Czechoslovakia: Understanding Kafka

It was in Prague in the ’20s that Franz Kafka wrote his chilling allegories of men condemned to lingering deaths by a malevolent bureaucracy. “People didn’t understand him 25 years ago,” mused a Czech writer recently. “Now, after 16 years of Communism, they understand Kafka very well.”

They should, for Czechoslovakia itself seems today to be smothering in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Prague was once known as the “Golden City.” Nowadays it is best seen after dark, for night alone can mask the soot and uncollected refuse that mar its crooked old streets. The only Central European capital that was spared the ravages of World War II, physically and psychologically it seems now to be dying of ennui and neglect.

Queues of grey-faced office workers, all clutching the inevitable scuffed briefcases, wait meekly outside shops that offer limited supplies of costly, clumsily packaged frozen meat and fish. Ancient streetcars labor creakily through streets empty of all but the lightest traffic. What few private automobiles there are seem to have escaped from an antique museum. When the government recently began issuing drivers’ licenses, many battered Buicks and monstrous Mercedes of prewar vintage returned to the streets after years of exile in garages. Czechoslovakia’s railroads, once among the best in Central Europe, today are the worst, and their coal-burning engines add to the gritty smog that cloaks the capital. In Prague’s restaurants and bars, Scotch and French cognac sell for $2.50 an ounce. Tipping is simple: all waiters want is a few American cigarettes.

Baron von Novotny. The economy may be chronically short of workers, but it supports a Parkinsonian proliferation of officials. There are 29 “technical” specialists for every 100 production workers in industry as a whole; in some heavy-engineering plants, two out of three employees are “experts.” Czech clerks dully obey detailed instructions that minutely specify every routine from stowing their rubber stamps to writing form letters with “psychologically effective opening and closing phrases.”

Czechoslovakia’s President Antonin Novotny, an unregenerate old-line arch-Stalinist, has doggedly resisted the “liberalization” urged by Moscow. Though Novotny has purged a few of the most loathed and offensive Stalinists from his government, notably ex-Premier Viliam Siroky and colleagues who were responsible for the show trials of 1952, Czechs have no illusions about the nature of the regime. Says one Prague cynic: “Why don’t they just come right out and admit what they are? We wouldn’t mind if he became Baron von Novotny and had his estates.”

The Price of Poetry. In style, if not in name, Novotny leads a baronial life in Prague Castle, high above the city. He seems aloofly indifferent to the restive talk that fills the bars, coffee shops and cabarets in the city below. Prague’s pent-up ire came to a head on May Day, when 3,000 students from Charles University gathered for a poetry reading in Kinsky Park before the statue of Romantic Poet Karel Macha (1810-36). Novotny had banned the students’ reading last year, and this time the crowd was infiltrated by plainclothes security cops. Before it could begin, uniformed police surrounded the group and ordered it to break up.

When the students refused, the cops waded in with truncheons and police dogs, arrested 25 “ringleaders.” Word of the police action spread, and an hour later nearly 15,000 people gathered in protest at Wenceslas Square around the reviewing stand where Novotny earlier had taken the salute at the mammoth May Day parade. Shouting blatantly counter-revolutionary slogans such as “Long live freedom!” and “Down with the Gestapo!”, the crowd withstood another police charge before it dispersed, leaving five more “ringleaders” in police hands.

However, in Prague, unlike other satellite capitals such as Budapest and Warsaw, students’ demonstrations have never yet stirred violent reactions from the workers and bureaucrats whose mass support is essential to any serious challenge to the government. The nation’s intellectuals also merely reflect discontent; they do not foment it. Indeed, as a venerable, non-Communist Czech author points out, “Novotny shouldn’t be afraid of a revolution. No one is interested in politics any more. All anyone wants is to have more fun and more money. And a little, a really modest amount of freedom.”