Letter from Czechoslovakia

...But this is not the case...

...I imagined a conversation in which I, as an American expert on Cooper, Zane Grey and western movies, rather amusedly confessed to never having heard of Old Shatter-hand...

...But more evident is the tremendous amount of energy going into private housing...

...He showed no embarrassment about this, although he was a Comsomol leader...

...Until you look very closely, you have the illusion of being in a competitive, hedonistic, profit-conscious economy...

...mostly this was a record of immediate anguish or of grave worry about what was to come...

...There is little puritanism in these countries...

...The permanent exhibit, a social and political history of Czechoslovakia from the time of the Russian Revolution to the present, was arranged with great care through some 15 grand rooms...

...Among statistics, quotations and blown-up front pages of Rude Prdvo, the Czech Party newspaper, what struck me were the distinguished faces of people, literally thousands of people, photographed marching in strikes and mass demonstrations, lying homeless in streets and fields during the depression, lined up under the guns of Nazi invaders...

...It was ironic to see in Budapest a government poster showing a group of Greek columns surrounded by barbed wire...

...Before I joined the party, I had been a Socialist for nearly 10 years, had read the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, the Anti-Duhring, the Theses on Feuerbach, and all the other texts required of a Marxist intellectual in that decade...

...A group of Algerians were flirting with her while they waited for the bus...

...And the streets are thronged with strollers...

...But the ignorance was mine...

...I was nine when the Russian Revolution occurred...

...There seems no interest even in anti-war and anti-imperialist themes...

...Two days later I found poisonously colored postcards of scenes from a series of westerns made jointly by Yugoslavia and Czeschoslovakia...

...The modes are conventionally avant-garde Western...

...There is a great vogue for Western-style products...

...Now on the main streets of Prague and Budapest you can walk for block after block past an uninterrupted row of display windows, brightly lighted and inventively decorated...

...One young man and one young woman were, themselves, who get permission from the municipality to dig clay from unused land in their off-time...

...The sight-seeing emphasis is on the medieval and renaissance past, on Jan Huss and King Wenceslaus, not on the present or future...

...To an American, the name doesn't have the right ring...

...a Czech actress played the heroine, Amy Wilkinsova...

...But when one thinks of all the years of intense ideological disputes, the denials and sacrifices demanded of the people by their leaders, the long period when these countries were cut off completely from the West, it does seem a tragic waste that nothing new and distinctive in human awareness came out of all this, even by way of resistance and reaction...

...This was now 30 years ago...

...But it does not occur to anyone to show off Socialist achieve-mens in modern Czechoslovakia— farms, schools, clinics, laboratories, factories, pioneer camps...

...There are, to be sure, the photographs of Tito, but they are not much more common than photographs of Johnson in American Federal government offices...

...In some suburbs and villages half the houses are brand-new or in the process of being built...

...Many of the tourists are from East Germany and the other iron curtain countries...

...Concentrated in the center of Prague are at least 30 night clubs, bars with vaudeville entertainment, and 10 or so large restaurants (in addition to innumerable non-musical ones) featuring live bands and dancing...

...You had hoped that somehow, somewhere, there was a different spirit...

...The hip pocket of her blue jeans bore a conspicuous label...

...I joined the American Communist party exactly 20 years later, in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War...

...There were moments of rare exhilaration...

...It used local scenes strictly for no apparent reason, completely nude...

...And in Yugoslavia, too, you have to look very closely to realize that you are in a Communist country...

...One photograph on exhibition showed a group of young people formally posed in a jazz or movie-making club...

...I spent over an hour in these Robert Gorham Davis is a professor of English at Columbia...

...Cedok, the government travel bureau, handles all tourists from East and West, offering many planned tours...

...No doubt there is plenty of formal ideological indoctrination in the Czechoslovakian schools and press, but the results do not show publicly...

...No one else entered all the time I was there, though the museum was open and fully staffed...

...But their efforts are essentially destructive, too...

...rooms, partly because I was thinking about my own past, too...

...All the shops on the main streets are government-owned, but they have their own names and are purposely varied to give the illusion of competition and wide choice...

...The role of Old Shatterhand was played by Lex Barker...

...They understand the mentality of their people...

...Upon houses, motorbikes and automobiles —private space and private mobility—the ambitions of the people are centered...

...Certainly more radical and unpredictable changes in human consciousness would result from the achievement of Communism...

...The windows of Sofia fabric shops show manikins draped so sexily that it seems clear the government is encouraging home dressmakers to abandon their rather shapeless modesty and emulate Western wickedness...

...I knew what profound cultural changes had accompanied the political struggles in England between 1603 and 1688, and in France between 1798 and 1851...

...Since Czechoslovakia has always been famous for shoes, this seemed wrong from every point of view...

...Rather than lose money by importing them, the government simply produces them itself...

...It is at least a matter of personal chagrin when a former proletarian critic, brought up on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, meets 30 years later on their home grounds in a Socialist society the workers, the new men and women of the future in whose name the Leninist revolution was made, and finds their self-expression flowering in Old Shatterhand blue jeans and a third-rate imitation Tsiganer orchestra playing with happy insipidity "I Could Have Danced ALL Night...

...No photographs of official leaders are evident at all...

...She had seen the Finnish shoes on display and thought they were of Finnish workmanship, but five years out of date in style...

...Russian prudery is completely absent...

...They are created literally out of the earth by the people as background...

...In the center of Prague are many small galleries of modern painting and photography...

...Miniskirts are as common in Prague, if not quite so extreme, as in London, and so are the youths with Mick Jagger hairdos...

...They jam Karlstein Castle and travel 60 miles to see the great tasteless palace that was the favorite home of Franz Ferdinand...

...The controls instituted by the Greek military junta are exactly like those so long enforced by the Communists...

...It's the foreign label that counts...

...In Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, the cult of personality must be at a minimum...

...Imaginatively and thematically, the famous Magic Lantern show could have come out of any Western capital city...

...We spoke of it to a graduate student from Somaliland, who said that he had been at the Bata factory the week before and seen them putting English and Finnish labels on shoes manufactured there, and making no bones of it...

...On this Sunday morning in Prague I was the only person in the whole city who wanted to see the exhibit...

...Besides, she had a low opinion of the workmanship in Czech goods...

...Above it was the head of a cowboy and another, darker head—whether of horse or Indian I could not tell without leaning too close...

...The sidewalk is a stage...

...A New Masses art of workers, capitalists, tractors and street struggles is apparently totally demode...

...In Bulgaria, particularly in the country, an earlier Communist spirit survives in the slogans on factories or over the gates of collective farms...

...His girl friend, who spent a year in Cuba, was amazed to find that the students there didn't cheat, that the honor system worked...

...Streets were dark and empty...

...Weekends and Sundays, with paid and volunteer labor, they bake the bricks and build often quite large two and three-story houses, living in one part while the rest is being finished...

...Whatever the facts, these attempts to meet consumer tastes with Western style products suggest the atmosphere today in the so-called people's democracies of East Europe...

...In Maribor, except for beauty parlors, there seemed to be no shops...

...It helps one to understand the desperate attempts of the fanatical Maoists in China to recover the psychological dynamism that the revolution has lost in the Communist countries of Europe...

...Opposite the hotel was a display of what purported to be Finnish and English shoes at double to triple the prices of locally manufactured shoes...

...Featured out of all proportion, of course, was the leadership of the Soviet Union and the Czech Communist party...

...They had no need to entice customers with brilliance and display...

...Outside, tourists rushed past to get to the square before the precious minute each hour when some eight melancholy, saintly puppets from the Middle Ages file past the open door of the famous astronomical clock...

...Probably the Czechs had bought them at a very low price...

...Old Shatterhand...

...Considering what they have suffered from governments and ideologies, it is understandable that the people of Eastern Europe, in their moments of relaxation, should welcome a sensibility totally dissociated from politics—especially their own brand of politics...

...People not only look in the windows but look at each other illuminated by the windows...

...Apparently he thought that we, as corrupt Westerners, would admire the enterprise and ingenuity of the methods used...

...In Sofia a student told us with great relish about the elaborate forms of cheating practiced almost universally in schools and at the university...

...Finnish "Top-man" shoes were too well known, the government would never dare...

...The lives of intellectuals are still terribly restricted, of course, in all these countries...

...It was at the castle that I saw the future in the guise of a slim Czech teen-ager...

...Apparently no one is interested...

...By contrast, in Sofia, Bulgaria, where most of the buying goes on at two huge government department stores, the streets at night still seem dim and ghostlike by Western standards...

...A Finnish girl, a university student of economics working for a month as an exchange apprentice in a Czech advertising bureau, said that this was impossible...

...There is danger of dilettantism or hypocrisy when a Western visitor expects anything else of them...

...So why not give it to them and make the shoes at home...

...Protruding horribly from walls and ceilings, often framing niches in which stand pale statues of saints and the Virgin, are thousands of antlers, each carefully labeled and dated—the horns of every last creature Franz Ferdinand shot before he himself got potted at Sarajevo...

...I did not realize how 19th-century my thinking had been, but I felt it now in the stillness and loneliness of the rooms through which I wandered...

...A TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Letter from Czechoslovakia By Robert Gorham Davis Prague In Prague, heading for the old town square where Kafka had lived as a boy, I came quite by chance on the Clement Gottwald Museum, housed in a huge Renaissance-style palace that is rich in marble columns, caryatids, Roman arches, frescoed ceilings...

...Those that existed were far apart, small and meagerly stocked...

...After a visit to the Clement Gottwald Museum, this illusion is troubling, especially if you are a former Marxist and deeply dissatisfied with social consciousness in the West—with our selfishness, our faddishness, our wastefulness, and the largely destructive character of our popular art...

...Twelve years ago, when I saw Communist city life for the first time in East Berlin and Maribor in Yugoslavia, I realized the extent to which our city centers, especially at night, are characterized by rows of bright display windows and the lights above stores...

...In Yugoslavia the opportunities for private economic enterprise have greatly widened since I was there last...