Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  Despite four months of Soviet occupation, the country is not yet totally paralyzed by fear. In the satirical weekly, there’s a bold festive cartoon: in a few days, it will be Christmas 1968, and two gentlemen are exchanging greetings, saying “Merry Christmas 1989.”

  Thus, it’ll only be a happy holiday in twenty years’ time.

  How did the cartoonist manage to see the future so precisely?

  What did he think of his cartoon when twenty years of despair came to an end at the exact moment he had predicted? In Czechoslovakia, communism really did collapse a month before Christmas 1989. And what did he think three days after Christmas, when Václav Havel was sworn in as president?

  Why did that particular year occur to him?

  Did he ever make any other prophecies?

  Did this drawing have any significance for him afterwards?

  I think that anything the cartoonist has to say about this will be worth hearing.

  The cartoon is signed “Bape.” This turns out to be the pseudonym of Vladimír Pergler, a staff cartoonist at Dikobraz. The magazine ceased to exist in 1990, but Bape has his own website, which is maintained by his daughter, Šárka Loty Erbanová-Polcarová. Over the phone, she tells me her dad died in 2001. He was sixty-eight.

  His friend Jiří Bartoš, who helped him think up the cartoons (“Bape” is an acronym based on the first letters of their surnames) has also passed away.

  I visit the cartoonist’s daughter in Prague. On the entrance door into her apartment block there’s a nameplate that says NUMEROLOGIST.

  She and her mother, Pergler’s wife, receive me. They don’t actually remember any such cartoon, and are surprised.

  “You’ll admit,” I say, “this is pure prophecy, clairvoyance, or rather clair-drawance!”

  “I myself am a numerologist, a fortune-teller, and in fact, I use automatic writing,” explains the daughter.

  “Automatic writing?”

  “Yes, a person in a trance makes contact with a source of energy from outer space and writes. It is a graphic spiritual connection. The medium makes notes, but the words appear on the paper without his conscious involvement. When he comes out of the trance, he is often very surprised by the message passed to him by a higher energy.”

  “And who can write automatically?”

  “Someone who is materialistic, for example, has a lesser chance of conveying messages from outer space.”

  “It’s your dad,” I say excitedly. “He must have drawn this message in a trance.”

  “Or perhaps,” puts in his wife, “he just turned the last two digits over? After all, our world was standing on its head in those days, so he put the figures upside-down too. I’m telling you, I’m sure Vláďa didn’t know what he was drawing.”

  THE TRAGEDY HUNTER

  Eduard Kirchberger was born in Prague in 1912.

  At the same time and in the same place, the world’s first Cubist sculpture of a human head was created.

  These two facts have no connection.

  PART 1: BRAK

  After the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, society has to be forced into detox.

  The authorities give orders for anything that brings simple pleasure to be liquidated.

  Liquidation committees are established. Their task is to remove crime fiction, horror and adventure stories, thrillers, romance novels and science fiction as soon as possible from every outlet. In short, to get rid of every lowbrow form of literature.

  The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of Incautious Maidens or Flames at the Metropole. So that those who prefer the false view of the world presented in cheap novels will never find refuge again.

  The death of trash is meant to occur in a natural way along with the death of capitalism, in February 1948. But that’s not how it happens. So, in 1950, it is announced that publishing even the smallest pocket-sized novel for lunch ladies is an offense against the state.

  As the committees can’t cope with the book screening, public collection points for trashy books are organized. Elementary school students at the Hloubětín estate in Prague immediately tear the books into very small pieces at the collection point, to make sure they will never go back into circulation. The children enthusiastically rip up Jasmines Below the Balcony and Faces from the Underworld.

  During the campaign, the term “literary brak” is used.

  Brak, the Czech word for a “lack” or “shortage” of something, can also mean “a piece of trash.” Now it is an epithet for something that ruins people’s lives. The liquidation records are full of notes saying: “worthless brak,” “empty brak,” “mindless brak,” “American brak,” “dull-witted brak,” “sentimental brak” and so on. The press explains to the population that brak is a bourgeois machine for making profit. Capitalism offers it to the workers to dull their wits.

  On the door of the City Library in Prague, there is a sign saying:

  READERS,

  No doubt you appreciate that we no longer lend brak (pulp fiction, crime and adventure novels). Do not write out slips for them and do not request them.

  The authorities manage to pulp almost 70 percent of the trashy books in circulation.

  “Operation Exclusion, Operation Substitution”—for so it is called—continues in Czechoslovakia until 1958. It’s not until the year 2000 that a historian of literature at Charles University, Pavel Janáček, will research and write about it.

  The trash is replaced by socialist-realist trash written by new authors.

  Three years before, Andy from The History of a Black Boxer (1950) would still have declared: “I want you to be my wife.”

  And Ruth would have replied, her voice softening: “Darling, you have no idea how much I love you.”

  Now their romantic exchange can’t serve their personal aims alone. So Ruth adds: “We must get to grips with life, like all working people. But you will never be victorious alone. You are a part of the community.”

  In another book, written in 2003, Pavel Janáček and his colleague Michal Jareš also investigated the biographies of more than a hundred pre-war authors of cheap fiction.

  Almost all of them fail to reappear under the new system.

  Many writers try their best to forget about their own pasts. “As soon as my books were removed from the libraries as worthless brak, I immediately gave up writing, and now I’m trying to erase my literary sins from memory,” the author of Hungry Heart, Marie Kyzlinková, explains to the Literary Institute in the 1960s. Once she has wiped out her sins, she occupies herself exclusively—as the wife of a railroad inspector—with housework.

  Many authors are eliminated forever. The communists refuse to accept their pledges to become better writers. Jova Patočková assures the Ministry of Information in writing: “In my novel The Spellbound Seeks a Shadow, a girl of impeccable character triumphs. As a socialist, I know what normal life is like. In my book, I contrast a girl with a positive attitude to work with a woman from the past who is idle, wanton, and flirtatious.”

  The Ministry doesn’t believe Patočková and refuses its consent to publish the novel; the author is excluded from public life.

  There is just one author who manages not only to eliminate himself, but also create his own substitute.

  To begin with, he is called Eduard Kirchberger.

  Afterwards, he is Karel Fabián.

  He is two completely different authors.

  The successful metamorphosis takes him three years. The socialist-realist literary reference books do not mention Fabián’s past.

  In his new incarnation, he even signs his name with different handwriting.

  Kirchberger writes about ghosts, monsters, wizards, gun-slingers and murderers. Fabián writes about workers, partisans, communists and enemies of the people.

  The former writes about terrifying open graves, with women lying in them whose hearts have b
een ripped out after death. The latter writes about terrifying exploiters who get rich at the expense of the workers.

  The former plays up phantoms. The second plays up production achievements.

  The former adores mysterious caves, dungeons, rock temples and cellars full of demons. The latter—if he ever writes about a cellar—will make it the headquarters of agents of American imperialism.

  “I was very surprised,” says Pavel Janáček, “when I realized that these two stylistically disparate writers were one and the same person. His adaptation to communism was impressive.”

  “He was a born storyteller,” he adds. “He thought up stories as easily as other people breathe. If he had lived in the US, a single one of his horror stories would have bought him an expensive car. So he couldn’t possibly keep quiet just because the communists had come to power. And that’s the reason why he brought Kirchberger’s life to an end.”

  PART 2: THE REASON

  Did he find the metamorphosis painful?

  Is a person who does all he can to win the favor of the totalitarian authorities at the same time trying to endear himself to everybody else?

  Does he like being a toady?

  Is there any situation where he is capable of saying “No”? Did his new self become more important to him than the old one?

  Karel Fabián is asked what he did before the war. In the official biographies, he mentions “publications.” “I don’t rate them at all,” he immediately adds, although Kirchberger’s tales enjoyed success.

  The system must be aware of his transformation. So why do the communists treat his metamorphosis with such understanding, while excluding a hundred other authors from public life?

  “That’s the most curious part. Maybe you’ll look into it?” Pavel Janáček encourages me.

  Eduard Kirchberger / Karel Fabián died in 1983, and since then twenty-two years have gone by. I start by looking for people who knew him and scouring the archives.

  I find one daughter in Germany. She used to be a journalist in Bratislava, but she emigrated in 1980. She and her husband and son pretended they were going on holiday to Sweden. “We were on our guard throughout the journey,” she says, “to make sure we only talked about trivial things in the car. So the regime wouldn’t realize anything was up, if they’d put a bug in there.”

  It all began to come apart for her when she witnessed an aerial disaster—a plane full of people had crashed into a reservoir near Bratislava. The aircraft was stuck nose down, and the passengers sitting at the back had suffocated. Nobody knew how to get them out of there. There was a crowd of people standing on the shore, and the militiamen ripped the film out of their cameras. When she got back to the newspaper office, her boss asked her why the hell she had gone there, and if anyone had checked her ID. She said she wanted to write about it. “Forget it,” she heard. “And just remember—airplanes never crash in our country.”

  “When he heard I’d fled abroad,” the journalist daughter tells me, “our dad was dumbstruck. He’d spent years whacking me over the head with his communist views. It’s a good thing he was already retired by then and wasn’t writing, or he’d have had a lot of trouble because of me.”

  I find a second daughter, a retired secretary, in Prague. She didn’t leave the country. She has just been watching a rented horror movie. Her grandson brings them, and they try to tot up one movie per day.

  For years on end, she lived with her mother. Unfortunately, Fabián’s wife died a month ago. “And before that she burned all his notebooks. In fact, I’m curious about his life myself. Did he change himself into Fabián to survive?”

  Under the new regime, K.F. employs his talents in this manner: “Our manufacturing plants,” he writes, “are the stomach of the state. Coal is its heart. Electricity, steam, and gas are its blood.”

  It is 1949, and the Five-Year Plan starts up. It is assumed that, thanks to the plan, everyone will be well dressed and well fed, life will be beautiful, and nobody will have any existential problems. K.F. becomes a reporter for the weekly Květen (meaning May) in Prague. He makes his debut on the back page, but soon almost every edition opens with one of his reports. An article of his titled “The Five-Year Plan Versus the Centuries” wins the heart of the editor in chief.

  “What is an electric floor polisher, an electric washing machine, an electric cushion, or an electric baby bottle?” he asks in one of his pieces.

  And gives the reply himself: “They are servants of the Five-Year Plan.”

  In “Problems with Bricks,” he stresses that nowadays the foundation of the family is not children, but bricks. “Bricks are bread. Bricks are a house. Bricks are heaven on earth.”

  By the third month of the plan, in his report from a textiles plant, the personnel clerk, delighted by the new order, states: “We live a fairy-tale existence … And everyone is good. There are no bad or insincere people among us.”

  K.F. should be the happiest writer of 1949—because he publishes Czechoslovakia’s first socialist-realist novel.

  It’s called About the Power Station, and it is published on the first anniversary of the victory of communism in Czechoslovakia.

  Except that two days before that victory, E.K. was still an anti-communist.

  Before the war, he published in Národní listy (“National Letters”)—the organ of the National Democratic Party—which, before Czechoslovakia came into being, was the monarchy’s leading journal for the Czech bourgeoisie. In 1937, after the death of philosopher and president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the founding father of Czechoslovakia, whom the communists would systematically denigrate, he published a poem in which he promises to shed blood and give up his life for Masaryk and for democracy.

  After the war, E.K. turns up in Liberec.

  He smiles without opening his mouth.

  He works at a bank, and publishes his stories in a social-democrat weekly, Stráž severu (“Northern Guard”). For three years following the war, Czechoslovakia is the last democratic state in the Soviet bloc. The communists only have 40 percent of the seats in parliament, the national socialists are in second place, and then come the peasant parties and the social democrats. The editor in chief at Stráž severu is a democratic member of parliament called Dr. Josef Veverka.

  On February 20, 1948, when twelve non-communist ministers resign from the coalition government they have formed with the communists—and by doing so initiate the complete takeover of power by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the course of the next five days, later known as “Victorious February”—E.K. writes a letter to his editor:

  Dear Pepíček,

  I’m writing to wish you even greater strength. From what I’ve heard about events in Prague, I guess that any moment now they’ll be coming to lock you up. Now I can see the weaklings around me, who are only turning to the left because, as they say, they ‘have a family,’ but luckily those people are not in our ranks.

  So I’m writing to you, Pepíček, to say that you can fully count on me, just as you can on all of us whom you have raised here in Liberec. We are ready to go to jail, because we know that communism is totalitarianism, and we have fought against totalitarianism in every form. Perhaps communism will last as much as a year, but freedom will come, for such are the laws of nature.

  You can believe these words, which suddenly came pouring out in my little office, of their own accord.

  Early that morning, he leaves the letter on Veverka’s desk, but the editor will never read it. An hour later, the communist who hands the envelope to the Security Service becomes editor in chief of Stráž severu.

  The letter ends with the words: “So we’re going to roll up our sleeves and go against the grain. My two daughters’ freedom is worth the effort. Yours, E.K.”

  Except that, not long after this letter, E.K. begs the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (the CPC) to accept him as a member.

  He assures it: “It was only following the Victorious February that I gave communism proper t
hought for the first time. To me, communism is like the gospel.”

  He stresses: “Please note that I want nothing from the CPC, and I never shall. I can say of myself that no part is being played by any motive of fear or calculation, which has brought so many people to the Communist Party. I have come to my own conclusions independently. I do not know how you will judge my case, but if you do not accept me, you will be spurning a man of good will.”

  He makes excuses for the other letter: “I was told about Veverka, and I felt great sympathy for him. On the night I wrote that fatal letter I had worked on The Tragedy Hunters until almost dawn, and once I had finished, after drinking an ocean of black coffee, I couldn’t get to sleep. Unfortunately, I ended up in a miserable mood, full of hazy sympathy, and I had to find an object for my feelings. By an unhappy coincidence, I remembered Veverka. It occurred to me that he had a family, that he probably wanted to be a government minister, and so on. I sat down at my typewriter and wrote that letter, then immediately forgot what was in it. I realize it seems hard to believe, but all manner of things can happen to a writer at night.”

  He gives the Party some advice: “Communism should be taught from the pulpit, with a Bible in hand—not in the church sense of the word of course, but by going among the people and teaching them.”

  He makes a confession: “I should be sincere enough to admit that I have to study an idea for several years before I can work for it successfully.”

  (The Tragedy Hunters never appeared—most likely he never wrote a single line of it.)

  E.K. becomes part of a wider trend.

  Václav Kopecký, one of the chief ideologues of the CPC, is surprised to find that non-communist members of parliament are voting unanimously for communist decrees, and even for the non-democratic constitution of May 9, 1948. “It was quite unpleasant,” he will write years later, “because this sort of unanimity looked like compulsion. The communists even asked some of the MPs to vote against, or at least to abstain, and gave them guarantees that nothing would happen to them—but in vain. They unanimously voted in favor.”