The president of forgetting
Thursday, December 4th, 2014
Milan Kundera remembers, anyway.
“If Franz Kafka was the prophet of a world without memory, Gustáv Husák is its creator. After T.G. Masaryk, who is known as the liberator-president (all his monuments without exception have been demolished) … Husák, the seventh president of my country, is known as the president of forgetting.
“The Russians brought him into power in 1969. Not since 1621 has the history of the Czech people experienced such a massacre of culture and thought. Everybody everywhere assumes that Husák simply tracked down his political opponents. In fact, however, the struggle with the political opposition was merely an excuse, a welcome opportunity the Russians took to use their intermediary for something more substantial.
“I find it highly significant in this connection that Husák dismissed some 145 Czech historians from universities and research institutes. (Rumor has it that for each of them – secretly, as in a fairy tale – a new monument to Lenin sprang up.) One of those historians, my all but blind friend Milan Hübl, came to visit me one day in 1971 in my tiny apartment on Bartolomejska Street. We looked out the window at the spires of the Castle and were sad.
That’s him. The prez.
“‘The first step in liquidating a people,’ said Hübl, ‘is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.’
‘What about language?’
‘Why would anyone bother to take it from us? It will soon be a matter of folklore and die a natural death.’
Was that hyperbole dictated by utter despair?
Or is it true that a nation cannot cross a desert of organized forgetting?
None of us knows what will be. One thing, however, is certain: in moments of clairvoyance the Czech nation can glimpse its own death at close range. Not as an accomplished fact, not as the inevitable future, but as a perfectly concrete possibility. Its death is at its side.”
– From Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“We looked out the window at the spires of the Castle and were sad.” (Photo: Jorge Royan)
