The long journey from Kafka to Gorbachev

NEW YORK — On Aug. 2, 1914, Franz Kafka wrote in his diary: "Germany has declared war against Russia. In the afternoon, swimming." Kafka, the reclusive and visionary Central European writer, gave his name to the 20th century. Seventy-five years had to pass before Kafka's swim before Central and Eastern Europe would return to the broader European civilization. A Kafkaesque pause, some might say.

Central and Eastern Europe was never only a place of right and left dictatorships, of ethnocentrism and xenophobia, of perpetual and frozen conflicts, as some now caricature it. It was also the birthplace of a spiritual heritage, of thinkers and artists, of a specific mode of creativity and search for meaning beyond pragmatic negotiations with daily life.

In 1989 the region's peoples brought with them in their "return to Europe" their diversity and richness; their vivacity, mysteries and memories; and their old and new aspirations. And they brought the lesson that moving from a closed society to an open one is both possible and extremely difficult.

As Thomas Mann once wrote: "Freedom is more complicated than power." Freedom changes the frame and substance of choice, and of individual and collective responsibility. It highlights the contrast between initiative and apathy, enterprise and obedience, competition and total dependence on a state that embodies a kind of unshakable fate. Just as slavery must be learned, step by step, in order to survive its terror and tricks, so freedom must be learned in order to face its risks and opportunities.

At that fluid border between old and new people craved most what they had never had: freedom of thought and expression, information, the tools to debate and define their own happiness.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, surprisingly accepted by Mikhail Gorbachev, meant immediate and direct support in reconstructing East Germany's institutions and economy. Yet, even in Germany, the situation was far from ideal, with many "Ossies" frustrated by their seeming second-class status, and many "Wessies" resenting the financial burden of annexation.

Elsewhere, change proved far more complicated. Many of the new postcommunist societies — consumed with revenge, resentment and raw struggles for power and status — became breeding grounds for aggressive nationalism. Ethno-centricism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism flourished, together with corruption, nepotism, hypocrisy and opportunism. The postcommunist turmoil led to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Czechoslovakia, fueled Yugoslavia's wars and ethnic atrocities, and brought forth authoritarian rule and imperial revanchism in Russia.

In this chaotic freedom, suddenly revealed secrets destroyed families and friendships and a common sense of togetherness; it shattered social stability, as insecure or falsified as that was. Sometimes it even replaced the old hypocrisy and opportunism with new ones as many former officials and secret-police employees thrived.

Public debates across Eastern Europe soon started to exhibit a fierce confrontation between two different hidden memories: the memory of the Holocaust and that of the communist terror and crimes. A stupid competition arose between two nightmares, the Holocaust and the Gulag, totalitarian Nazism and totalitarian communism.

Unavoidably, old-new cliches emerged. In Romania, some leading intellectuals publicly condemned the "Jewish monopoly of suffering" — part of an "international conspiracy" that had reached, once again, the territory between the Danube and the Carpathians.

In the notorious Walser Debate of 1998 in Germany about the "unbearable" way Germans had been portrayed after the Holocaust, I proposed that every country should complement its monuments of heroism with monuments of shame to recall the wrong done to other countries, other peoples and to its own people. A decade later, that proposal still seems meaningful. Would not monuments to shame be as instructive, if not more so, than monuments to heroism?

While admission to the European Union appeared to draw a line under the postcommunist period (at least in Central and Eastern Europe), the rupture of 1989 did not mark the beginning of an era of perfect cooperation by the people and for the people. But that did not stop some from proclaiming that the triumph of liberal capitalism meant the end of ideological struggle — and thus of History.

It requires a large reserve of imagination, optimism or plain stupidity to believe that one's fellow human beings will ever live beyond history and ideology. As the religious terrorists of Sept. 11, 2001, proved, the human story and mankind's history go on, as before, through ideas and conflicts, through projects of absolute happiness, through cruelty and disasters, revolutions and revivals.

And liberal capitalism itself — with its mediocre political leaders and cartoonish public discourse — has become a poor advertisement for the Absolute Idea. Indeed, some now wonder if the recent financial crisis has done to liberal capitalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall did to communism.

There is an unnerving similarity between many economists' naive premise of a perfectly rational market and the "dialectical materialism" of scientific socialism. By hijacking "rationality" in the belief that human behavior can be predicted (and thus potentially controlled), today's arrogant General Staff of economists, bankers and bureaucrats have compromised not only themselves, but the basic notion of freedom.

We have no real alternative to the market, just as we have no real alternative to freedom. None of the defects or shortcomings of market economies are as bad as the remedies ranged against them. But, just as every act of individual and collective freedom threatened "real socialism," so we must acknowledge that human freedom — the emancipation of creativity — means the end of certainty.

This uncertainty does not weaken liberal capitalism — on the contrary, it is the system's primary source of strength. But it does extend to what economists can know about human behavior and the market. In this regard, the most important lesson of 1989 and its aftermath is that society's evolution can never be perfectly prophesied. Despite great difficulties and tensions, today's postcommunist capitalism is still better than the degenerate and tyrannical "real socialism" of yesterday.