained for those who lived it just as haunting a spectre from the past. Presentism is a luxury of the post-communist generation.

Today a generation is growing up with no memory at all of communism. Jiří Ratinger was born in 1991; his younger sister, Marie Ratingerová, was born in 1993. They are multilingual, cosmopolitan teenagers from Prague who have gone to school in England and Spain and travelled in the United States. The distinction between eastern and western Europe is not something they reject – rather they are not aware that such a distinction exists at all. Jiří, sixteen, has an idea that under communism, ‘everything belonged to the state – that's the main thing’, and that ‘it sounds good, but it was proven not so good’. The phrases ‘intensification of the class struggle’ and ‘socialism with a human face’ have no meaning. Jiří and Marie have an idea that in 1968 tanks arrived, but are not certain from where. They know that Jan Palach was someone who set himself on fire, but are unsure why, and that Charter 77 was something some people signed, but are unsure what it said.

In February 2008 a New York Times columnist asked a seventeen-year-old student Ricardo Westendorf in East Berlin about communism. ‘Communism? What's that? I think we talked about it in a history lesson, but I was ill.’ His classmate Pia von Cossart said that their parents failed to realise that their stories about the old days were boring. Westendorf was more obliging: he promised to look up communism in Wikipedia.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Postscript

‘Someday’, said Heda Margolius Kovály in 1997, ‘I'd like to see a public discussion come into being here about those people who truly to the depths of their souls believed that communism was a new opportunity for humanity, who were willing to renounce everything that was theirs alone for a better future for everyone. Today it's only with difficulty that we can conjure up such people in our minds.’ Now was not yet the time, she acknowledged. But someday.Footnote ¹¹⁵