The New York Review Abroad (40 page)

What I have recounted here is only a small part of the story, albeit a central part. There are many other vital parts that others will have to fill in: for example, the story from the Party–government side, and, indeed, the detail of the actual negotiations. It is too soon to draw any balance sheet. But a few tentative reflections may already be ventured.

Why did it happen in November? The real question is rather: why did it not happen before? Historically, Czechoslovakia was much the most democratic state in the region before the war. Geographically, Prague lies west of Vienna. Culturally, it is
the
Central European city. The Prague Spring was crushed by external force. But the river ran on underground. The gulf between the
pays réel
and the surreal, mendacious
pays légal
—Husák’s kingdom of forgetting—grew ever wider. During the last couple of years, the number of those prepared to risk something in order to speak their real minds grew very significantly. There were the 40,000 who signed the “Several Sentences” Manifesto. There were the hundreds of thousands of believers who signed the petition for religious freedom. There were the students and the actors. Once the transformations began in neighboring Poland and Hungary, one had the feeling that it was just a matter of time before things moved in Czechoslovakia.

And so it was. But East Germany went first. And if one asks, “Why did things go so fast in Czechoslovakia?” the simple answer is
“because the Czechs came last.” East Germany was the final straw: seen, remember, not just on television but also in Prague itself, as the East German escapees flooded into the West German embassy. National pride was aroused. Rapid change was clearly possible, and allowed, even encouraged, by Gorbachev. From the members of the audience in the Realistic Theater on the first Saturday who immediately leapt to their feet in a standing ovation at the actors’ demand for a general strike, to the crowds on Wenceslas Square chanting, “Now’s the time,” from the journalists who at once started reporting truthfully, to the workers who never hesitated about going on strike: everyone was ready. Everyone knew, from their neighbors’ experience, that it could be done.

More than that, their neighbors had given them a few ideas about how it should be done. In a real sense, Czechoslovakia was the beneficiary, and what happened there the culmination, of a ten-year-long Central European learning process—with Poland being the first, but paying the heaviest price. A student occupation strike? Of course, as in Poland! Nonviolence? The First Commandment of all Central European oppositions. Puppet parties coming alive? As in East Germany. A “round table” to negotiate the transition? As in Poland and Hungary. And so on. Politically, Czechoslovakia had what economic historians call the “advantages of backwardness.” They could learn from the others’ examples; and from their mistakes.

Yet when all this has been said, no one in Prague could resist the feeling that there must also be an additional, suprarational cause at work. Hegel’s
Weltgeist
, said some. Agnes of Bohemia, said others. “The world is moving from dictatorship to democracy,” said a third, in a newspaper interview. How you describe the suprarational agency is a matter of personal choice—for myself, I’ll stick with the angels—but on a sober enumeration of causes, the whole is definitely more than the sum of its parts.

If there were angels at work, there were also devils. One saw more than once how the devils of ambition, vanity, pride, the little germs of corruption, wriggled their way down into the bowels of the Magic Lantern. Taken all in all, however, the central assembly of the Forum in the Czech lands was an impressive body. It was as democratic as it could reasonably be, in the circumstances. It was remarkably good humored. It showed a genius for improvisation. Profound differences of political ideology, faith, and attitudes were generally subordinated to the common good. A reasonable balance was struck between the political and the moral imperatives. Above all, men and women who for twenty years had been deprived of the most basic possibilities of political articulation were able to get together and say, within a matter of days: “This is what we want, this is how the face of the new Czechoslovakia should look.” And it is a face that bears examination.

All the same, they were lucky. Even compared with Solidarity in Poland nine years ago, this was the politics of amateurs. There were several moments in the second week when one felt they had lost their way in the tangle of demands, long and short term, moral, symbolic, and political. Thus, to forget about those crucial levers of power, the defense and interior ministries, might look, to a cold and critical observer, like carelessness. To toss in the demand next day, in a hastily drafted letter, might look, to the cold and critical observer, like theater rather than politics. But such was the tide of popular feeling (helped by the favorable external winds), and so clear the general direction, that it came right in the end. And in politics, as Disraeli observed, nothing succeeds like success.

“Unhappy the land that has need of heroes,” cries Brecht’s Galileo. Unhappy the land that has need of revolution. The twenty years, and in many respects the forty years, are really lost. Lives have been ruined.
Damage has been done that can never be repaired. But if you must have a revolution, then it would be difficult to imagine a better revolution than the one Czechoslovakia had: swift, nonviolent, joyful, and funny. A laughing revolution. It also came without the accompanying (and precipitating) economic crisis of Poland or Hungary. What is more, because the change has been so swift—because Komárek, Dlouhý, and Klaus are already in government, taking the necessary steps—Czechoslovakia has a real chance of making the larger transition from dictatorship to democracy, and from planned to market economy, with relatively little economic pain: although I stress the word relatively.

So the parting images should be of happiness. Collective happiness, as seen in Wenceslas Square, but even more of individual happiness. I think of Pavel, designing the bicameral legislature in his stoker’s hut. I think of Petr, given a new last chapter for his history of Czechoslovakia, which will be published legally, while he travels to Oxford. I think of Rita, preparing for her new job as ambassador to Washington. I think of Jirí, now making the foreign policy of the Czechoslovak (Socialist?) Republic. And I think of Václav—that is, Wenceslas—drinking a Christmas toast.

Sentimental? Absurdly so. But sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof, and God knows there will be evils enough in East Central Europe over the next decade: common, workaday evils of fragile polities and struggling economies. For a short while, at least, we may surely rejoice. After twenty years, the clocks have started again in Prague. The ice has melted. The most Western of all the so-called East European countries is resuming its proper history.

—January 18, 1990

Susan Sontag

1.

I WENT TO
Sarajevo in mid-July to stage a production of
Waiting for Godot
not so much because I’d always wanted to direct Beckett’s play (although I had), as because it gave me a practical reason to return to Sarajevo and stay for a month or more. I had spent two weeks there in April, and had come to care intensely about the battered city and what it stands for; some of its citizens had become friends. But I couldn’t again be just a witness: that is, meet and visit, tremble with fear, feel brave, feel depressed, have heart-breaking conversations, grow ever more indignant, lose weight. If I went back, it would be to pitch in and do something.

No longer can a writer consider that the imperative task is to bring the news to the outside world. The news is out. Plenty of excellent foreign journalists (most of them in favor of intervention, as am I) have been reporting the lies and the slaughter since the beginning of the siege, while the decision of the western European powers and the United States not to intervene remains firm, thereby giving the victory to Serb fascism. I was not under the illusion that going to Sarajevo to direct a play would make me useful in the way I could be if I were a doctor or a water systems engineer. It would be a small contribution. But it was the only one of the three things I do—write, make films, and direct in the theater—which yields something that would exist only in Sarajevo, that would be made and consumed there.

Among the people I’d met in April was a young Sarajevo-born theater director, Haris Pasovic, who had left the city after he finished school and made his considerable reputation working mainly in Serbia.
When the Serbs started the war in April 1992, Pasovic went abroad, but in the fall, while working on a spectacle called
Sarajevo
in Antwerp, he decided that he could no longer remain in safe exile, and at the end of the year managed to crawl back past UN patrols and under Serb gunfire into the freezing, besieged city. Pasovic invited me to see his
Grad
(“City”)—a collage, with music, of declamations, partly drawn from texts by Constantine Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Sylvia Plath, using a dozen actors—which he had put together in eight days. Now he was preparing a far more ambitious production, Euripides’
Alcestis
, after which one of his students (Pasovic teaches at the still-functioning Academy of Drama) would be directing Sophocles’
Ajax
. Realizing suddenly that I was talking to a producer as well as to a director, I asked Pasovic if he would be interested in my coming back in a few months to direct a play.

“Of course,” he said.

Before I could add, “Then let me think for a while about what I might want to do,” he went on, “What play will you do?” And bravado, following the impulsiveness of my proposal, suggested to me in an instant what I might not have seen had I taken longer to reflect: there was one obvious play for me to direct. Beckett’s play, written over forty years ago, seems written for, and about, Sarajevo.