My Crazy Century Read online

  MY CRAZY CENTURY

  Also by Ivan Klíma

  (in English)

  A Ship Named Hope

  My Merry Mornings

  My First Loves

  A Summer Affair

  Love and Garbage

  Judge on Trial

  My Golden Trades

  The Spirit of Prague

  Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light

  The Ultimate Intimacy

  Lovers for a Day

  No Saints or Angels

  MY CRAZY CENTURY

  Ivan Klíma

  Translated from the Czech

  by Craig Cravens

  Grove Press UK

  Copyright © 2009 by Ivan Klíma

  Copyright © 2010 by Ivan Klíma

  English translation copyright © 2013 by Craig Cravens

  All photographs courtesy of Ivan Klíma unless otherwise noted. All translations by Craig Cravens unless otherwise noted. Pages 84–85: Poem by Milan Jarviš, published in the original Czech in the journal Literární noviny, vol. 1, issue 2, 7 March 1953

  (p. 9). Page 191: Poem by Vladimír Holan, published in the original Czech in Pojd’se mnou do noci. Vybor uspořadal Jan Adam. 1. vyd. Praha: Československy spisovatel, 1982, s. 181. Pages 259–260: Poem by Václav Havel, published in Listy, 7 November 1968. Pages 402–403: Poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, trans. by Albert C. Todd in From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology, ed. Stephan Delbos; Prague: Univerzita Karlova, 2011 (pp. 176–77). Pages 420–424: Original English translation from Rudolph Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, ed. Steven Paskuly and trans. Andrew Poillinger (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), pp. 153, 157–59. Copyright © 1992 by Steven Paskuly. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the publisher; www.prometheusbooks.com.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011, or [email protected].

  First published in Czech as two volumes: Moje šílené století by Nakladatelství

  Academia, Prague, and Moje šílené století II by Nakladatelství Academia, Prague.

  Printed in Great Britian

  ISBN: 9781611855708

  eBook ISBN: 9781611859751

  Grove Press, UK

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

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  NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  With the help of the author and translator, this edition has been abridged from the original Czech edition, which was published in two volumes. It is our hope that the full unabridged translation will be published in the future.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  PART II

  EPILOGUE

  ESSAYS

  Ideological Murderers

  Utopias

  The Victors and the Defeated

  The Party

  Revolution—Terror and Fear

  Abused Youth

  The Necessity of Faith

  Dictators and Dictatorship

  The Betrayal of the Intellectuals

  On Propaganda

  Dogmatists and Fanatics

  Weary Dictators and Rebels

  Dreams and Reality

  Life in Subjugation

  Occupation, Collaboration, and Intellectual Riffraff

  Self-Criticism

  (Secret Police)

  The Elite

  MY CRAZY CENTURY

  PROLOGUE

  A young Czech editor from BBC Radio, for whom I sometimes wrote commentary, once asked me, “Why don’t you write about why you were a Communist in your youth? I think listeners would be very interested.”

  I realized that although I had used many of my experiences as material for my prose, I had avoided my several-year membership in the Communist Party, perhaps with the exception of a few mildly autobiographical passages in my novel Judge on Trial.

  For quite a long time now I have considered the Communist Party or, more precisely, the Communist movement, a criminal conspiracy against democracy. And it is not pleasant to remember that, even though it was for only a short period, I had been a member of this party.

  But was my young colleague from the BBC correct? Who today could be interested in the reasons why so many people from my generation succumbed to an ideology that had its roots deep in the thinking, in the social situation and societal atmosphere, of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

  Marxism, which invoked a Communist ideology, is today somewhat forgotten. Its revolutionary theories have been refuted by practice. These days people are threatened much more by international terrorism; instead of battling Marxism, democracy is battling radical branches of Islam.

  But it is less ideology than the need of people, especially the young, to rebel against a societal order that they did not create themselves and do not consider their own. Besides, people need to have some kind of faith or goal they consider higher than themselves, and they are inclined to see the world and its contradictions in unexpected, apparently simple relationships, which appear to explain everything that is important, everything they are going through, or everything with which they do not agree. And for these often deceptive goals they are willing to sacrifice even their lives.

  All ideologies of the past that led to murder could evolve only when they had purged from the minds of the people everything they considered inappropriate and compelled the people to fanatical loyalty to their ideas, which they proclaimed appropriate. In this they did not differ from contemporary ideologies that lead to terrorist murder.

  Perhaps this attempt of mine to recount and analyze what took place in my life might have meaning even for those who consider communism a long-dead idea. In my account, I mainly concentrate on the circumstances that, in this crazy century, often led mankind astray, sometimes with fatal consequences.

  PART I

  1

  My first memory is of something insignificant: One day Mother took me shopping in an area of Prague called Vysočany and asked me to remind her to buy a newspaper for Father. For me, it was such an important responsibility that I still remember it. The name of the newspaper, however, I no longer recall.

  My parents rented two rooms and a kitchen in a house that was occupied by, in addition to the owner, a hunting dog with the elegant name of Lord. Birds, mainly blackbirds and thrushes, nested in the garden. When you are four or five, time seems endless, and I spent hours watching a blackbird hopping about the grass until he victoriously pulled a dew worm out of the earth and flew back with it to his nest in the juniper thicket, or observing how snowflakes fell on our neighbor’s woodshed roof, which to me was like a hungry black-headed monster, gobbling up the snowflakes until it was sated and only then allowing the snow to gradually accumulate on the dark surface.

  From the window of the room where I slept there was a view into the valley. From time to time, a train would pass, and at the bottom of the v
ale and on the opposite slopes huge chimneys towered into the sky. They were almost alive and, like the locomotives, they belched forth plumes of dark smoke. All around there were meadows, small woodlots, and thick clumps of shrubbery, and when the trees and bushes were in bloom in the springtime I began to sneeze, my eyes turned red, and I had trouble breathing at night. Mother was alarmed and took my temperature and forced me to swallow pills that were meant to make me perspire. Then she took me to the doctor, who said it was nothing serious, just hay fever, and that it would probably afflict me every spring. In this he was certainly not wrong.

  It was in one of those chimneyed factories, called Kolbenka, that my father worked. He was an engineer and a doctor, but not the kind of doctor who cures people, Mother explained: He cured motors and machines and even invented some of them. My father seemed larger than life to me. He was strong, with a magnificent thatch of black hair. Each morning he shaved with a straight razor, which I was not allowed to touch. Before he began lathering his face, he sharpened the razor on a leather belt. Once, to impress upon me how terribly sharp it was, he took a breakfast roll from the table and very gently flicked it with the blade. The top half of the roll toppled onto the floor.

  Father had a bad habit that really annoyed Mother: When he walked along the street, he was always spitting into the gutter. Once when he took me for a walk to Vysočany, we crossed the railway tracks on a wooden bridge. A train was approaching, and to amuse me Father attempted to demonstrate that he could spit directly into the locomotive’s smokestack. But a sudden breeze, or perhaps it was a blast of smoke, blew my father’s new hat off and it floated down and landed on an open freight car heaped with coal. It was then I first realized that my father was a man of action: Instead of continuing on our walk, we ran to the station, where Father persuaded the stationmaster to telephone ahead to the next station and ask the staff to watch the coal wagons and, if they found a hat on one of them, to send it back. Several days later Father proudly brought the hat home, but Mother wouldn’t let him wear it because it was covered in coal dust and looked like a filthy old tomcat.

  Mother stayed at home with me and managed the household: She cooked, did the shopping, took me on long walks, and read to me at night until I fell asleep. I always put off going to sleep for as long as I could. I was afraid of the state of unconsciousness that came with sleep, afraid above all that I would never wake up. I also worried that the moment I fell asleep my parents would leave and perhaps never come back. Sometimes they would try to slip out before I fell asleep and I would raise a terrible fuss, crying and screaming and clutching Mother’s skirt. I was afraid to hold on to Father; he could yell far more powerfully than I could.

  It is not easy to see into the problems, the attitudes, or the feelings of one’s parents; a young person is fully absorbed in himself and in the relationship of his parents to himself, and the fact that there also exists another world of complex relationships that his parents are somehow involved in eludes him until much later.

  Both my parents came from poor backgrounds, which certainly influenced their way of thinking. My mother was the second youngest of six children. Grandfather worked as a minor court official (he finished only secondary school); Grandmother owned a small shop that sold women’s accessories. Her business eventually failed—the era of large department stores was just beginning and small shops couldn’t compete.

  Grandpa and Grandma were truly poor. The eight-member family lived in a two-room flat on Petrské Square, and one of those rooms was kept free for two subtenants, whose contribution ensured that my grandparents were able to pay the rent. Nevertheless, they made certain their children got an education: One of my aunts became the first Czech woman to get a degree in chemical engineering, and my mother graduated from a business academy.

  Two of Mother’s brothers were meant to study law, but they went into politics instead. I hardly knew them and can’t judge whether they joined the Communist Party out of misguided idealism or genuine solidarity with the poor, who at that time still made up a sizable portion of the population. After having immigrated to the Soviet Union, both of them returned to the German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on orders from the party. Given their Jewish background, this was a suicidal move and certainly not opportunistic.

  My mother was fond of her brothers and respected them, but she did not share their convictions. It bothered her that the Soviet Union meant more to them than our own country and that they held Lenin in higher esteem than they did Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.

  On the day I turned six, Masaryk died. For my birthday, my mother promised me egg puffs, which were an exceptional treat. To this day I can see her entering the room with a plateful of the pastries and sobbing loudly, the tears running down her beautiful cheeks. I had no idea why; it was my birthday, after all.

  Father seldom spoke about his childhood. He seldom spoke to us about much of anything; he would come home from work, eat dinner, sit down at his worktable, and design his motors. I know that he lost his father when he was thirteen. Grandmother was able to get by on her husband’s tiny pension only because her brother-in-law (our only wealthy relative) let them live rent-free in a little house he bought for them just outside Prague. When he was studying at the university, my father supported himself by giving private lessons (as did my mother), but then he got a decent job in Kolbenka and managed to hang on to it even during the Depression. Still, I think the mass unemployment that affected so many workers influenced his thinking for a long time afterward.

  I hadn’t yet turned seven when the country mobilized for war. I didn’t understand the circumstances, but I stood with our neighbors at the garden gate and watched as columns of armored cars and tanks rolled by. We waved to them while airplanes from the nearby Kbely airport roared overhead. Mother burst out crying and Father railed against the French and the English. I had no idea what he was talking about.

  Soon after, we moved across town to Hanspaulka. Our new apartment seemed enormous; it had three rooms and a balcony and a large stove in the kitchen. When the stove was fired up, hot water flowed into strange-looking metal tubes that Father called radiators, although they bore no resemblance to the radio from which human voices or music could be heard. It was in this new apartment that my brother, Jan, was born. The name Jan is a Czech version of the Russian Ivan, so if we had lived in Russia our names would have been the same.

  When Father brought Mother and the newborn home from the maternity hospital, there was a gathering of both our grandmothers, our grandfather, and our aunts, and they showered praises on the infant, who, in my opinion, was exceptionally ugly. I recall one sentence uttered by Grandfather when they gave him the baby to hold: “Well, little Jan,” he said, “you haven’t exactly chosen a very happy time to be born.”

  *

  Until then I had never heard the word “Jew,” and I had no idea what it meant. It was explained to me as a religion, but I knew nothing about religion: My school report card stated “no religious affiliation.” We had the traditional visitation from Baby Jesus at Christmas, but I had never heard anything about the Jesus of the Gospels. Because I had been given a beautiful retelling of the Iliad and the Odyssey, I knew far more about Greek deities than I did about the God of my ancestors. My family, under the foolish illusion that they would be protecting my brother and me from a lot of harassment, had us christened. Family tradition had it that some of my mother’s distant forebears had been Protestants, and so my brother and I were christened by a Moravian church pastor from Žižkov. I was given a baptismal certificate, which I have to this day, but I still knew nothing of God or Jesus, whom I was meant to believe was God’s son and who, through his death on the cross, had liberated everyone—even me—from sin and death.

  Father may have been upset with the English, but one day my parents informed me that we were going to move to England. I was given a very charming illustrated textbook of English called Laugh and Learn, and Mother started learning English with me
.

  I asked my parents why we had to move out of our new apartment that all of us were fond of. Father said I was too young to understand, but he’d been offered a good job in England, and if we stayed here, everything would be uncertain, particularly if we were occupied by the Germans, who were ruled by, he said, an upholsterer, a good-for-nothing rascal by the name of Hitler.

  One snowy day the Germans really did invade the country.

  The very next morning complete strangers showed up at our apartment speaking German—or, more precisely, shouting in German. They walked through our beautiful home, searched the cupboards, looked under the beds and out on the balcony, and peered into the cot where my little brother began crying. Then they shouted something else and left. I wanted to know who these people were and how they could get away with storming through our apartment as though they owned it. Mother, her face pale, uttered another word I was hearing for the first time: gestapo. She explained that the men were looking for Uncle Ota and Uncle Viktor. She lifted my brother from his cot and tried to console him, but as she was so upset, her efforts only made Jan cry harder.

  At dinner, Father told Mother it was time to get out. But in the end, we didn’t move to England because, although we already had visas, Grandmother’s had yet to arrive. To make matters worse, our landlord, Mr. Kovář, served us with an eviction notice. He didn’t want Jews in his building anymore. Naturally no one told me anything, and I still had no idea that I was so different from other people it might give them a pretext to kill me.

  We moved into a newly completed building in Vršovice, where again we had only two rooms. Immediately after that, the war began.

  I can no longer recall exactly how that apartment was furnished. I vaguely recollect a green ottoman, a bookcase on which an azure blue bowl stood, and, hanging on the living room wall, a large map of Europe and northern Africa where Father followed the progress of the war. Apparently it was not going well. The German army swiftly occupied all those colored patches on the map representing the countries I had learned unerringly to recognize: the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia. To top it all off, the good-for-nothing rascal Hitler had made an agreement with someone called Stalin, who ruled over the Soviet Union, decreeing that their respective empires would now be friends. This news took Father by surprise. I also understood that it was a bad sign, since the area on the map marked Soviet Union was so enormous that if the map was folded over, the Soviet Union could completely cover the rest of Europe.