Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [85]
Czechs, East Germans and Hungarian academics were the Party members in the Soviet bloc I saw most of. Of the major political figures of the regimes I met only one or two briefly, notably Andras Hegedüs, the last Hungarian premier under Rakosi, who recycled himself as an academic sociologist after 1956, travelled, protected dissidents but said little, though allowing it to be understood that the quality of the Party leadership had declined after his day. None of my friends was a Party figure, although Ivan Berend turned down the offer to become a minister of education in his country, Hungary. He was and is a superb historian, President of his country’s Academy of Sciences under communism, whose merits were recognized, after the end of communism, by election as President of the International Committee of Historical Sciences. Almost all the Czechs I knew, some of whom dated back to the pre-war English emigration, became supporters of the Prague Spring of 1968, and some, such as my friend Antonin Liehm, played a notable part in it as editor of the leading cultural-political journal of the time, Literarny listy. We first met not through politics but as jazz-lovers at a Prague festival, but jazz, like the rehabilitation of Kafka, was an oppositional activity in the run-up to 1968, though I am not aware of any political background to the publication of my The Jazz Scene, the only one of my books translated into Czech under communism. After 1968 the Party reformers were either forced into emigration or into window-cleaning, coal-heaving or similar activities, if not old enough to be pensioners. Some, like Edward Goldstücker, a major figure in the Prague Spring as President of the Writers’ Union, had already been jailed for years in the Stalinist persecution of the early 1950s. (We saw him in 1996 in Prague shortly before his death: the authorities of the new Czechoslovakia had denied him the status of one persecuted by communism.) They lost their country for good for, when communism ended, nobody wanted them any more.
The Hungarians I got to know best, too young for pre-war politics or resistance – Ivan Berend and his long-time collaborator George Ranki both returned from the Nazi camps in 1945 to high school – were reform communists, except for the brilliant Peter Hanak, young star of Hungarian Marxist history in 1955, insurgent in the revolution of 1956, and strongly anti-communist afterwards. But the post-’56 mood in Hungary was both modestly reformist and tolerant, even of some dissidence. Of all Party regimes Hungary probably came closest to normal intellectual life under communism, perhaps largely thanks to its wealth of intellectual talent, which it reinforced by good relations with its western émigrés. Some of its most remarkable non-political minds rejected emigration even in the worst times, such as the mathematical genius Erdös, who insisted on maintaining his Hungarian passport while also insisting on travelling round the world’s mathematics departments, never staying in any place for more than a few months, carrying all his worldly possessions with him in his suitcase. He managed this extraordinary and perhaps unique achievement by a private citizen at the height of the Cold War, thanks to the unanimous support of the international mafia of mathematicians. When, unable to talk number theory with him, I asked him, on an agreeable evening in Cambridge, why he wanted the permanent right to go back to Budapest, he said: ‘Is good mathematical atmosphere.’ Hungary, of course, was the only part of central Europe that had not lost most of its Jews.
In some countries of ‘real socialism’, as for instance Poland, it was possible to avoid the Party in one’s dealings with colleagues and friends. Not so in the German Democratic Republic where nothing