I wrote to David Parker concerning his ‘Response’ to my ‘provisional
reply’ to him: ‘I am at present too deeply intellectually involved in Kant, and
emotionally in my memories concerning the Germans (see my post entitled 'A
reply to Professor Koch from Heidelberg University', August 4), to be able to
reply to your 'Response' in a way it deserves.’
Concerning the former, I hope to be ready to properly engage
with David after I write some more on ‘Aristotle’s concept and Kant’s “intuition” of time’;
concerning the latter, I shall relieve myself of my memories in three sets: 1.
Socrates and the Thirty, 2. How Katz und
Maus (Cat and mouse) caused a
delay of a Prague-Berlin fast train, 3. At the Prague Castle.
***
Socrates and the Thirty
I shall begin with my earliest memory, Socrates and the
Thirty will get mentioned at the very end.
I was six, my brother Mikuláš was four, Marian was one year
old. We lived in Mělník, a town built on a hill above the confluence of Vltava
and Labe, the two main rivers in Bohemia. My father managed to barter tobacco for
a goose. My mother with Marian in a pushchair, Mikuláš, and myself went to get
the goose from a farm in Hořín, on the other side of the river. We were
returning home with the goose in a bag, over the bridge. The bridge over the
river is long, over Labe enlarged by Vltava.
There stood someone in the middle of the bridge. Only when we got nearer
we realized that it was a German army officer. Should we go back? To barter tobacco
for a goose was an illicit transaction. We decided to brave it. The officer was
approaching us. To flee was pointless. He came and gave Mikuláš a sweet. – I
can still feel the enormous relief that overwhelmed me at that moment.
I went to school in the Autumn of 1944. German was
obligatory. We had a very good teacher. I still can remember Ich bin Peter du bist Paul [I am Peter
you are Paul], ich bin fleissig [I am
diligent], du bist faul [youa are
lazy]. Eins, zwei [one, two], Polizei [a policeman] … neun, zehn [nine, ten], schlafen gehen [to go to bed]. In the
coming years I several times wanted to build on those first steps into German;
we had a very good shortened version a German
Textbook by Augustin, but I got never very far with it. My proper
introduction to German had to wait until my second imprisonment.
I must explain: the first imprisonment was short, three
months for my refusal to be drafted to the military, but after my release from
prison I was immediately summoned to the military service again. In spite of my
encounter with Marx during my three months in prison – Marx’ Capital
had made me realized that Marxism was no embodiment of evil, but a fully
justified response to the evils of the early days of capitalism – I still
remained true to Tolstoy’s and Gandhi’s non-violence. Those were the days of
Gomulka’s Poland. I hoped that I might succeed in getting on a ship, and via
Sweden to India. I got as far as Szczecin. I got four years for crossing the
borders illegally, but President Zápotocký died, and three years of my sentence
were pardoned by the General Amnesty announced by Novotný, the new president.
After my sentence I was transported to a prison camp in Rtyně v Podkrkonoší,
where I was to work in a coalmine. A prison doctor declared me unfit to work in
the pit because I had to wear glasses. The prison management was not prepared
for such an eventuality; I stayed there for six weeks, waiting for an escort to
a different prison camp. In the Rtyně prison camp were about sixty Catholic
priests. One of them, Václav Divíšek took care of me. Because I was a
vegetarian, he bought me whatever he could in the canteen, but most
importantly, the priests smuggled in a lot of precious books – the prison
guards did not venture to the coalface, there the prisoners worked with the civilian
coal-miners. Divíšek provided me with the complete version of Augustine’s German Textbook, and there I read my
first German book, a tiny brochure by Romano Guardini on The Secret of the Holy Mass [Das
Geheimnis der heiligen Messe]. Although I was baptized as a Catholic, I did
not consider myself to be one; I had been too deeply steeped in Buddhism, in
Bhagavad Gita, in Rama Krishna and Vivekananda, but I spent hours with Divíšek,
and I began to admire the spiritual strength he and the other priests derived
from their faith. It was there that I realized that I could do more for my
country with the help of Marx than with Tolstoy and Gandhi. Becoming a Marxist,
I had one great aim: to do everything in my power to foster such change in the
regime that those priests would be released from prison, allowed to resume
their vocation as priests, and share with others the spiritual strength they
accumulated during the years of their imprisonment.
After my release from prison I applied for permission to
study philosophy at Charles University. I was interviewed for admission;, a
member of the commission that
interviewed me was Milan Machovec. In the Application Form I did not say a word
about my imprisonment; I was applying as a forest worker. (My Application had
to be signed and rubberstamped by the head of a Communist Party organization in
the Forestery. The head was the Forester, Michelčík was his name. I asked him
whether I should put in my two imprisonments. He told me: “Are you mad? If you
put it in, you will not be invited to the interview.”) Applying for a place at
the Faculty of Philosophy to study Marxism as a working class cadre, that
looked promising. Not only that, by that time I read Marx’ Capital, some Engels and a lot of Lenin. As the interview went on,
the Commission were more and more amazed. Then Milan Machovec asked: ‘Comrade
Tomin, hasn’t there been some problem in your past life?’ I hesitated for a
moment, then said it all. The Commission could not accept me, but Milan
Machovec asked for and obtained their authorization for his becoming my supervisor.
The year was 1960. I soon could begin to study philosophy at Charles University
while working; I finished the six year course in three years. Milan Machovec
and I, we approached Christians and invited them to get engaged with us in
Marxist-Christian dialogue.
The early sixties were the years of Busse tun (Repentance) for Germans. Groups of German students led
by their protestant pastors were coming to Prague; the Jewish Museum with its
Pinkas Synagogue, the walls of which are covered with about 77.000 names of
perished Bohemian-Moravian Jews, was obligatory. Those who had heard about me
and my engagement in the Christian-Marxist Dialogue wanted to have me as their
guide. I co-lived (miterlebte) with
them their Repentance. I was blond, my grand grandfather was German, I would
have most likely become a German, had the Germany won the war. Had I been
older, how could I be sure I would not have taken part in such atrocities as
those the testimony of which we could see in the Pinkas Synagogue? I strongly
hoped that the Germans exposed to the view the darkest sides of human nature,
to which all of us could succumb, if the conditions were ‘right’. Feeling
morally superior to Germans after the war, we crated our Communist
concentration camps, organized our witch-hunts. One memory in particular haunted
me. On the 9th of May 1945 the Red Army liberated Prague, but it did
not yet reach Mělník. My father went into town, he thought something would
happen. After a few hours he came home shaking; a crowd gathered in the centre
of the town, dragged two German soldiers from a lorry and burnt them alive in
the town square. With every visit to the Jewish cemetery with my German friends
grew my firm determination to do in every situation what is right.
In those days I worked as an editor for philosophy in the
Publishing House of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Our offices were in
the Wenceslas square. One day I was summoned to the Head of the Publishing
House; he said to me: ‘The Central Committee [of the Communist Party] is
worried about your contacts with the foreigners. You must stop all contacts
with them.’ I asked: ‘When a foreigner meets me at the Wenceslas square and
asks me where the nearest public toilets are, am I allowed to answer them?’
***
Soon afterwards I was dismissed, but those were the years of
Czechoslovakia marching towards its Prague Spring of 1968. I was given
Aspirantura at the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University (a kind of
fellowship; I was paid for four years to write a dissertation in philosophy;
most importantly, I could do some teaching in the history of philosophy at the
Faculty. I wrote the dissertation on ‘Three contributions to the theory of
knowledge’ and subjected it to scholarly scrutiny at the end of the third year
of my Aspirantura, in the spring of 1969, before leaving Prague for the
University of Hawaii where I was giving a course in Marxism. I was to defend
the dissertation after my return, but when I returned home in 1970, it was the
time of ‘consolidation and normalization’, of massive purges, the country had
to be subjected to the new rule established in the wake of the Soviet invasion
of the 21st August 1968. I became a turbine operator in the Prague
power plant; to obtain permission to defend my dissertation was out of the
question.
***
Socrates was summoned to the leaders of the Thirty Tyrants,
Critias and Charicles, and ordered to stop conversing with young people, to
wit with anyone under thirty.’ Socrates asked: ‘Suppose I want to buy
something, am I not even then to ask the price if the seller is under thirty?’ (Xenophon,
Memorabilia, I. ii. 35-36) – I began
to study Ancient Greek after I had been dismissed from the Publishing House; I
read Xenophon’s Memorabilia for the
first time when I worked in the power plant, after my return from the USA.
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