Table of Contents:
-My schedule the last few months
-Announcement of posting of essays
-Announcement of school completetion
-Review of recent readings
-Announcement of posting "Day Two of Xtrav"
-"Discover Something New: Czech Christmas"
-Season's Greetings
Hello my friends! It’s been a while since you’ve heard from me! The last couple of months built up to a pretty crazy climax, which I’ll summarize: Last time you heard about my balanced and gradual slide into insanity, by adding interesting classes until I had twice as many as most students, by rejoining Christian groups I used to be involved with, and by trying to start building a base of teaching hours. The main problem is that this was my last semester, so as soon as January hits I need to be teaching full time to support myself. This is difficult because teaching jobs are hard to find in the middle of the academic year in anything but piece-meal, so when I had opportunities to take on students in October or November I felt obliged to start with them immediately. This meant that just as I was adding more teaching hours my classes were gradually getting more difficult as final exams approached, causing a spiraling process of dog-paddling and tread-mill running and leading to a climatic final two weeks of very little sleep or coherent thought. Now THERE’s a sentence for you! Can you tell I’ve been churning out essays like a tornado tearing through Harvard? :-)
[That brings me to my first purpose of this letter, to say that I’ve posted some of my recent essays on my blog for those of you who are WAY too bored over the holidays. www.discoverthepenguinsworld.blogspot.com. Click on “Lexical Creations” on the right. I’m posting three essays, one on All Quiet on the Western Front (entitled At Any Price), another on the psychological effects of oppressive occupation as observed in examples of “insanity” in Czech literature (The Days of the Madman), and the last (and most recommended), a mostly biographical piece on my WWII veteran professor (A Long Road Home). They are rushed and unrefined, as I had to write about 25 pages my last week, but some of you might find some of them interesting.]
So despite my traditional madness I survived, even getting more sleep than in many other crazy periods of my life (only one all-nighter!), and now I have completed all the requirements for my B.A. I don’t FEEL like a graduate, but that’s probably because I’m pretty sure that I’ll return to school some day.
So now I just have teaching, and most lessons are on holiday for two weeks, so I have a real chance to kick back and catch up a bit. I’m very glad of some time to read again, and I’ve felt very diverse and intellectual in my readings lately. After a few months of Czech literature (everything from Kafka’s Metamorphosis (again!) to Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being) and novels of 20th century turbulence (All Quiet on the Western Front (WWI, Germany) and Darkness at Noon (Soviet Russia)), I’ve also almost finished The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Ruth Benedict’s classic profile of Japanese culture and psychology), and am now tearing through A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s portrayal of the streets of India (thanks Lin!). I’ve also been getting a lot from the Psalms in my Bible reading (O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. Ps 63). For my next book I’m looking into Haruki Murakami, a Japanese novelist who’s very popular right now (any recommendations on a specific book of his, you Japanese reading this?). The problem is that I’m trying to actually decrease my personal library, because of the possibility of leaving CZ at the end of the summer, and not wanting to drag 100s of books with me or worry about burdening someone here with them. So I guess I’ll be limited to the English selections at the Prague libraries.
Anyway, besides reading I’ve also had time to return to some of my other projects. That brings me to my third point of this letter (the second being that I’m done with school), which is that the 2nd day of Xtrav (Extreme Travel) has been completed and posted on www.youtube.com/extravpenguin. Day Two starts with episode 15. If you got bored of it before, give it one more chance. This is the day that the trip truly began to live up to the X part of the title for me, and I hope that comes across. I had to use the voice recorder much more than the first day, so I apologize that the medium is not quite as engaging as the first day, but I hope that the material is.
My fourth point is that it’s high time you all got a chance to Discover Something New!
Seeing as Christmas is in 2 days (1 for some of us. Wait, I’ll get to that!), I thought it would be appropriate to discuss Christmas traditions, and since I’m in Czech Republic I though I’d share a little of Czech traditions with you. For you Czechs, or for those of you who have heard from me on this topic before this won’t be anything new, but there are many people on this list who know nothing about the fascinating array of Czech traditions...
Without a doubt the one Czech cultural element that is the most distinct from America is the way they celebrate holidays. Easter, Halloween, and even Witch Burning Day all have their distinct peculiarities for an American observer, but Christmas draws the line between our two cultures clearer than anything else. Maybe it’s because we assume that such an international holiday will be celebrated the same way internationally, but cultural has its ways of making itself felt, globalization or no globalization.
The first striking difference for an American in CZ for Christmas is that here Christmas is essentially celebrated on the 24th of December. This is a little confusing, because there seems to be a notion for some Czechs that Christmas Day is still the 25th, and that Czech celebrations take place on Christmas Eve. But because all significant “Christmassy” activities take place on the 24th, in practice everyone refers to the 24th as “Christmas.” I warned you it was confusing. This custom is followed by much of Central Europe, as well as Scandinavian countries, Jordan, Japan, and Columbia (those of you from these countries, correct me if I’m wrong, please!). I imagine that in Czech Republic we’re in a cultural transition, and that in another 100 years all lingering notion of celebrating on Christmas Eve will fade and the 24th will simply be Christmas.
The 24th is a day filled with traditions and celebration. There’s not necessarily an early start, though, because presents are opened at the very end of the day, not first thing in the morning (they may seem to be more patient, but let’s not forget they still open presents a day earlier than Americans!
There is a tradition to not eat the entire day until dinner. This is made more difficult by the customary day-long activity in the kitchen, preparing dinner and the essential “Christmas sweets,” as everyone calls them when speaking English. More accurate would be “Christmas cookies,” which are of various shapes and sorts, many of which are not dissimilar to our sugar cookies in shapes of stars and crescent moons. These “sweets” are absolutely essential at any Czech Christmas, and much fuss is made of them; for good reason, they’re delicious! So those who desire to honor the tradition of fasting all day face no easy task, but they have motivation. Tradition says that those who make it to dinner without eating will see a golden pig. That’s right, a gold pig. I’ve never gotten a straight explanation of this, so don’t ask me!
When dinner arrives another key difference becomes quickly obvious: those who love their traditional American Christmas dinner will be shocked, as not a single item is the same. No eggnog, not turkey or ham, no pies. The main course is fried carp, and on the side will be potato salad and rolls. The other elements are various, but carp and potato salad are a must. However it seems that there’s a constant debate among Czechs about this custom, as a significant number of them can’t stand carp for one reason or another. I quite enjoy the meal, but this is often heard with surprise from those who are against the tradition. Some complain about the smell, others about the bones (you do need to shift through very carefully), others about the cruelty of preparation; and that brings us to another interesting point.
The carp is not picked up at the nearest super market the day before the meal, not by any means! This leads to a recounting of my strongest moment of culture shock ever experienced in the Czech Republic. It was my first Christmas season here in 2003, and I was walking home a few days before Christmas when I noticed a large booth set up where no booth had been before. On further investigation I discovered a vat about the size of a small Jacuzzi, filled to the brim with large carp, and the cracks filled in with water. Curious, I decided to stand back and observe the proceedings. In a few minutes a mother and young daughter came by, and the girl (probably 7-8 years old), gazed excitedly into the teeming vat. Finally she pointed to one of the fish, and the man at the booth grabbed a net and deftly scooped the fish out, giving the others a little more fin-room. Holding the foot long+ carp, the man asked the mother something, and the mother answered. I later learned that the question was essentially “dead or alive?” The man slapped the fish on the table, picked up a wooden mallet, and, with the little girl watching happily, he delivered a powerful and solid whack to the fish’s forehead. He held the carp firmly as it thrashed like a boa constrictor when its tail gets run over, and then wrapped the fish in paper and handed it over. The mother and happy child walked away, leaving me on the sidelines with my jaw resting on my chest. The main shock for me was that the young girl had chosen the victim and watched the execution without losing her contended smile for a moment, just going to show that Czechs are much more willing to accept that their meat comes from dead animals than Americans are.
The strange thing is that as difficult as this is for me to watch even now (I tried to watch a few days ago, and had to leave after the bludgeoning), whenever I see the carp-vats on the street I know it’s Christmas, and it’s actually difficult for me to feel at all “Christmassy” in CZ without these stands, which pop up everywhere. This year I didn’t see one until Friday, to which I credit my serious lack of Christmas spirit this year.
But remember that the man asked “dead or alive?”? Yes, sometimes people take the carp home alive. What do they do with it, several days before Christmas? Why, they keep it in their bathtub, of course! Really, I’m not joking. No seriously, they keep the fish in their bath tubs until it’s time for the “man of the house” (you can always tell who wears the pants in the family by who kills the carp) to kill it and clean it. How do they take baths? I never got the courage to ask this directly, but at least one former student of mind says she remembers taking a bath with the carp when she was young. Often children also name the din-... err, carp. But what if they get attached to it? Well, there’s even a tradition to address that. Some families (not many) keep the carp several days until the 24th, and then let the children release it into the river. Christmas charity. However, since the fish are raised in captivity it’s common knowledge that they never survive more than a few days.
The dinner of fried carp and potato salad complete, the Czech family turns to the tree, which thus far has very few presents under it. The children are taken out of the room, so that Ježíšek can come with their presents. That’s right, Ježíšek (pronounced "Yezheeshek"), which means little or baby Jesus, brings the presents, not Santa. Santa Clause is nothing more than a commercial import from the West here, so no stockings hung out to dry, no cookies and milk, no reindeer. Instead, baby Jesus brings the presents and a host of different traditions. This custom is followed also in Slovakia and Hungary.
The most interesting thing about Ježíšek for me is that he does not have a clear image. I made a habit of asking my students every year about how Ježíšek looks, and everyone has a different idea. Some really imagine a baby in a diaper dragging a sack of presents behind him, others see an old man with a long white beard, wearing clothes very reminiscent of Santa. Still others picture a ball of bright light hovering in the air, or a man wearing a thick green coat. The most creative answer I received came from the same student who bathed with carps, who said “well, I always imagined that Ježíšek was a big yellow hedgehog.” I was completely baffled until I found out months later that the Czech for hedgehog is ježik, and she had gotten these words mixed up as a child. Why yellow I’ll never know.
I’ve always been a little uncertain about Ježíšek, as I’ve never quite been able to get a firm grasp of how much mental connection there is to Ježíš, or Jesus. More and more, though, it seems to me that most Czechs make very little connection between the two, if for no other reason than that CZ is largely atheistic and Christmas has very little to do with Christ. This doesn’t really make me feel better, though.
After presents many people attend a midnight Christmas catholic mass. This is the only hour of the year when the churches are full. As far as what happens there, I really don’t know, because I haven’t managed to attend one yet. But I will this year, and hopefully in St. Vitus cathedral itself, in Prague castle. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.
With that I’ll let you all go back to enjoying your own Christmas. If you think of a particularly unique Christmas custom of your country or family I’d love to hear about it, so give it some thought. In any case, whatever country you find yourself in, I hope that you are surrounded by happiness and the joy of this season. We celebrate the day that God came to earth to live homeless, penniless, and infinitely loving. Whatever you believe, you have to admit that the very idea is worth celebrating; with gifts and decorations and gatherings of course, but especially with our hearts and minds. God bless and Merry Christmas. -Caleb
Monday, December 24, 2007
Saturday, December 22, 2007
At Any Price
Human life is shaped and formed by countless factors. These factors can be physical, logical, emotional, or even supernatural, but perhaps the strongest motivators are instinctual. And no instinct holds more sway than the instinct to survive. Given free reign, the survival instinct will go to any lengths to achieve its purpose. It gives nearly irresistible commands in moments of danger, and when danger is present for longer periods of time then it can create seemingly absurd behaviors and structures as a means of defense. The more extreme the danger and the longer it lasts, then the more unusual and desperate will the structures become.
The most extreme example of this phenomenon is human war. Those who must find a way to exist in this most threatening and torturous of environments inevitably create otherwise impossible structures of friendship, manipulations of human nature, irreversible transformations of their thought processes, all to “on living at any price” (100). As is demonstrated in Erich Maria Remarque's book “All Quiet On The Western Front,” this radical process is the only hope for survival.
Here “survival” does not mean physical survival, since all the soldiers quickly come to realize that “it is simply a matter of chance whether I am hit or whether I go on living” (72). The long-term practical effects of the survival instinct in war exist primarily in the social realm. Nowhere else is it so evident that humans are social creatures with a life-and-death need for community.
The first factor to understand is that these young soldiers have been utterly removed from every aspect of their previous social existence. All that they had been taught both directly and indirectly by their previous life was found to be wanting on the battlefield. This means that every foundation and trust of their young minds was shattered to its core. The main character Paul Baumer says of their teachers, parents, and role-models that “we believed in them. In our minds the idea of authority – which is what they represented – implied deeper insights and a more humane wisdom. But the first dead man we saw shattered this conviction” (9). The teacher who pressed them all into the war to begin with, whom they all formerly respected and who had the best of intentions in pushing them to war, is now perceived as being completely morally bankrupt.
The rawness of war, and the essential changes it works on the nature of young men completely severed their connection with any environment that was not war. When visiting home it is painfully obvious to Paul that “I'm sure that I was just like them myself, before: but now I can't find any real point of contact... These people are different” (121). In fact the people are not different at all, it is Paul and his comrades who have completely changed. The way that their survival instincts have completely remade them causes Paul to feel that even if they physically survive the war, still “I don't think we'll ever get home” (62).
Of course other young people experience this feeling without any involvement in a war. But they have other ways to build a new “home” and other social shelters to run to; namely to romance. But on the battlefront there are no women at all, and thus the soldiers are deprived of another “natural” survival mechanism. The absence of the “fairer sex” has as profound an effect on the soldiers as the disconnection from their homes, though it might be subtler. In the book it is most clearly seen when there appears a poster with a beautiful woman on it, and the reaction of two of the young men is a sudden desire to wash themselves, find clean clothes to wear, and make themselves “presentable,” even though they've given no thought to presentability for nearly two years. From this it can be seen how influential women have been on the development of a cultured and civil society. Without this influence it quickly becomes clear that “a man is basically a beast, and it's only later that a bit of decency gets smeared on top” (31).
Man cannot survive without a social community. In the absence of family, role-models, and romantic interests, the survival instinct finds more unusual ways to fill the void. One way is to make seemingly unfeeling jokes and fun of their deadly situation, even though “it isn't because we are naturally cheerful that we make jokes, it's just that we keep cheerful because if we didn't, we'd be done for” (101). They throw off many of the morals and taboos which aid the construction of “civilization,” but here are only baggage to weigh them down. Those who would never think of stealing do so here without even missing the non-existent guilt, and the embarrassment of public toilets is a an idea from a past life. “Earlier values don't count any longer. And nobody really knows how things used to be” (191). These are all far-reaching creations of the survival instinct, far removed from the form of man in less threatening environments, but vital here.
But the strongest structure created for the sake of survival is “the best thing that the war produced – comradeship in arms” (19). The bond between the soldiers, in the absence of anyone else to bond with, is as intense as any social bond in non-war conditions. It isn't talked about, just understood, that their fellows are all they have to hold on to, all that gets them through another day without losing all will to live. The feeling that someone is dependent on you just as you depend on him is so vital to the human psyche, especially under such circumstances, that the survival instinct creates it through virtually anyone who is available. The result is that “we have a greater and more gentle consideration for each other than I should think even lovers do. We are two human beings, two tiny sparks of life: outside there is just the night, and all around us, death... Before the war we wouldn't have has a single thought in common – and now here we are... aware of our existence and so close to each other that we can't even talk about it” (68).
While this fraternal bond is the only thing that keeps them alive and feeling like human beings, at the same time it is this bond that blocks their road back to human civilization. It is the common experience, the intense daily stress survived side-by-side that forms the fabric of their lives, and that very experience is something that no one in the “real world” will ever be able to relate to. No one will ever be able to understand these young soldiers, and their awareness of this only pulls them closer together in increasing rejection of the outside world.
Besides the growing disconnection with their former homes, another rejection occurs in the realm of political thought. Previously they had either ignored the political world as irrelevant to their lives, or else taken everything at face value when presented with authority. But suddenly politics has a very real effect on them all, and they begin to question the powers-that-be. They are shocked by the realization that “on some table, a document is signed by some people that none of us knows, and for years our main aim in life is the one thing that usually draws the condemnation of the whole world and incurs its severest punishment in law” (137). From here they are able to begin questioning the leaders of their country, even the Kaiser himself. They start to accept the idea that he is human, that he can be questioned, that he might make mistakes or be motivated by selfishness. The knowledge that “the war has ruined us for everything”(63) further embitters them and further isolates them from their own command. No longer are they content to leave the affairs of the world in the hands of the “bigwigs,” they want to have their own say. Beyond this, however, is a feeling that they've been betrayed by a system they trusted, by an existence they trusted. More powerful than any plan for change or hope of deliverance is the the lasting impression is that “everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren't even able to prevent this river of blood” (186). Their “political awakening,” so to speak, did not motivate them to greater political involvement, but rather further convinced them its futility.
Along with the self-granted permission to question authority came the ability to question the very tenants of their war-time existence. Their sole function as soldiers is to kill the opposing soldiers, despite the dawning realization that they really have no personal motive for doing so beyond the fact that “if we don't destroy them they will destroy us” (83). Their expanded political understanding leads them to the conclusion that war is caused by a few men in high positions, and that “...out here...the wrong people are fighting each other” (29).
They develop almost a sympathy for those on the other side of no-man's land, seeing that in many ways they have all been thrown together into the same mess for no good reason. “It's funny when you think about it... We're out here defending out homeland. And yet the French are there defending their homeland as well. Which of us is right?” (144). Of course these thoughts cut them off even more from their leadership, from their patriotic parents and teachers, and from their former innocent and trusting selves, and pulls them closer together an unusual substitute family.
The ultimate end for the main character Paul is not his physical death, which is little more than a footnote at the end of the book, but rather the loss of his “family,” his fellows. They represent the only community he has left, the last scrap of safety net his survival instinct has been able to hold together, and when that community vanishes then there is nothing left to live for. He feels that if they all could have returned home a year ago, together and strengthened by their common experience, then they could have changed to world with their righteous indignation. But “if we go back now we shall be weary, broken-down, burnt-out, rootless and devoid of hope. We shall no longer be able to cope” (206). It is the loss of comradeship that takes all the life out of Paul, and the shrapnel that later kills him is little more than the physical manifestation of that lifelessness.
Through all this it can be seen how far humans will go to create a close community, and that when absolutely no material for community can be found then the result is dire. For Paul and his fellows, cut off from every other social interaction, they bond with each other to an extent that is inexplicable for anyone who has not experienced war. The thing that makes this account of the war more terrifying than anything else is the loss of that bond, and the destruction of everyone left behind. As Remarque says in his introduction, the purpose of the story is no more or less than to “give an account of a generation that was destroyed by war – even those of it who survived the shelling.” For anyone who is temped to count the cost of war accounting to the statistics of deaths and survivals, it is vital to remember that true war does not allow any survivors at all.
The most extreme example of this phenomenon is human war. Those who must find a way to exist in this most threatening and torturous of environments inevitably create otherwise impossible structures of friendship, manipulations of human nature, irreversible transformations of their thought processes, all to “on living at any price” (100). As is demonstrated in Erich Maria Remarque's book “All Quiet On The Western Front,” this radical process is the only hope for survival.
Here “survival” does not mean physical survival, since all the soldiers quickly come to realize that “it is simply a matter of chance whether I am hit or whether I go on living” (72). The long-term practical effects of the survival instinct in war exist primarily in the social realm. Nowhere else is it so evident that humans are social creatures with a life-and-death need for community.
The first factor to understand is that these young soldiers have been utterly removed from every aspect of their previous social existence. All that they had been taught both directly and indirectly by their previous life was found to be wanting on the battlefield. This means that every foundation and trust of their young minds was shattered to its core. The main character Paul Baumer says of their teachers, parents, and role-models that “we believed in them. In our minds the idea of authority – which is what they represented – implied deeper insights and a more humane wisdom. But the first dead man we saw shattered this conviction” (9). The teacher who pressed them all into the war to begin with, whom they all formerly respected and who had the best of intentions in pushing them to war, is now perceived as being completely morally bankrupt.
The rawness of war, and the essential changes it works on the nature of young men completely severed their connection with any environment that was not war. When visiting home it is painfully obvious to Paul that “I'm sure that I was just like them myself, before: but now I can't find any real point of contact... These people are different” (121). In fact the people are not different at all, it is Paul and his comrades who have completely changed. The way that their survival instincts have completely remade them causes Paul to feel that even if they physically survive the war, still “I don't think we'll ever get home” (62).
Of course other young people experience this feeling without any involvement in a war. But they have other ways to build a new “home” and other social shelters to run to; namely to romance. But on the battlefront there are no women at all, and thus the soldiers are deprived of another “natural” survival mechanism. The absence of the “fairer sex” has as profound an effect on the soldiers as the disconnection from their homes, though it might be subtler. In the book it is most clearly seen when there appears a poster with a beautiful woman on it, and the reaction of two of the young men is a sudden desire to wash themselves, find clean clothes to wear, and make themselves “presentable,” even though they've given no thought to presentability for nearly two years. From this it can be seen how influential women have been on the development of a cultured and civil society. Without this influence it quickly becomes clear that “a man is basically a beast, and it's only later that a bit of decency gets smeared on top” (31).
Man cannot survive without a social community. In the absence of family, role-models, and romantic interests, the survival instinct finds more unusual ways to fill the void. One way is to make seemingly unfeeling jokes and fun of their deadly situation, even though “it isn't because we are naturally cheerful that we make jokes, it's just that we keep cheerful because if we didn't, we'd be done for” (101). They throw off many of the morals and taboos which aid the construction of “civilization,” but here are only baggage to weigh them down. Those who would never think of stealing do so here without even missing the non-existent guilt, and the embarrassment of public toilets is a an idea from a past life. “Earlier values don't count any longer. And nobody really knows how things used to be” (191). These are all far-reaching creations of the survival instinct, far removed from the form of man in less threatening environments, but vital here.
But the strongest structure created for the sake of survival is “the best thing that the war produced – comradeship in arms” (19). The bond between the soldiers, in the absence of anyone else to bond with, is as intense as any social bond in non-war conditions. It isn't talked about, just understood, that their fellows are all they have to hold on to, all that gets them through another day without losing all will to live. The feeling that someone is dependent on you just as you depend on him is so vital to the human psyche, especially under such circumstances, that the survival instinct creates it through virtually anyone who is available. The result is that “we have a greater and more gentle consideration for each other than I should think even lovers do. We are two human beings, two tiny sparks of life: outside there is just the night, and all around us, death... Before the war we wouldn't have has a single thought in common – and now here we are... aware of our existence and so close to each other that we can't even talk about it” (68).
While this fraternal bond is the only thing that keeps them alive and feeling like human beings, at the same time it is this bond that blocks their road back to human civilization. It is the common experience, the intense daily stress survived side-by-side that forms the fabric of their lives, and that very experience is something that no one in the “real world” will ever be able to relate to. No one will ever be able to understand these young soldiers, and their awareness of this only pulls them closer together in increasing rejection of the outside world.
Besides the growing disconnection with their former homes, another rejection occurs in the realm of political thought. Previously they had either ignored the political world as irrelevant to their lives, or else taken everything at face value when presented with authority. But suddenly politics has a very real effect on them all, and they begin to question the powers-that-be. They are shocked by the realization that “on some table, a document is signed by some people that none of us knows, and for years our main aim in life is the one thing that usually draws the condemnation of the whole world and incurs its severest punishment in law” (137). From here they are able to begin questioning the leaders of their country, even the Kaiser himself. They start to accept the idea that he is human, that he can be questioned, that he might make mistakes or be motivated by selfishness. The knowledge that “the war has ruined us for everything”(63) further embitters them and further isolates them from their own command. No longer are they content to leave the affairs of the world in the hands of the “bigwigs,” they want to have their own say. Beyond this, however, is a feeling that they've been betrayed by a system they trusted, by an existence they trusted. More powerful than any plan for change or hope of deliverance is the the lasting impression is that “everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren't even able to prevent this river of blood” (186). Their “political awakening,” so to speak, did not motivate them to greater political involvement, but rather further convinced them its futility.
Along with the self-granted permission to question authority came the ability to question the very tenants of their war-time existence. Their sole function as soldiers is to kill the opposing soldiers, despite the dawning realization that they really have no personal motive for doing so beyond the fact that “if we don't destroy them they will destroy us” (83). Their expanded political understanding leads them to the conclusion that war is caused by a few men in high positions, and that “...out here...the wrong people are fighting each other” (29).
They develop almost a sympathy for those on the other side of no-man's land, seeing that in many ways they have all been thrown together into the same mess for no good reason. “It's funny when you think about it... We're out here defending out homeland. And yet the French are there defending their homeland as well. Which of us is right?” (144). Of course these thoughts cut them off even more from their leadership, from their patriotic parents and teachers, and from their former innocent and trusting selves, and pulls them closer together an unusual substitute family.
The ultimate end for the main character Paul is not his physical death, which is little more than a footnote at the end of the book, but rather the loss of his “family,” his fellows. They represent the only community he has left, the last scrap of safety net his survival instinct has been able to hold together, and when that community vanishes then there is nothing left to live for. He feels that if they all could have returned home a year ago, together and strengthened by their common experience, then they could have changed to world with their righteous indignation. But “if we go back now we shall be weary, broken-down, burnt-out, rootless and devoid of hope. We shall no longer be able to cope” (206). It is the loss of comradeship that takes all the life out of Paul, and the shrapnel that later kills him is little more than the physical manifestation of that lifelessness.
Through all this it can be seen how far humans will go to create a close community, and that when absolutely no material for community can be found then the result is dire. For Paul and his fellows, cut off from every other social interaction, they bond with each other to an extent that is inexplicable for anyone who has not experienced war. The thing that makes this account of the war more terrifying than anything else is the loss of that bond, and the destruction of everyone left behind. As Remarque says in his introduction, the purpose of the story is no more or less than to “give an account of a generation that was destroyed by war – even those of it who survived the shelling.” For anyone who is temped to count the cost of war accounting to the statistics of deaths and survivals, it is vital to remember that true war does not allow any survivors at all.
The Days of the Madman
“I think you cope quite sensible with the difficulty of living. We build useless war machines, towers, walls, curtains of silk, and we could marvel at all this a great deal if we had the time. We tremble in the balance, we don’t fall, we flutter…” (Kafka 45).
Franz Kafka wrote these lines in 1909, from under an atmosphere of intense occupation. This may seem a strange statement to make, since although modern Czech history offers a number of severe political and military occupations, Kafka did not experience them. When he was born in Prague, the Czech lands were part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, which may be called a kind of occupation, except that after 200 years this arrangement was status-quo, and as a German speaker himself Kafka would be expected to have more sympathy with Austria than with the “Czech” nation. So how can it be said that his writing is influenced by an occupation?
In the context of the Czech experience, the word “occupation” wears many masks. It can be applied to the military presence of Nazi Germany during World War II, or to the political influence of Soviet Russia from 1948-1989 (including their own military period, starting in 1968). It could even apply to the cultural oppression of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries. All definitions of the word, however, have two common factors: the existence of an unwelcome outside presence, and the restrictions enforced by that outside presence upon the subject. Under these terms, this essay is aimed at exploring a very different manifestation of the word: the occupation of the psyche.
To begin shedding light on this concept we will leave Kafka for the moment and turn to one of his contemporaries: Gustav Meyrink. In The Golum, Meyrink writes about an individual living in the Jewish Quarter, which in the early 20th century was a ghetto that embodied an atmosphere of extreme claustrophobia, despair, and isolation. The residents were held there by force, meaning that legal, religious, or financial factors strictly prevented them from leaving. Thus stagnation, in every conceivable sense of the word, permeated the ghetto. “The dark, sullen life which clings to this house refuses to leave me in peace, and old images keep looming up inside me” says Athanasius Pernath, the main character of The Golum (Meyrink 13).
When applying the word “occupation” to the Jewish ghetto, it is important to understand that a “psychic occupation” need not be planned or intended by any person or entity. It is necessary only that a foreign (and probably unwanted) presence impose restrictions on the natural course of life. With this in mind it is easier to imagine the ghetto as being under occupation, not by military or political force but by the heavy psychological burden which all inhabitants lived under every day. Their lives and minds were not their own, being held captive by the environment in which they lived. No individual exhibits this better than Mr. Pernath.
Pernath finds himself caught up in a convoluted psychic haunting of the ghetto by an ancient intangible entity, the Golum. The embodied emergence of the Golum is explained as being the result of the long term psychic trauma of the ghetto: “As the electric tension builds past endurance on humid days and at last gives birth to lightning, might not the constant accumulation of the never-changing thoughts which poison the air here in the ghetto inevitably lead to a sudden, fitful discharge? – a psychic explosion which whips our dream-consciousness out into the daylight…” (46).
This “psychic explosion” that is the Golum chooses Pernath as its host, and a second level of occupation occurs in the story as he is gradually possessed by the Golum. As a result of this Pernath’s behavior changes radically, quickly isolating those around him and throwing him into a spiral of thoughts and actions that would certainly invoke the diagnosis of “insanity” from any outside observer. He begins to attribute consciousness to inanimate objects: “Often I dreamed I eavesdropped on these houses’ sinister doings and learned to my horror that they were the true secret masters of the street” (25), he has dreams and visions that are increasingly difficult to separate from reality (even for the reader), and the encounters with the Golum begin to seem more like encounters with himself.
The question is whether it is wholly justifiable to call Pernath’s reaction to this psychological occupation “insanity.” To that end we will turn to another character and another period in Czech literature. In Fuks’ Mr. Theodore Mundstock, there is no need to make a case for the existence of a hostile occupation, as the main character is a Jew during the Nazi reign in Prague. But our interest here is not the physical occupation, but rather the prying into peoples’ psyches, which in this case is very deliberate and intentional.
Mr. Mundstock exhibits seemingly “insane” behavior in two ways, which correspond to the two halves of the book. Indeed, insanity seems to be the driving point of the story, and the first introspective piece of information the main character gives the reader is that “my nerves have gone all to pieces” (Fuks 2). He comes home every day expecting to find a summons for the daily Jewish transport to concentration camps, and he spends every waking moment at home waiting for the decisive knock on his door. He explains his stress about all this to his companion, Mon, and also often receives ridicule from him. Mon, as far as can be determined, is Mr. Mundstock’s shadow personified. The conversations between these two sometimes become so animated as to alert the neighbors, and while Mr. Mundstock puts great effort into ignoring Mon, he isn’t quite strong enough to be left alone.
If Mon were to vanish, Mr. Mundstock would truly be alone (besides the ambiguous bird he keeps as a pet, a relationship which could be an argument for insanity in itself!). His reportedly active social life before the invasion has shriveled into little more than furtive glances and secret, whispered meetings. This applies to all members of the Jewish community, who live in fear of drawing attention to themselves or of implicating a friend by their presence. There is no law specifically which states that Jews must remain hidden behind locked doors and dart quietly from shadow to shadow, but the constant fear and dread enforces this behavior as firmly as any chains could. They realize that “we have been flung into a terrible hell” (95), but the whispers of news from the concentration camps constantly reminds them that a single knock on the door could trigger much worst.
It is in this environment that Mr. Mundstock has endowed his shadow with a personality which he is no longer able to control. He can talk to Mon, ignore him, but he cannot uncreate him. Clearly this is not sane behavior, but can we blame him? Stripped of all traditional and healthy social interaction, he has adapted an imaginative solution to his need. And in this we hit upon a crucial point.
Often we hear that mankind is the most adaptable creature of the animal kingdom, being able to adapt to life in nearly any environment this planet can throw at us, and for this reason we dominate the globe. In a physical sense this might be true, but in our progression we have also developed a vulnerability to a metaphysical environment of which the animals need know nothing. Our needs within this metaphysical realm are many, and while they may vary slightly from person to person it is vital that they not be underestimated. For example, while there are animals that lead a social existence, there is no other creature that relies so fundamentally on communication that the lack of interaction becomes a question of life or death. Other needs (those which will be addressed here) besides social interaction include a sense of place in time, and hope (in one form or another), among many others. These metaphysical needs are so absolute that man is utterly unable to adapt to life without them, just as our lungs cannot adapt to life on the moon. Rather, the reaction is to drastically adapt our perception of the very fabric of reality until it becomes bearable. If we cannot successfully fool ourselves into believing that those needs are being met, then we whither and die.
In this light it becomes more difficult to label Mr. Mundstock as being insane. The military occupation has deprived him of all meaningful interaction, and in so doing has forced its way into his psyche. He must have human contact, or perish (and the number of suicides amongst his friends confirms the reality of this threat). The restrictions placed on him press from all sides except one. Every traditional and accepted path to social interaction has been systematically blocked, but there is no way (or need) to block the full extent of human creativity. Mr. Mundstock takes the only road left to him, the road that fulfills his needs through a detachment from reality. After all, “there was probably nothing on earth that you couldn’t explain away if you found the right reason” (35), and he has found the right reasons to explain away the fact that it is impossible to have a real conversation with one’s shadow. That reason is a life-or-death need for companionship. In truth he is not insane, but merely following his logical survival instincts in an insane environment. However, he goes on to provide further grounds for suspicion!
When Mr. Mundstock becomes more certain that his summons to the concentration camp is coming soon, he begins to panic, and another need quietly rises to the forefront: “The worse thing of all is to lose hope” (8). Hope, too, has been systematically and deliberately barricaded in every conceivable way. But suddenly he is struck with the thought that “method and a practical approach could save him” (111). He begins to put himself through a rigorous training routine, practicing not sleeping, not eating, doing hard labor, etc. This is clearly madness, since being prepared for a bullet will not save anyone from it. And as he vividly imagines watching his closest friends being dragged to the camps and beaten, coolly taking notes in a very “practical” manner, then the reader is left with no question as to his slipping hold on sanity. But this would be taking Mr. Mundstock at face value, for while he thinks that the purpose of these actions is to survive the camps, the subconscious and true goal is to acquire a reason to hope.
Mr. Mundstock’s callousness is appalling, and the extent to which he drowns himself in his hallucinations is disturbing. But as he himself says: “Where can you turn for strength? I don’t blame people for escaping into dreams, I don’t. You’ve got to find a refuge somewhere. How can we just go on holding out?” (153). This is the mark of the occupied psyche; he is so confined that he is unable to go on in any socially acceptable way. It forces him to a choice: a despairing death, or a disengagement from reality that equates to madness. More often then not the end result is both. There’s no question that “there are thoughts that crush” (17). In the end, after the enormous struggle for survival, Mr. Mundstock is prepared, and while crossing the street to join a transport to the concentration camps he is hit by a truck and killed instantly. The Nazis did they work thoroughly, systematically pursuing and claiming his companionship, hope, time, sanity, and finally his life.
Now we can step back to Pernath and the Golum, whom we left awaiting our verdict on his sanity. His psyche has also been invaded, pried open, and occupied by the deep communal distress of the ghetto. Before any serious entanglement with the Golum, this atmosphere had restricted his options and actions, even blocking the road to certain essential metaphysical needs. These needs rise to the surface of his consciousness, and he becomes nearly obsessed with what another Czech author of a different period of occupation called “the unbearable lightness of being” (Kundera). Seeing the wind catch up a piece of paper and wave it around in the air, Pernath wonders: “What if, in the end, we living creatures too are something like those scraps of paper? – Might an invisible, ungraspable wind chase us back and forth as well, determining our actions, while we in our innocence think ourselves governed by our own free will?” (Meyrink 41).
This notion becomes even more frightening for him as he begins to realize that he has no knowledge of his past, that almost all memories had been blocked to protect him from some tremendous trauma. That lack of memory was “making me homeless amidst the life surrounding me” (52). A man with no knowledge of the past, no hope for the future, and no link to the present desires one thing, connection. He longs to be a part of the time and space he inhabits, to know that he exists by the impact his life has on the people around him, and to affect something, anything, in the formation of the future.
This is the need, and all the restrictions of his environment are aimed against him achieving it. The solution (whether of his own psychological creation or simply a rare opportunity that appeared just in time to save him from devastation) is the insane behavior involving the Golum. The Golum embodies the tortured consciousness of the entire Jewish community, and through their surreal interaction Pernath obtains a connection to his time and place. He sees a vision of many faces “on through the centuries, until the features grew more and more familiar to me and converged in one last face: the face of the Golum, ending the procession of my forebears” (144). As abstract, untraditional, and “insane” as this connection might be, that is precisely the point. Psychological occupation leaves room for nothing else.
In prison Pernath meets another man who has shared some of his experiences with the Golum. This individual has been taken to the extreme of committing murder while under the influence of the Golum, but he coolly accepts this in a way that seems like madness even to Pernath. His response is instructive: “But I am not mad. I am something quite different – something which closely resembles madness, but is its exact opposite” (238). Although it is taking his statement slightly out of context, these words eloquently communicate one point of this essay: the bitter irony of psychological occupation is that the insanity it produces springs from an entirely logical reaction to the circumstances. The most irrational deeds can be understood as absolutely imperative when taken in the context of the significance of mankind’s metaphysical needs.
At last we are prepared to return to Kafka. The quote at the beginning of this essay comes from the short story “A Description of a Struggle,” and a quick perusal of the story should reveal its similarities with the other pieces of literature already examined. In regards to the presence of insane behavior, the story jumps from one restless hallucination to the next and switches suddenly between narrators without warning. Concerning the analysis of this story, it would be difficult to even separate the characters from one another and determine what their behavior actually is, much less what needs provoke it. In fact one must wonder if the author himself is not under some sever psychological occupation, and this is where it fits.
Kafka lived in the ghetto at the same time that Meyrink was writing about it. In fact if Pernath had been a writer, we could imagine him producing something similar to Kafka’s works. Kafka was also a German speaking Jew in the Czech lands, a condition that much increased his feelings of isolation and oppression. His writing was a compulsion, his own creative way of addressing a need within him. And anyone who can write about a man waking up to discover that he has become a giant beetle is no stranger to the accusation of insanity. Therefore it is an easy jump to hypothesize that he was driven to this form of expression by a psychological occupation, the same plague which weighed on Fuks, Meyrink, Kundera, and many other principles of Czech literature.
Without going into unnecessary details, the very elements that can be identified as “insane” in Kafka’s works point to the driving force behind them; that is, a feeling of isolation and lack of intimacy, and a need to communicate those feelings. Seen in this light, Kafka becomes not nearly so Kafkaesque. After all, as he himself says, in an insane environment that restricts the natural course of the pursuit of needs, insane behavior is the only way to “cope quite sensible with the difficulty of living” (Kafka 45).
Mankind has shown itself capable of momentous things, of mobilizing mighty armies and sweeping across continents, of digging deep into the human consciousness and turning a man into a puppet, of building cities for vast masses and altering the very structure of the earth. Even though these things might be worthy of wonder, Kafka calls them “useless.” They fall on the well paved path that we have used for centuries to fulfill our needs of social intimacy, of hope, of meaning, and the road has been transformed into a battlefield full of mines and barbed wire. The human response to the dehumanizing effects of the modern age, thus far, has not been to strengthen ourselves for the fight, to charge into battle, or even to adapt to a new way of life in this distorted landscape. Even if this would end in disaster, it would be an act of courage and determination to fight and fall heavily. But no, “we don’t fall” (45); our response has been to wander bewildered across the land, tip-toeing from shadow to shadow, losing our minds to save our lives. Thus “we tremble in the balance…we flutter” (45).
It is safe to say that the human race is not as strong as we would like to think, not as prepared to adapt and overcome any obstacle. The rising frequency and strength of psychological occupations in last hundred years of turbulent history is frightening, especially when one gains an understanding of how effortless it can be for this condition to be put into effect. The effects are such that even our defenses are self-destructive, and defeat is fatal either physically or metaphysically.
Also instructive is the realization of how frail and dependent our psyches really are. The emotional and philosophical needs of our species are not luxury items that we can learn to live without. They are of mortal significance, so that our instincts will drive us to the very edge of sanity and beyond in search of these that we rarely notice until we lack them. As the world shrinks, as pressure on our instinctive way of life increases, our environment will become more and more reminiscent of the Jewish ghetto, and our desperation will likely lead us to new levels of “madness.” Kafka’s premonition of the future, of the increased restrictions imposed by the psychological occupation of this modern age, is even more chilling: “One day everyone wanting to live will look like me – cut out of tissue paper, like silhouettes… – and when they walk they will be heard to rustle” (38). In the words of Fuks, “this [is] nowadays, the days of the madman” (Fuks 118).
Franz Kafka wrote these lines in 1909, from under an atmosphere of intense occupation. This may seem a strange statement to make, since although modern Czech history offers a number of severe political and military occupations, Kafka did not experience them. When he was born in Prague, the Czech lands were part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, which may be called a kind of occupation, except that after 200 years this arrangement was status-quo, and as a German speaker himself Kafka would be expected to have more sympathy with Austria than with the “Czech” nation. So how can it be said that his writing is influenced by an occupation?
In the context of the Czech experience, the word “occupation” wears many masks. It can be applied to the military presence of Nazi Germany during World War II, or to the political influence of Soviet Russia from 1948-1989 (including their own military period, starting in 1968). It could even apply to the cultural oppression of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries. All definitions of the word, however, have two common factors: the existence of an unwelcome outside presence, and the restrictions enforced by that outside presence upon the subject. Under these terms, this essay is aimed at exploring a very different manifestation of the word: the occupation of the psyche.
To begin shedding light on this concept we will leave Kafka for the moment and turn to one of his contemporaries: Gustav Meyrink. In The Golum, Meyrink writes about an individual living in the Jewish Quarter, which in the early 20th century was a ghetto that embodied an atmosphere of extreme claustrophobia, despair, and isolation. The residents were held there by force, meaning that legal, religious, or financial factors strictly prevented them from leaving. Thus stagnation, in every conceivable sense of the word, permeated the ghetto. “The dark, sullen life which clings to this house refuses to leave me in peace, and old images keep looming up inside me” says Athanasius Pernath, the main character of The Golum (Meyrink 13).
When applying the word “occupation” to the Jewish ghetto, it is important to understand that a “psychic occupation” need not be planned or intended by any person or entity. It is necessary only that a foreign (and probably unwanted) presence impose restrictions on the natural course of life. With this in mind it is easier to imagine the ghetto as being under occupation, not by military or political force but by the heavy psychological burden which all inhabitants lived under every day. Their lives and minds were not their own, being held captive by the environment in which they lived. No individual exhibits this better than Mr. Pernath.
Pernath finds himself caught up in a convoluted psychic haunting of the ghetto by an ancient intangible entity, the Golum. The embodied emergence of the Golum is explained as being the result of the long term psychic trauma of the ghetto: “As the electric tension builds past endurance on humid days and at last gives birth to lightning, might not the constant accumulation of the never-changing thoughts which poison the air here in the ghetto inevitably lead to a sudden, fitful discharge? – a psychic explosion which whips our dream-consciousness out into the daylight…” (46).
This “psychic explosion” that is the Golum chooses Pernath as its host, and a second level of occupation occurs in the story as he is gradually possessed by the Golum. As a result of this Pernath’s behavior changes radically, quickly isolating those around him and throwing him into a spiral of thoughts and actions that would certainly invoke the diagnosis of “insanity” from any outside observer. He begins to attribute consciousness to inanimate objects: “Often I dreamed I eavesdropped on these houses’ sinister doings and learned to my horror that they were the true secret masters of the street” (25), he has dreams and visions that are increasingly difficult to separate from reality (even for the reader), and the encounters with the Golum begin to seem more like encounters with himself.
The question is whether it is wholly justifiable to call Pernath’s reaction to this psychological occupation “insanity.” To that end we will turn to another character and another period in Czech literature. In Fuks’ Mr. Theodore Mundstock, there is no need to make a case for the existence of a hostile occupation, as the main character is a Jew during the Nazi reign in Prague. But our interest here is not the physical occupation, but rather the prying into peoples’ psyches, which in this case is very deliberate and intentional.
Mr. Mundstock exhibits seemingly “insane” behavior in two ways, which correspond to the two halves of the book. Indeed, insanity seems to be the driving point of the story, and the first introspective piece of information the main character gives the reader is that “my nerves have gone all to pieces” (Fuks 2). He comes home every day expecting to find a summons for the daily Jewish transport to concentration camps, and he spends every waking moment at home waiting for the decisive knock on his door. He explains his stress about all this to his companion, Mon, and also often receives ridicule from him. Mon, as far as can be determined, is Mr. Mundstock’s shadow personified. The conversations between these two sometimes become so animated as to alert the neighbors, and while Mr. Mundstock puts great effort into ignoring Mon, he isn’t quite strong enough to be left alone.
If Mon were to vanish, Mr. Mundstock would truly be alone (besides the ambiguous bird he keeps as a pet, a relationship which could be an argument for insanity in itself!). His reportedly active social life before the invasion has shriveled into little more than furtive glances and secret, whispered meetings. This applies to all members of the Jewish community, who live in fear of drawing attention to themselves or of implicating a friend by their presence. There is no law specifically which states that Jews must remain hidden behind locked doors and dart quietly from shadow to shadow, but the constant fear and dread enforces this behavior as firmly as any chains could. They realize that “we have been flung into a terrible hell” (95), but the whispers of news from the concentration camps constantly reminds them that a single knock on the door could trigger much worst.
It is in this environment that Mr. Mundstock has endowed his shadow with a personality which he is no longer able to control. He can talk to Mon, ignore him, but he cannot uncreate him. Clearly this is not sane behavior, but can we blame him? Stripped of all traditional and healthy social interaction, he has adapted an imaginative solution to his need. And in this we hit upon a crucial point.
Often we hear that mankind is the most adaptable creature of the animal kingdom, being able to adapt to life in nearly any environment this planet can throw at us, and for this reason we dominate the globe. In a physical sense this might be true, but in our progression we have also developed a vulnerability to a metaphysical environment of which the animals need know nothing. Our needs within this metaphysical realm are many, and while they may vary slightly from person to person it is vital that they not be underestimated. For example, while there are animals that lead a social existence, there is no other creature that relies so fundamentally on communication that the lack of interaction becomes a question of life or death. Other needs (those which will be addressed here) besides social interaction include a sense of place in time, and hope (in one form or another), among many others. These metaphysical needs are so absolute that man is utterly unable to adapt to life without them, just as our lungs cannot adapt to life on the moon. Rather, the reaction is to drastically adapt our perception of the very fabric of reality until it becomes bearable. If we cannot successfully fool ourselves into believing that those needs are being met, then we whither and die.
In this light it becomes more difficult to label Mr. Mundstock as being insane. The military occupation has deprived him of all meaningful interaction, and in so doing has forced its way into his psyche. He must have human contact, or perish (and the number of suicides amongst his friends confirms the reality of this threat). The restrictions placed on him press from all sides except one. Every traditional and accepted path to social interaction has been systematically blocked, but there is no way (or need) to block the full extent of human creativity. Mr. Mundstock takes the only road left to him, the road that fulfills his needs through a detachment from reality. After all, “there was probably nothing on earth that you couldn’t explain away if you found the right reason” (35), and he has found the right reasons to explain away the fact that it is impossible to have a real conversation with one’s shadow. That reason is a life-or-death need for companionship. In truth he is not insane, but merely following his logical survival instincts in an insane environment. However, he goes on to provide further grounds for suspicion!
When Mr. Mundstock becomes more certain that his summons to the concentration camp is coming soon, he begins to panic, and another need quietly rises to the forefront: “The worse thing of all is to lose hope” (8). Hope, too, has been systematically and deliberately barricaded in every conceivable way. But suddenly he is struck with the thought that “method and a practical approach could save him” (111). He begins to put himself through a rigorous training routine, practicing not sleeping, not eating, doing hard labor, etc. This is clearly madness, since being prepared for a bullet will not save anyone from it. And as he vividly imagines watching his closest friends being dragged to the camps and beaten, coolly taking notes in a very “practical” manner, then the reader is left with no question as to his slipping hold on sanity. But this would be taking Mr. Mundstock at face value, for while he thinks that the purpose of these actions is to survive the camps, the subconscious and true goal is to acquire a reason to hope.
Mr. Mundstock’s callousness is appalling, and the extent to which he drowns himself in his hallucinations is disturbing. But as he himself says: “Where can you turn for strength? I don’t blame people for escaping into dreams, I don’t. You’ve got to find a refuge somewhere. How can we just go on holding out?” (153). This is the mark of the occupied psyche; he is so confined that he is unable to go on in any socially acceptable way. It forces him to a choice: a despairing death, or a disengagement from reality that equates to madness. More often then not the end result is both. There’s no question that “there are thoughts that crush” (17). In the end, after the enormous struggle for survival, Mr. Mundstock is prepared, and while crossing the street to join a transport to the concentration camps he is hit by a truck and killed instantly. The Nazis did they work thoroughly, systematically pursuing and claiming his companionship, hope, time, sanity, and finally his life.
Now we can step back to Pernath and the Golum, whom we left awaiting our verdict on his sanity. His psyche has also been invaded, pried open, and occupied by the deep communal distress of the ghetto. Before any serious entanglement with the Golum, this atmosphere had restricted his options and actions, even blocking the road to certain essential metaphysical needs. These needs rise to the surface of his consciousness, and he becomes nearly obsessed with what another Czech author of a different period of occupation called “the unbearable lightness of being” (Kundera). Seeing the wind catch up a piece of paper and wave it around in the air, Pernath wonders: “What if, in the end, we living creatures too are something like those scraps of paper? – Might an invisible, ungraspable wind chase us back and forth as well, determining our actions, while we in our innocence think ourselves governed by our own free will?” (Meyrink 41).
This notion becomes even more frightening for him as he begins to realize that he has no knowledge of his past, that almost all memories had been blocked to protect him from some tremendous trauma. That lack of memory was “making me homeless amidst the life surrounding me” (52). A man with no knowledge of the past, no hope for the future, and no link to the present desires one thing, connection. He longs to be a part of the time and space he inhabits, to know that he exists by the impact his life has on the people around him, and to affect something, anything, in the formation of the future.
This is the need, and all the restrictions of his environment are aimed against him achieving it. The solution (whether of his own psychological creation or simply a rare opportunity that appeared just in time to save him from devastation) is the insane behavior involving the Golum. The Golum embodies the tortured consciousness of the entire Jewish community, and through their surreal interaction Pernath obtains a connection to his time and place. He sees a vision of many faces “on through the centuries, until the features grew more and more familiar to me and converged in one last face: the face of the Golum, ending the procession of my forebears” (144). As abstract, untraditional, and “insane” as this connection might be, that is precisely the point. Psychological occupation leaves room for nothing else.
In prison Pernath meets another man who has shared some of his experiences with the Golum. This individual has been taken to the extreme of committing murder while under the influence of the Golum, but he coolly accepts this in a way that seems like madness even to Pernath. His response is instructive: “But I am not mad. I am something quite different – something which closely resembles madness, but is its exact opposite” (238). Although it is taking his statement slightly out of context, these words eloquently communicate one point of this essay: the bitter irony of psychological occupation is that the insanity it produces springs from an entirely logical reaction to the circumstances. The most irrational deeds can be understood as absolutely imperative when taken in the context of the significance of mankind’s metaphysical needs.
At last we are prepared to return to Kafka. The quote at the beginning of this essay comes from the short story “A Description of a Struggle,” and a quick perusal of the story should reveal its similarities with the other pieces of literature already examined. In regards to the presence of insane behavior, the story jumps from one restless hallucination to the next and switches suddenly between narrators without warning. Concerning the analysis of this story, it would be difficult to even separate the characters from one another and determine what their behavior actually is, much less what needs provoke it. In fact one must wonder if the author himself is not under some sever psychological occupation, and this is where it fits.
Kafka lived in the ghetto at the same time that Meyrink was writing about it. In fact if Pernath had been a writer, we could imagine him producing something similar to Kafka’s works. Kafka was also a German speaking Jew in the Czech lands, a condition that much increased his feelings of isolation and oppression. His writing was a compulsion, his own creative way of addressing a need within him. And anyone who can write about a man waking up to discover that he has become a giant beetle is no stranger to the accusation of insanity. Therefore it is an easy jump to hypothesize that he was driven to this form of expression by a psychological occupation, the same plague which weighed on Fuks, Meyrink, Kundera, and many other principles of Czech literature.
Without going into unnecessary details, the very elements that can be identified as “insane” in Kafka’s works point to the driving force behind them; that is, a feeling of isolation and lack of intimacy, and a need to communicate those feelings. Seen in this light, Kafka becomes not nearly so Kafkaesque. After all, as he himself says, in an insane environment that restricts the natural course of the pursuit of needs, insane behavior is the only way to “cope quite sensible with the difficulty of living” (Kafka 45).
Mankind has shown itself capable of momentous things, of mobilizing mighty armies and sweeping across continents, of digging deep into the human consciousness and turning a man into a puppet, of building cities for vast masses and altering the very structure of the earth. Even though these things might be worthy of wonder, Kafka calls them “useless.” They fall on the well paved path that we have used for centuries to fulfill our needs of social intimacy, of hope, of meaning, and the road has been transformed into a battlefield full of mines and barbed wire. The human response to the dehumanizing effects of the modern age, thus far, has not been to strengthen ourselves for the fight, to charge into battle, or even to adapt to a new way of life in this distorted landscape. Even if this would end in disaster, it would be an act of courage and determination to fight and fall heavily. But no, “we don’t fall” (45); our response has been to wander bewildered across the land, tip-toeing from shadow to shadow, losing our minds to save our lives. Thus “we tremble in the balance…we flutter” (45).
It is safe to say that the human race is not as strong as we would like to think, not as prepared to adapt and overcome any obstacle. The rising frequency and strength of psychological occupations in last hundred years of turbulent history is frightening, especially when one gains an understanding of how effortless it can be for this condition to be put into effect. The effects are such that even our defenses are self-destructive, and defeat is fatal either physically or metaphysically.
Also instructive is the realization of how frail and dependent our psyches really are. The emotional and philosophical needs of our species are not luxury items that we can learn to live without. They are of mortal significance, so that our instincts will drive us to the very edge of sanity and beyond in search of these that we rarely notice until we lack them. As the world shrinks, as pressure on our instinctive way of life increases, our environment will become more and more reminiscent of the Jewish ghetto, and our desperation will likely lead us to new levels of “madness.” Kafka’s premonition of the future, of the increased restrictions imposed by the psychological occupation of this modern age, is even more chilling: “One day everyone wanting to live will look like me – cut out of tissue paper, like silhouettes… – and when they walk they will be heard to rustle” (38). In the words of Fuks, “this [is] nowadays, the days of the madman” (Fuks 118).
A Long Road Home
Exactly one month ago, On November 10th, 2007, a demonstration of a Neo-Nazi political group took place in the center of Prague. While the reported intention was to protest the war in Iraq, the date is telling: it is the anniversary of Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), when in 1938 Jewish homes and shops were ransacked across Germany and Austria by Nazis, who killed more than 100 Jews. The Neo-Nazis last month were met by thousands of protestors who blocked the planned march through Old Town Square and shouted down their speakers. One leader of the Neo-Nazis shouted at the crowd of protestors that “there never was a Holocaust, but there will be one!”
The reaction to this demonstration shows that people have not forgotten the lessons of history, but the fact that the event took place at all shows that we will never completely escape the risk of history repeating itself. This is an especially potent truth for one of the protestors who blocked the Neo-Nazis on Old Town Square, 87 year old Jan Weiner. Jan was a young Jewish man when the Nazis first occupied Czechoslovakia, and he lived to experienced first-hand many of the trials and sorrows of the Czech people throughout the 20th century. He now teaches 20th century European history to foreign students in Prague, which is where I met him and have had the privilege of studying under him for the past four months.
Jan was born and spent his childhood in German, where his father worked. In face of the rise of Nazi anti-Semitic sentiment in the early 30s the family moved back to their native land, hoping that there they would be safe from the growing storm. Jan quickly connected with the Czech people, attended a Czech school, became very involved with the Sokol movement (as did most of the young people at this time), and “learned to love the country and the people who had given us – and many other refugees – asylum and a new home” (Weiner 1). Jan’s mother worked closely with immigrants such as Remarque, who fled Germany to Prague, where they were granted asylum and Czechoslovak citizenship. It might be this very work which proved disastrous for Mrs. Weiner a few years later.
With the annexation of Austria in 1938, and observing the covetous rhetoric of Hitler directed at the Sudetenland boarder regions of Czechoslovakia, the Czech people began bracing themselves for a struggle. The Sokol movement, a national fitness society designed to encourage physical and mental strength as well as nationalistic and community sentiment, was a significant conductor of determination to resist German encroachment. As tensions rose, Czechoslovakia mobilized in 1938. Jan, and most of his young friends, volunteered for the army and were sent to the Krkonoše mountains bordering Germany, where they expected to engage the Germans at any moment. But the Czech fire for resistance was extinguished on September 29th, 1938, when France and England acknowledged German’s right to occupy Sudetenland. When the support of their former western allies suddenly evaporated, there was no hope in armed resistance, so Jan and the rest of the young soldiers were called back to Prague and the Germans took ownership of a massive swath of Czechoslovak land.
As the optimism swiftly deteriorated the atmosphere turned gloomy. In less than 6 months the Nazis violated the Munich Agreement and militarily occupied Prague and the rest of Czechoslovakia. Although crowds of Czechs came out to watch the German tanks rolling by “no one shouted. Through the steadily-falling snowflakes one could only hear the engines...” (4). And before armed combat was sparked anywhere, the war began in Czechoslovakia. All legal rights of Jews were abolished, and in light of the Kristallnacht their future looked grim. Thanks to the help of his mother’s connections, Jan was able to acquire a fake passport and escape to join his father in Yugoslavia. His mother remained.
In the film “The Fighter,” a documentary of Jan’s life, the camera follow Jan as he returns to a house in Yugoslavia, 60 years after he and his father lived there. While they waited to see what would happen, the disaster struck. Poland fell to the Nazis, then France, and in April 1941 the Nazis quickly surrounded Yugoslavia and occupied it. Jan and his father were trapped. That night in despair his father told him that he intended to kill himself. “The Fighter” shows a scene in which Jan stands over the bed where decades ago he watched his father breathe his last, remembering the panic rising in his chest. Afterwards 20 year old Jan snuck out the window, and made it to Lublyana, where he found a place to hide out for a week. He then caught a train and traveled underneath the cabin for dozens of hours across the northern length of Italy. In Genoa he was caught and threatened with being sent back to Prague. “If you do that,” he shouted, “it would be kinder and cheaper to shoot me right here! I will certainly be shot in Prague!” (55). In the end the Italians put him in one of their own prisoner camps in Southern Italy, which made him feel “delighted.” He would spend 2 years in an Italian prison.
During these two years back in Prague conditions grew steadily worse, and Jan was definitely right to feel delighted at being imprisoned in Italy. Jews were deported daily from Prague, mainly to the concentration camp in the north, Theresienstadt, before they were sent to Auschwitz or Mauthausen for extermination. All Jews expected their deportation papers at any moment, and the slightest miss-step could instantly cause fatal attention to fall upon them. Social interaction largely ceased, and most Czechs, especially Jews, were pushed into a survival-mode of life, unable to be concerned about anything else except getting through another day alive.
There was, however, a small but very professional resistance movement, built most significantly around the double-agent “A-54,” and reporting directly to president-in-exile Beneš in London. A-54 was Paul Thummel, a high ranking German undercover spy in Prague, who for some reason decided to turn double-agent and report his knowledge of highly classified information to the Czech resistance. He reported detailed information predicting the invasion of France, the German betrayal of Russia, and the invasion of Britain. When Beneš (and Churchill) realized what a powerful advantage they had in A-54, there was much more motivation to support and build up the Czech resistance from London. Czech soldiers were specially trained in espionage, explosives, and assassination, and were parachuted at great risk into Czechoslovakia to bolster the Prague underground movement.
At the same time the Nazi leadership began to realize that they had a serious leak of information in Prague, and none other that Reinhard Heydrich decided to take care of the situation himself. He arrived in Prague in September 1941, and lost very little time breaking down the resistance. In his first week “163 people were sentenced to death and 718 to concentration camps,” and after two weeks he wrote Hitler that “approximately 5,000 people have been arrested...” (44). This reign of terror was brought to the attention of Beneš, who for a long time had considered the benefits of arranging for the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi by the Czech underground. Now he knew who the target should be.
Two specially trained soldiers of the Czech army in London, Gabchik and Kubish, were parachuted in and made contact with the Czech resistance leaders. After many delays and complications, and after A-54 had already been captured and sent to Theresienstadt, in May 1942 they were ready. They knew the exact place and hour when Heydrich’s car would come around a hair-pin turn, and so they lay in wait. But as the car came around the corner and Gabchik aimed his gun, the trigger jammed. Kubish leaped into action and threw a tank grenade into the car, which exploded but only wounded Heydrich, who drew his pistol along with his driver and began firing on the would-be assassins. Kubish and Gabchik had to flee.
While the attack was a disaster from the perspective of the paratroopers, in the end it was successful. Several days later Heydrich suddenly died in the hospital, possibly from blood-poisoning. But whether the entire plan was a “success” is another question. The reprisal was terrible.
In the former location of the village Lidice there today stands a statue depicting the 98 children who lived there in 1942. They look frightened and bewildered, as they must have looked on the night of June 9th. Acting on specific instructions from Hitler himself, German troops surrounded this tiny village and raided it without warning. Every person was dragged out into the night, the buildings set on fire, and 173 men shot. The women and children were almost all sent to Theresienstadt. The village was erased from all maps. The point was impossible to misunderstand: Hitler had the power to cause whole villages to cease to exist, and for every assassinated leader he would kill thousands.
In Prague martial law was enforced, and Hitler himself ordered that 10,000 Czech suspects should be arrested and all political prisoners be shot (98). The “shock and awe” effect of the persecution was more brutal and effective than anything Heydrich had ever initiated. The Czech resistance was completely decimated, and thousands of civilians were shot outright or sent to concentration camps.
For a while the two assassins and five other paratroopers were able to hide in the crypt of the Karel Boromaeus Greek Orthodox Church. This church stands on Pštrossova street, a few houses away from where I now live. The paratroopers kept constant guard, slept in the tombs, and tried not to despair over the torture that they felt they had unleashed on the Czech people. They were protected by four priests, and for a while they were safe. Then another British-trained paratrooper, Karel Curda, who had been hiding in the countryside, suddenly turned himself over to the Gestapo and agreed to give them all the information he had on the assassins. Maybe he truly believed the Nazi promise that the civilian executions would stop if the assassins were found, or maybe he was motivated by the one million German mark reward. Whatever the case, his cooperation led directly to the discovery of the secret crypt. A fierce battle of several hours took place between the 7 paratroopers and hundreds of German soldiers. One the side of the stone church the damage from machine-gun fire has been left as a tribute to that struggle. Each of the paratroopers fought fiercely until one by one they had only one bullet, which they used to kill themselves. These final seven shots signaled the total death of the Prague resistance movement. On the church today there is a plaque which reads “in memory of the members of the CS abroad army, who here lay down their lives for our freedom...”
In the fallout of Heydrich’s assassination, one of the casualties was Jan’s mother. While he has no specific information about her death, she was most likely transported to Theresienstadt. There Jan leads several class trips every year, pointing out the women’s quarters (where he refuses to go after the first visit with his daughter), the hundreds of graves of unknown victims (one of which may be his mother’s), and the train tracks that lead to Auschwitz (where she might have been sent). Seeing the camp through his eyes, there are weary and silent ghosts around every corner. At the end of every tour he has the ritual of sitting by the gate and ordering a shot of vodka. He salutes in the direction of the women’s quarters, and drinks to his mother’s memory.
In the past Jan used to invite one of the survivors of Lidice to his classes, until she died several years ago. When asked if the assassination of Heydrich should have taken place, she said “No, a thousand times no!” “But,” says Jan to us today, “but I think it was right.” Many people feel that without this display of Czech resistance, it is unlikely that the western powers would have recognized the Czechs as a nation unto itself. This was Beneš’s thought from the beginning, and whether the good outweighed the bad is a question no will ever be able to answer.
In September 1943 Jan escaped the Italian prison and was rescued by the Allied forces coming up from the south. He managed to join the Czech army in London and became a navigator for the R.A.F. He flew twenty-four bombing missions over France, Germany, and Holland, each of which was a life-and-death adventure in itself. In September 1945 he was finally able to return to Prague, though not to his life. Nothing and no one was left for him there, and at the age of 23 he had to build a new life from scratch. Before he could really make progress, however, his time spent in the West came to haunt him, as he was accused by the Communist government of “anti-state and anti-peoples’ attitudes,” and was sent to a labor camp in Kladno. But that’s another story.
Jan Weiner’s experience during the years of WWII is certainly not the typical holocaust survivor story. However, he experienced suicide, murder, prison, sickness, isolation, despair, and an environment of constant tension, and each one of these is an intrinsic elements in the Jewish experience of this time period. Even though he escaped Czechoslovakia and survived, no one can say that he got off easy.
So while for many it’s simply a statistic to hear that the holocaust killed 277,000 Czechoslovak Jews and 5,821,000 Jews total (Encyclopedia Judaica), for Jan it’s as personal as it can get. His father and mother are listed in that number, and he himself nearly lost his life many times.
In another 10 years there will be almost no WWII veterans left alive, and that is why it is so important to listen to them, to make a practice of telling their stories, so that their witness will remain among us in spirit. Only then will we be able to recognize the threat of history repeating itself and be prepared to block the way. “Could the holocaust happen again?” Jan answers a student’s question. “Yes, I believe it can happen again, but first we must forget.” Let us hope that we never forget.
Sources:
Books:
Jan G. Weiner, The Assassination of Heydrich, Grossman Publishing, New York, 1969.
Encyclopedia Judaica (http://www.rossel.net/Holocaust00.htm)
Film:
“The Fighter” directed by Amir Bar-Lev, 2000
Primary information:
Discussions with and lectures of Jan Weiner
Visits to:
Terezin
The Karel Boromaeus Greek Orthodox Church
Lidice
The reaction to this demonstration shows that people have not forgotten the lessons of history, but the fact that the event took place at all shows that we will never completely escape the risk of history repeating itself. This is an especially potent truth for one of the protestors who blocked the Neo-Nazis on Old Town Square, 87 year old Jan Weiner. Jan was a young Jewish man when the Nazis first occupied Czechoslovakia, and he lived to experienced first-hand many of the trials and sorrows of the Czech people throughout the 20th century. He now teaches 20th century European history to foreign students in Prague, which is where I met him and have had the privilege of studying under him for the past four months.
Jan was born and spent his childhood in German, where his father worked. In face of the rise of Nazi anti-Semitic sentiment in the early 30s the family moved back to their native land, hoping that there they would be safe from the growing storm. Jan quickly connected with the Czech people, attended a Czech school, became very involved with the Sokol movement (as did most of the young people at this time), and “learned to love the country and the people who had given us – and many other refugees – asylum and a new home” (Weiner 1). Jan’s mother worked closely with immigrants such as Remarque, who fled Germany to Prague, where they were granted asylum and Czechoslovak citizenship. It might be this very work which proved disastrous for Mrs. Weiner a few years later.
With the annexation of Austria in 1938, and observing the covetous rhetoric of Hitler directed at the Sudetenland boarder regions of Czechoslovakia, the Czech people began bracing themselves for a struggle. The Sokol movement, a national fitness society designed to encourage physical and mental strength as well as nationalistic and community sentiment, was a significant conductor of determination to resist German encroachment. As tensions rose, Czechoslovakia mobilized in 1938. Jan, and most of his young friends, volunteered for the army and were sent to the Krkonoše mountains bordering Germany, where they expected to engage the Germans at any moment. But the Czech fire for resistance was extinguished on September 29th, 1938, when France and England acknowledged German’s right to occupy Sudetenland. When the support of their former western allies suddenly evaporated, there was no hope in armed resistance, so Jan and the rest of the young soldiers were called back to Prague and the Germans took ownership of a massive swath of Czechoslovak land.
As the optimism swiftly deteriorated the atmosphere turned gloomy. In less than 6 months the Nazis violated the Munich Agreement and militarily occupied Prague and the rest of Czechoslovakia. Although crowds of Czechs came out to watch the German tanks rolling by “no one shouted. Through the steadily-falling snowflakes one could only hear the engines...” (4). And before armed combat was sparked anywhere, the war began in Czechoslovakia. All legal rights of Jews were abolished, and in light of the Kristallnacht their future looked grim. Thanks to the help of his mother’s connections, Jan was able to acquire a fake passport and escape to join his father in Yugoslavia. His mother remained.
In the film “The Fighter,” a documentary of Jan’s life, the camera follow Jan as he returns to a house in Yugoslavia, 60 years after he and his father lived there. While they waited to see what would happen, the disaster struck. Poland fell to the Nazis, then France, and in April 1941 the Nazis quickly surrounded Yugoslavia and occupied it. Jan and his father were trapped. That night in despair his father told him that he intended to kill himself. “The Fighter” shows a scene in which Jan stands over the bed where decades ago he watched his father breathe his last, remembering the panic rising in his chest. Afterwards 20 year old Jan snuck out the window, and made it to Lublyana, where he found a place to hide out for a week. He then caught a train and traveled underneath the cabin for dozens of hours across the northern length of Italy. In Genoa he was caught and threatened with being sent back to Prague. “If you do that,” he shouted, “it would be kinder and cheaper to shoot me right here! I will certainly be shot in Prague!” (55). In the end the Italians put him in one of their own prisoner camps in Southern Italy, which made him feel “delighted.” He would spend 2 years in an Italian prison.
During these two years back in Prague conditions grew steadily worse, and Jan was definitely right to feel delighted at being imprisoned in Italy. Jews were deported daily from Prague, mainly to the concentration camp in the north, Theresienstadt, before they were sent to Auschwitz or Mauthausen for extermination. All Jews expected their deportation papers at any moment, and the slightest miss-step could instantly cause fatal attention to fall upon them. Social interaction largely ceased, and most Czechs, especially Jews, were pushed into a survival-mode of life, unable to be concerned about anything else except getting through another day alive.
There was, however, a small but very professional resistance movement, built most significantly around the double-agent “A-54,” and reporting directly to president-in-exile Beneš in London. A-54 was Paul Thummel, a high ranking German undercover spy in Prague, who for some reason decided to turn double-agent and report his knowledge of highly classified information to the Czech resistance. He reported detailed information predicting the invasion of France, the German betrayal of Russia, and the invasion of Britain. When Beneš (and Churchill) realized what a powerful advantage they had in A-54, there was much more motivation to support and build up the Czech resistance from London. Czech soldiers were specially trained in espionage, explosives, and assassination, and were parachuted at great risk into Czechoslovakia to bolster the Prague underground movement.
At the same time the Nazi leadership began to realize that they had a serious leak of information in Prague, and none other that Reinhard Heydrich decided to take care of the situation himself. He arrived in Prague in September 1941, and lost very little time breaking down the resistance. In his first week “163 people were sentenced to death and 718 to concentration camps,” and after two weeks he wrote Hitler that “approximately 5,000 people have been arrested...” (44). This reign of terror was brought to the attention of Beneš, who for a long time had considered the benefits of arranging for the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi by the Czech underground. Now he knew who the target should be.
Two specially trained soldiers of the Czech army in London, Gabchik and Kubish, were parachuted in and made contact with the Czech resistance leaders. After many delays and complications, and after A-54 had already been captured and sent to Theresienstadt, in May 1942 they were ready. They knew the exact place and hour when Heydrich’s car would come around a hair-pin turn, and so they lay in wait. But as the car came around the corner and Gabchik aimed his gun, the trigger jammed. Kubish leaped into action and threw a tank grenade into the car, which exploded but only wounded Heydrich, who drew his pistol along with his driver and began firing on the would-be assassins. Kubish and Gabchik had to flee.
While the attack was a disaster from the perspective of the paratroopers, in the end it was successful. Several days later Heydrich suddenly died in the hospital, possibly from blood-poisoning. But whether the entire plan was a “success” is another question. The reprisal was terrible.
In the former location of the village Lidice there today stands a statue depicting the 98 children who lived there in 1942. They look frightened and bewildered, as they must have looked on the night of June 9th. Acting on specific instructions from Hitler himself, German troops surrounded this tiny village and raided it without warning. Every person was dragged out into the night, the buildings set on fire, and 173 men shot. The women and children were almost all sent to Theresienstadt. The village was erased from all maps. The point was impossible to misunderstand: Hitler had the power to cause whole villages to cease to exist, and for every assassinated leader he would kill thousands.
In Prague martial law was enforced, and Hitler himself ordered that 10,000 Czech suspects should be arrested and all political prisoners be shot (98). The “shock and awe” effect of the persecution was more brutal and effective than anything Heydrich had ever initiated. The Czech resistance was completely decimated, and thousands of civilians were shot outright or sent to concentration camps.
For a while the two assassins and five other paratroopers were able to hide in the crypt of the Karel Boromaeus Greek Orthodox Church. This church stands on Pštrossova street, a few houses away from where I now live. The paratroopers kept constant guard, slept in the tombs, and tried not to despair over the torture that they felt they had unleashed on the Czech people. They were protected by four priests, and for a while they were safe. Then another British-trained paratrooper, Karel Curda, who had been hiding in the countryside, suddenly turned himself over to the Gestapo and agreed to give them all the information he had on the assassins. Maybe he truly believed the Nazi promise that the civilian executions would stop if the assassins were found, or maybe he was motivated by the one million German mark reward. Whatever the case, his cooperation led directly to the discovery of the secret crypt. A fierce battle of several hours took place between the 7 paratroopers and hundreds of German soldiers. One the side of the stone church the damage from machine-gun fire has been left as a tribute to that struggle. Each of the paratroopers fought fiercely until one by one they had only one bullet, which they used to kill themselves. These final seven shots signaled the total death of the Prague resistance movement. On the church today there is a plaque which reads “in memory of the members of the CS abroad army, who here lay down their lives for our freedom...”
In the fallout of Heydrich’s assassination, one of the casualties was Jan’s mother. While he has no specific information about her death, she was most likely transported to Theresienstadt. There Jan leads several class trips every year, pointing out the women’s quarters (where he refuses to go after the first visit with his daughter), the hundreds of graves of unknown victims (one of which may be his mother’s), and the train tracks that lead to Auschwitz (where she might have been sent). Seeing the camp through his eyes, there are weary and silent ghosts around every corner. At the end of every tour he has the ritual of sitting by the gate and ordering a shot of vodka. He salutes in the direction of the women’s quarters, and drinks to his mother’s memory.
In the past Jan used to invite one of the survivors of Lidice to his classes, until she died several years ago. When asked if the assassination of Heydrich should have taken place, she said “No, a thousand times no!” “But,” says Jan to us today, “but I think it was right.” Many people feel that without this display of Czech resistance, it is unlikely that the western powers would have recognized the Czechs as a nation unto itself. This was Beneš’s thought from the beginning, and whether the good outweighed the bad is a question no will ever be able to answer.
In September 1943 Jan escaped the Italian prison and was rescued by the Allied forces coming up from the south. He managed to join the Czech army in London and became a navigator for the R.A.F. He flew twenty-four bombing missions over France, Germany, and Holland, each of which was a life-and-death adventure in itself. In September 1945 he was finally able to return to Prague, though not to his life. Nothing and no one was left for him there, and at the age of 23 he had to build a new life from scratch. Before he could really make progress, however, his time spent in the West came to haunt him, as he was accused by the Communist government of “anti-state and anti-peoples’ attitudes,” and was sent to a labor camp in Kladno. But that’s another story.
Jan Weiner’s experience during the years of WWII is certainly not the typical holocaust survivor story. However, he experienced suicide, murder, prison, sickness, isolation, despair, and an environment of constant tension, and each one of these is an intrinsic elements in the Jewish experience of this time period. Even though he escaped Czechoslovakia and survived, no one can say that he got off easy.
So while for many it’s simply a statistic to hear that the holocaust killed 277,000 Czechoslovak Jews and 5,821,000 Jews total (Encyclopedia Judaica), for Jan it’s as personal as it can get. His father and mother are listed in that number, and he himself nearly lost his life many times.
In another 10 years there will be almost no WWII veterans left alive, and that is why it is so important to listen to them, to make a practice of telling their stories, so that their witness will remain among us in spirit. Only then will we be able to recognize the threat of history repeating itself and be prepared to block the way. “Could the holocaust happen again?” Jan answers a student’s question. “Yes, I believe it can happen again, but first we must forget.” Let us hope that we never forget.
Sources:
Books:
Jan G. Weiner, The Assassination of Heydrich, Grossman Publishing, New York, 1969.
Encyclopedia Judaica (http://www.rossel.net/Holocaust00.htm)
Film:
“The Fighter” directed by Amir Bar-Lev, 2000
Primary information:
Discussions with and lectures of Jan Weiner
Visits to:
Terezin
The Karel Boromaeus Greek Orthodox Church
Lidice
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