The End and the Beginning: The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History

Marci Shore:“A Spectre is Haunting Europe. . .”: Dissidents, Intellectuals and a New Generation

marci sHore “A Spectre is Haunting Europe…”: Dissidents, Intellectuals and a New Generation “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism,” wrote Marx and Engels in 1848. Yet communism, once no longer a spectre to come became a spectre from the past. The revolutions of 1989 were a wrinkle in time: time, seemingly halted for so long, suddenly leapt forward. The revolutions, too, were an opening of a Pandora’s Box - and a vindication of Freud’s warning that the repressed would return. A certain parallel to Freud’s unconscious—that dark psychic closet into which everything too disturbing is thrown—has appeared in the communist archives. Freud, for his part, had no illusions that coaxing the contents of that psychic closet into consciousness would prove painless. And psychoanalysis, in contrast to Marxism, never promised any happily ever after.1 Ketman and Camels In February 1990, Václav Havel, as the new president of Czechoslovakia , gave his first address before the United States Congress. “Consciousness precedes Being,” Havel told the senators and con1 I would like to thank Anna Muller and Timothy Snyder for comments on earlier versions of this essay. I would also like to thank Izabela Kalinowska for suggesting Trzech kumpli; Dariusz Stola for an excellent paper about the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej at the September 2009 conference “Tomorrow’s Yesterday: Memory Politics in Europe” at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen; Samuel Abrahám, Benjamin Frommer, Adam Hradilek, and Martin Šimečka for conversations on the “Kundera affair”; and the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna for being, as always, a wonderfully collegial place to think and write. 466 THE END AND THE BEGINNING gressmen, “and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim.”2 Very few of his listeners had any idea what he meant. It was doubtful that more than a handful even followed the reference to Marx’s idea of consciousness as derivative of a given person’s position in the socioeconomic order. After the political revolution, Havel hoped for a revolution of consciousness . He opposed revenge; accounting with the past, he believed, was above all a matter of accounting with one’s own conscience. Yet in 1992, over Havel’s opposition, Havel’s fellow dissident and Charter 77 signatory Petr Cibulka published a list of some 160,000 names of people supposedly implicated by cooperation with the communist-era Czechoslovak secret police. “Cibulka’s List” was vigilante justice. It was also an expression of a longing for moral clarity, something equivalent to the distinctness of truth versus lies, a central theme of dissident philosophy.3 In the communist years, dissidents for obvious reasons were especially targeted for collaboration. The secret police always had various methods of coercion at their disposal; some people simply proved more resilient than others. The poet and philosopher Egon Bondy had been one of the gurus of the Czechoslovak underground. The Velvet Underground-inspired rock band The Plastic People of the Universe— the arrest of whose members had been the impetus for Charter 77— had used Bondy’s poems as song lyrics. Then his name appeared on Cibulka’s list as an informer. Paul Wilson, the Canadian who was once The Plastic People’s lead singer, was Egon Bondy’s friend. Nonetheless, Wilson believed it was true: there were actual transcripts. And the secret police had put so much pressure on Bondy, Wilson remembered, at a time when his friend had been near collapse. He could believe that Bondy had been broken. This did not make him evil, though, Wilson insisted. In fact, Cibulka’s List had revealed that several people Paul Wilson had known well in the underground of the 1970s were informers. Not infrequently 2 Václav Havel, “Help the Soviet Union on the Road to Democracy: Consciousness Precedes Being,” Vital Speeches of the Day vol. 56, no. 11 (15 March 1990): 327–30. 3 Petr Cibulka, Cibulkovy seznamy spolupracovníků StB (Olomouc: Votobia, 1999). Originally published in Necenzurované noviny no. 13 (1992). 467 “A Spectre is Haunting Europe…” the friends who were their victims forgave them. “Of all the people I knew,” Wilson said, “it was the people who were the most harmed by informers who were also the most forgiving of those informers.”4 Thirteen years after Cibulka’s List came Wildstein’s List. What happened in Czechoslovakia in 1992 happened in Poland in 2005, a...