Czechoslovakia 1968
Grass, Günter
(2) Czechoslovakia 1968 This Address was delivered on September 8, 1968, in Basel, Switzerland, and published in Die Zeit, October 4, 1968. ADIES AND GENTLEMEN: This is not a protest...
...And should this last refuge become untenable, there is always the looking glass: Narcissus always manages to survive...
...We ought to be just a little proud of the fact that in the parliamentary democracies the unions have managed to maintain their independ ence of the state...
...And: To what extent do we share the responsibility for the failure of democratic socialism...
...The polite but secretly disappointed reaction of the Czechoslovakian students to the West German visitors is summed up in the words of a young historian from Charles University in Prague: "They don't know anything, but they know it all...
...2) Czechoslovakia 1968 This Address was delivered on September 8, 1968, in Basel, Switzerland, and published in Die Zeit, October 4, 1968...
...The injustice remains and the protest dies down...
...Today its former spokesmen are trying, in resignation, to blend with the landscape...
...With little success...
...But though the brutality of international power politics is the same everywhere, the Western New Left saw little or no reason to take notice of the New Left in Czechoslovakia, let alone support it...
...Today we know that when basic industry was expropriated in the People's Republics it did not become the property of the people but was handed over to a new owner—the state...
...I see no reason whatsoever to embellish the disaster of the West European Left with fronds of hope...
...It pursued different and often contrary aims...
...ADIES AND GENTLEMEN: This is not a protest meeting...
...Will the occupation of Czechoslovakia have a sobering effect on the revolutionaries in the exquisite salons of Rome, in the Berlin Republican Club, and in the Paris Latin Quarter...
...I am more concerned with the missed opportunities of the European Left, or at least that part of it which regards itself as radical or revolutionary...
...Nor the arrogance: "Those people lack revolutionary perspective...
...First of all, it is incumbent on the Socialist and Social Democratic parties of Western Europe to give content to the thus far empty concept of coexistence by putting forward a program for co-ordinated aid that will put an end to the power-political competition between East and West...
...All mention of a serious, carefully thought-out movement —even then impeded by unavoidable compromises and today interrupted by power politicSwas drowned out by rhythmic stamping and in lieu of arguments by loud cries of "Ho Chi Minh...
...Measured against the demands of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the Prague attempt at reform was held to be meager and unattractive...
...But state capitalism is not an alternative to private capitalism...
...For more than a year, ever since the writers Vaculik, Klima, Havel, Kundera, Kohout, and Liehm made their accusing speeches against the neo-Stalinist regime of Antonin Novotny, then still in power, and drafting plans for the future, the revolutionary Western European Left and the growing student protest movement have had ample opportunity to appreciate the daring efforts of the TWO BY GUNTER GRASS Czechs and Slovaks and to identify themselves with their cause...
...The Cuban and Chinese conceptions and experiences are ignored or rejected en bloc...
...If today we ask ourselves whether we can help Czechoslovakia, we should, I believe, dispense with gratuitous gestures of sympathy, and take up the challenge of democratic socialism...
...The genocide in Biafra, for which all—and I mean all—social systems bear their share of responsibility, is the most terrifying consequence of East-West power politics: English and Soviet, Swiss and Czechoslovakian, Portuguese and French arms are competing on African soil—an inhuman expression of what might still cynically be called "aid to underdeveloped countries...
...They attacked...
...At last we have understood the lesson of Prague...
...The police-state mentalities of the East and West have developed a negative but harmonious coexistence that is well illustrated by the police actions in Berlin and Paris and the action of the occupying powers in Czechoslovakia...
...FOR A WHOLE YEAR I tried, in a series of speeches running parallel to my open correspondence with Pavel Kohout, to draw the attention of students, and of the writers of my generation, to the reform of socialism in Czechoslovakia...
...In other words: While the Czechoslovakian reformers were trying to put through their reform under the most discouraging conditions and to overcome obstacles which, as we have recently seen, are still insuperable, the Western radical Left—also termed the New Left—indulged in romantic revolutionary gestures...
...Delegations of the Socialist Student League went to Prague and with Teutonic presumption tried to teach the Czechs and Slovaks a little academic Marxism...
...the Western New Left has failed through its own fault and through its inability to understand the lesson of Prague...
...The German Democratic Republic is regarded as a foreign enemy...
...Recently Willy Brandt, the West German Minister of Foreign Affairs, made a speech in Geneva...
...his demand for world-wide renunciation of the use of force and his condemnation of all military intervention were uttered at a time when the casualty figures in the various theaters of war are mounting faster than the gross national product...
...The fears aroused by the election returns in Baden-Wurttemberg were soon fully borne out in France: never has reactionary sentiment been stronger in Western Europe than in the summer of this year...
...How could the Stalinist reactionaries in the Soviet Union have been expected to sit still when their conservative brothers in Western Europe were so unmistakably successful...
...Without a program, expressing itself in a jargon that no one could understand, this Left succeeded in dissipating the protest movement and in provoking the radical Right...
...If the Czechs and Slovaks with their reform have met the Western socialist parties halfway, the question arises: Do we want to stay in our old rut, or are we too prepared to go halfway...
...But the students of Berlin and Paris did not take Vaculik or Havel as their model...
...Czechoslovakia crowded Vietnam out of the news, and now Biafra is taking the place of Czechoslovakia...
...Let them make use of their independence and answer the call from Prague and Bratislava...
...In other words, Alexander Dubcek's cautiously formulated program for a democratic socialism could make no headway against the cult of Che Guevara...
...Anyone who has ever tried to gain a hearing for the Czechoslovakian attempt at reform knows what brilliant disciples the Josef Goebbels of other days has found among the West European Left-wing radicals of today...
...Its thinking bears a share in the responsibility...
...It would be easy to prove that the applause of once uncompromising Cold Warriors, which rose to a clamor and then turned to telegenic lamentations when Czechoslovakia was occupied, was in part responsible for the Czechoslovakian tragedy...
...Everyday life starts in again...
...While the Czechoslovakian students, writers, and scientists were working in a calm, businesslike way, the Western European Left was indulging in revolutionary dramatics...
...But this is not the right place or the right audience for a speech about the last Cold War or the next...
...He pointed out that it is no longer a question of petty security, of short-term interests and comfortably rising prosperity...
...In all the People's Republics state-controlled unions made it impossible from the outset for the workers to participate in industrial management...
...now that Fidel Castro has approved the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Mao remains available free TWO BY GUNTER GRASS of charge...
...To me as a Social Democrat this means that in the same measure as Communism in Czechoslovakia has been striving for a rapprochement with its fellow products of European enlightenment, namely, the fundamental democratic rights, Social Democracy should try to break with its short-sighted concentration on immediate economic ends and develop a modern socialism in which all those who are qualified to do so participate in decisions and responsibilities and so exert a democratic control over the organs of power and the instruments of production...
...The New Left in Czechoslovakia has temporarily succumbed to the superior power of reaction...
...Meanwhile the papers report earthquakes, presidential elections, more protest meetings, and fluctuations of the stock market...
...Now that Czechoslovakian socialism, despite its temporary repression, has become a world-wide necessity, it is to be hoped that it will see its first tasks in the co-ordination of Eastern and Western aid to underdeveloped countries...
...So it might be a good idea to suspend our reactions to the headlines, which as often as not spring from a mere sense of obligation, to look back—because the occupation of Czechoslovakia is already behind us—and ask a few questions about our own attitude...
...nevertheless this indictment will find them...
...If they have any sympathies in their own camp, it is for Rumania and Yugoslavia...
...Once again, our revolutionaries wanted all or nothing...
...This community, verbally so radical, has always sought and found an escape: yesterday it was Cuba...
...While the Czechs and Slovaks were demanding the liberalization of their system and the toleration of disagreement, here in our country tolerance was rejected and liberalism denounced as the mortal enemy of revolution...
...Why, what this Professor Sik is aiming at is pure liberalism or, still worse, social democracy...
...Two overfed world powers have converted stupidity into armored divisions and atomic warheads...
...And the result was: nothing...
...But now that false solidarities have been exposed, perhaps our students will realize what charlatanism they fell for when they saw the future in an obsolete Soviet system, while only a few miles away, in Prague and Bratislava, a first attempt was being made to overcome the bipartite division of the world and to bridge the gulf between Communism and Social Democracy...
...Marx is not an infallible Church Father...
...I shall not forget the laughter of the revolutionaries of very substantial family background and the indifference of the revolutionary elite...
...Pro test is a reaction to the injustice of the day...
...An example: In a collection of articles on "Students and Power," the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger expresses the following judgment on the Prague student movement: "The documents bear witness to an extremely limited horizon...
...their choice was photogenic and aesthetic: Che Guevara, the Argentine professional revolutionary, was enlarged to pin-up size...
...What I have said about the responsibility of the intellectuals of the radical Left does not refer primarily to the minority of radical students, most of them scions of upper-middleclass families, who expanded their protest against their parents into a protest against the Establishment as such...
...The dogmatic exegesis of his works has led to disastrous economic blunders in the People's Republics...
...I am referring chiefly to the intellectuals of my own generation, who irresponsibly neglected to give the students the criticism they needed and did their best to participate in the blind activism of a pseudorevolutionary movement...
...And we sit in-between, permanently threatened by the good-natured pats on the back of one or the other giant...
...While in Prague and Bratislava the theory of reform had immediately to be tested in practice, here reform was slandered as reformism and theory were carried to the point of hair-splitting...
...Their political substance is meager...
...The questions are: Why is democratic socialism a matter of importance to us...
Vol. 16 • March 1969 • No. 2
