My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  That some members of the young generation expressed their approval of the new regime and accepted its activities without suspicion was certainly due to the fact that they had grown up under Nazi occupation and had been denied education. These efforts produced a paradoxical result. Nazi propaganda was seen as deceitful and antagonistic, which was how all attacks against Bolshevism came to be perceived. (When the Nazis announced their discovery of the mass graves of Polish officers who had been murdered in the Katyn Forest by Stalin’s secret police, few doubted that this was a Nazi lie.)

  Who of the youth knew the details of the Soviet dictator’s path to power? Who at ten or fifteen years of age was interested in trials in which the Soviet dictator liquidated his opponents group by group? Who knew that millions of innocent victims of the Communist regime were leading miserable existences or dying in Siberian concentration camps?

  But because the trials of enemies of the people, reactionaries, conspirators, spies, and traitors became one of the fundamental and essential pillars of Communist dictatorship, it was necessary to acquaint those who suspected nothing, who were uninterested, with these methods.

  And so, soon after the coup, carefully manipulated information concerning these events began to appear. Alongside the quickly translated and published transcripts of the staged trials (which were sometimes difficult to accept if only for their absurdity) or the boring and, for the uninitiated, incomprehensible History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, further works of Stalinist propaganda were published that were masterful in their mendacity. Among them was The Great Conspiracy, which pretended to be nonfiction: To provide it with the appearance of greater objectivity it was written (or at least signed) by two American Communists, Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn. This pamphlet about a worldwide imperialist conspiracy against the land of the Soviets skillfully and suggestively employed transcripts from political trials. It cited fabricated conversations and secret meetings between disciples of Trotsky and others later condemned as “traitors, spies, and terrorists” as if they had actually occurred and had been written down on the spot. From this the authors inferred the existence of an enormous conspiracy, whose goal was to destroy the first Socialist state of workers and farmers. Hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed and, like all similar works of propaganda, served as the foundation for wholesale slaughter.

  For a reader unfamiliar with these events, it was easy to believe that sabotage units, conspiracies, and even cunning imperialistic spies in fact existed, that everything presented as historical fact was indeed true. There was of course no mention of the phony political trials that took place in the Soviet Union practically from its inception; that they were carried out upon the order of the steeled man of steel, Stalin; and that all confessions were acquired by means of unspeakable torture, signed beforehand by hangman interrogators, and then under threat of further torture repeated by the broken prisoners at their trials.

  The Necessity of Faith

  Since time immemorial, man has sought to explain the connection between himself and everything that is remote or estranged; he wants to uncover his own origin and the origin of the world. During different periods, people in different parts of the world hit upon a satisfactory explanation, which was handed down from generation to generation because they believed it was incontrovertible.

  Faith helped them live in a world full of mystery, of inexplicable phenomena, when at times there was enough food whereas at others they were hungry, where one day a person was alive and the next he was some kind of lifeless, cold matter.

  In various places on our planet, people accepted events as the work of someone or something much more powerful. One could perhaps implore the higher being to revoke his decisions, but even so, times would come when one could no longer implore. One must die. But while he was alive he could try to please the powerful one to avoid suffering while on earth and then be allowed live on in some other realm—perhaps beneath the earth, perhaps above it—or perhaps he would be reincarnated in another being or an inanimate object. And then this object would be revered.

  Since long ago, the world was, in the imaginations of our forefathers, inhabited by gods and goddesses, powerful beings both good and evil. Some of these dwelled nearby, in trees, animals, or water; others inhabited the heights and revealed themselves only in the form of lightning, thunder, sunlight, or illness, which drew near from the unknown. In his relationship with the powerful forces, man was full of humility; nevertheless, he believed he would one day enjoy some sort of beatific condition that went by various names—heaven, nirvana—but was always a condition in which a person was happy, where all pain, all cares, all fears of the end ceased. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it was even supposed that at one time we had lived in such a state, and only our own reckless longing for knowledge had deprived us of it. The longing for knowledge, however, although stigmatized, persisted.

  Gradually the individual gods lost their concrete forms or retreated in the face of one most powerful God until they disappeared entirely or turned into his servants or lingered on as water nymphs, sprites, naiads, genies, or angels.

  While the gods changed their form, the human need for faith changed only little. Man wanted to believe there was someone above him who would judge all his deeds, who would reward good and punish evil, who would right the wrongs, who would even arrange it so that after death he would encounter those he had loved.

  Although human societies arose at different times and places, and they developed various and oftentimes very dissimilar religions, many things connected them: All religions had their own rituals. They celebrated the festival of the solstice, the arrival of rain, the metamorphosis of a boy into a man, the joining of man and woman, and the dead on their final journey. All of this persisted for generations, and it never occurred to anyone to doubt the usefulness and necessity of observing the rituals.

  Every religion, every deity, had its own chosen people or caste, its own shamans, monks, lamas, or priests who ensured that all the prescribed commandments were obeyed.

  Religion required unswerving faith in everything it claimed, in everything it demanded, even in what it promised. Only the insane, the outcast, or the blaspheming heretic could not believe.

  As thousands of years went by, man continued in his aspirations, which caused his banishment from paradise. He wanted to know and discover new and better explanations for phenomena in his world. Reason appeared against the enduring faith in the constancy of ancient explanations. Reason announced that everything could be subject to doubt; it was necessary to examine and explore everything. Even the ancient Greek philosophers reached the conclusion that man was after all part of nature and like everything else was subject to old age and then death. Not even the Greek materialist philosophers doubted the existence of immortal gods, but they assumed that immortal beings cared little about the fate of mortals. They themselves had to seek how to avoid anguish from nonbeing, from the meaninglessness of their existence, and at the same time how to escape this meaninglessness.

  In the seventeenth century, however, thinkers began to emphasize the significance of reason over the long-standing conclusions issuing from faith.

  During the Enlightenment, reason became the instrument that should guide a meaningful life. In subsequent centuries, reason achieved unexpected successes. There is no sense enumerating them, but reason, along with its child science and its grandchild technology, altered essentially the conditions and utility of life. As knowledge and understanding developed, certain religious dogmas began to be doubted. Science arrived with a new conception of time; it began to explain the origin of man and the origin of the earth and the universe in an entirely different way. It began to investigate and finally even break down matter. Gradually, at least in people’s everyday lives, the inexplicable diminished, and reason began to insinuate itself and take the place of God.

  But the need of man to believe, to turn to some power greater than himself, a force that was certai
nly not rationally explicable but that one could approach through exaltation and with the aid of dance, music, or song, was not dead in the least. People missed the cults and rituals as well as the saints; they lacked an absolute superhuman authority.

  Enlightenment reason cast God’s power into doubt and, along with it, the earthly and religious rulers who were supposed to reflect that power. Emperor Josef II abolished monasteries and expelled monks as freeloaders; just a little while later the French king and his family were executed (rather, murdered), and not long after that, Russian Bolsheviks murdered the tsar and his entire family. Rulers and their ministers, people who only recently were looked up to with reverence, were dead or overthrown. But could their places remain empty? People wanted to look to something higher, an authority that determined what was good and what was evil, who deserved punishment and who deserved acclaim. New leaders exploited this need, but they derived their claims not from God’s will (even though Hitler enjoyed announcing he had been chosen by providence) but rather from the will of the people who flattered themselves as the very embodiment of a wise and reasonable power.

  It is significant that both of the powerful ideologies of the twentieth century were atheistic and professed scientific or, rather, pseudoscientific theories; at the same time they adopted signs of religious faith. At first this fascinated millions of both the educated and the unlettered.

  The ideology of German National Socialism combined elements of socialism with an obscure racialist theory. It declared that the German race, which according to the Nazis represented the highest level of human development, was destined to rule the world. This theory was not based on contemporary, scientifically provable facts and therefore could be accepted only on the basis of faith. This faith, however, was indeed quite gratifying. It elevated its adherents above all others; it offered them a vision of a marvelous future, the building of something suprapersonal—a thousand-year empire.

  Communist ideology emphasized its rationality even more; it claimed to have arisen on the basis of the most modern, ingenious, and fundamentally insuperable scientific method of Marx and Engels. The conclusions reached by these two thinkers while studying societal forces and their development were supposed to have eternal validity, like the laws of Archimedes or Newton, for instance. It was precisely the scientific basis of their teachings that was supposed to guarantee they would lead to a perfect society, to heaven on earth. In reality, this utopian vision was unscientific; it could be believed only on the basis of blind faith.

  Textbooks of Marxism or historical materialism resembled a catechism in which every question had a prepared answer that applied irrefutably.

  Historical materialism is a pragmatic and harmonious scientific theory that explains the evolution of society, the transition from one societal system to another. At the same time it is the only correct scientific method of investigating all societal phenomena and the histories of individual states and nations.

  Everything that did not conform to the dogma of the new Word was condemned as heresy and had to be suppressed and punished.

  Holy writ, of course, enjoyed natural authority. The wisdom of entire generations was collected in the Old Testament. There was no need to continually belaud its authors (disregarding the fact that according to the Orthodox interpretation the writers of the texts were merely interpreters of God’s will). Marxist, fascistic, and Nazi ideology, however, brought a new faith, and their interpreters considered it necessary to convince the readers that the new prophets were the only genuinely elect and proselytized the only truth.

  Fifty years after the death of Lenin, when it was obvious to everyone who had not lost his reason that the regime he created with unusual cruelty had plunged the citizenry of an enormous empire into poverty and subjugation and deprived several million people of their lives, Lenin’s official biography was published in the Soviet Union with this evaluation:

  Lenin’s activity and his deep and noble thinking influenced and will continue to influence the course of world history and the fate of all humanity. . . . V. I. [sic] Lenin showed the nations of the world the path to genuine freedom and happiness.

  Communist ideologues perhaps attributed the most oracular characteristics to Stalin. Through his ingenious perspicacity he glimpsed the contours of future prosperity . . . and masterfully elaborated and sketched out a grandiose program of Socialist construction. . . . In his unrepeatable, ingenious analyses, he pointed out the abysmal difference between the world of capitalist decay and disintegration and the efflorescent and deeply humane world of socialism.

  Furthermore, like a true prophet, Stalin was extremely simple, modest, far-sighted, uncompromising, ingeniously perspicacious; his logic was overwhelming, his thoughts crystal clear. Therefore, he became for us our teacher and father, the greatest luminary of the world, a coryphaeus of science, the great leader of the working class, an ingenious strategist who has written the indelible Word in the book of history.

  The miserable poet and Hitler Youth leader Baldur Benedikt von Schirach composed Hitler’s panegyric:

  That is the greatest thing about him,

  That he is not only our leader and a great hero,

  But himself, upright, firm and simple,

  in him rest the roots of our world.

  And his soul touches the stars.

  Yet he remains a man like you and me.

  The attempt by totalitarian ideologies to satisfy the traditional need to believe was remarkably consistent. Leaders renewed the significance of ritualistic gatherings, pilgrimages, and marches to the sound of monotonous music. They returned banners and images of their own saints to the hands of the people. They used religious-sounding words. They loved to talk about eternity and immortality. An often banal and vacuous statement was passed off as a prophetic revelation. Because of his unlimited, mystical fascination, remarked Goebbels on Hitler’s address at a party gathering, it was an almost religious rite.

  Every year the Nazis organized eight days of ritual celebrations that were supposed to function like religious pilgrimages. The American diplomat and author Frederic Spotts, in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, notes:

  The fifth day was the “Day of Political Leaders” and from 1936 this event culminated in the dramatic high point of the rallies. After sundown 110,000 men marched on to the review field while 100,000 spectators took their places on the stands. At a signal, once darkness fell, the space was suddenly encircled by a ring of light, with 30,000 flags and standards glistening in the illumination. Spotlights would focus on the main gate, as distant cheers announced the Führer’s approach. At the instant he entered, 150 powerful searchlights would shoot into the sky to produce a gigantic, shimmering “cathedral of light,” as it was called. . . . “Cathedral” was the apt term since the essence of the ceremony was one of sacramental dedication to Führer and party. Encased in a circle of light and dark, the participants were transported into a vast phantasmagoria.

  Film clips of the enthusiastic crowds greeting the new gods embodied in the figures of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, or their successors even today bear witness to the fact that many people upon meeting their leaders truly experienced the ecstasy of religious rapture and were prepared to do anything the new gods commanded—work oneself to death, go to one’s own death, or put someone else to death.

  Often fear lurked behind this ecstasy, but of course it was never very far from some sort of religious faith.

  Totalitarian ideologies demanded devotion from their followers, absolute obedience in carrying out their (often absurd) commandments. They demanded that people believe the image of reality precisely in the form submitted to them. Millions of Germans believed so fervently in the villainy of Jews that they permitted their slaughter. Plenty enthusiastically made this perverted idea a reality. In the same way, many Germans believed they were destined for world domination and were willing to sacrifice their lives to the new divinity in the name of this horrible but suprapersonal goal.

  The Comm
unists accepted that entire groups of inhabitants had to be suppressed or killed if a new and better society was to be created. Absolute and uncritical faith was necessary to believe that the recently celebrated members of the party leadership were subsequently revealed to be traitors and must therefore be forcibly removed from the world of the living.

  The faith of some was so strong that they were not willing to renounce it. They could not turn away from their villainous god even when standing upon the scaffold. When Hitler with the help of Himmler’s SS suppressed a nonexistent conspiracy by the SA, the SS men led the alleged conspirators before the firing squad. Before dying they managed to shout out their elementary slogan, “Heil Hitler” (while the execution squad received the order, “Heil Hitler, fire!”). Many Communists sentenced to death during the trials, which took place upon Stalin’s orders, died while crying out, “Long live Stalin!” They could not imagine that their god, in order to elevate himself, had demanded their death, and they did not have the fortitude to admit that the entirety of their faith had been an error, for which they had sacrificed their lives. It is probable that at least some of those who stood across from those carrying out the execution also invoked Stalin’s name. It is even possible that several of those who were to die the very next moment believed that they were serving a magnificent goal to which society was allegedly drawing near. Paradoxically, fanatically believing hangmen and victims stood face-to-face, each convinced that everything he had lived through and everything he was undergoing served a great and laudable objective.

  Many German citizens, almost to the final moment, believed in the megalomaniac who had driven them to death and to the very end glorified his name in the same way they glorified the name of God. Even after the defeat of Nazism, even after the disclosure of the crimes of the Stalinist regime, many refused to admit that their faith had been misplaced and even villainous. They remained true to their faith because without it their lives would have fallen into even greater meaninglessness.