A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (2 page)

I cannot say that I mind living in this museum, although it was really more interesting living in the grammar school. I learned a lot about Communism by listening to the lectures of a history teacher there. Perlík was his name. I heard that he was also a poet, a kind of dissident intellectual, and that he even spent some time in jail when he was young.

You don't have such a museum in Würzburg, you say, and your knowledge of Communism is almost nonexistent. Well, since you are here in Prague as a tourist, I could show you around. I consider myself qualified to be a guide here, but the sad truth is that the museum would not employ a mouse. I can tell you that the more time I spend here, the more I realize how important this museum is. I remember Professor Perlík's words that the time would soon come when kids would say: Communism, what's
that
? A religion? A maker of cars perhaps? And from what I heard from him, this is simply not right, Communism shouldn't be remembered just by the likes of the professor or Milena, who survived it. It should be remembered for its bad sides and good; there must have been something good one can say about it, although that's not a popular view to hold these days, I gather. For example, people could get a solid education, they say. Or there's the fact that the Communist USSR fought against the Nazis in the Second World War. Yet Milena says that watching Hollywood movies one gets the impression that it was the Americans who won it all on their own!

No, life under Communism should not be forgotten, although that is exactly what I see happening. In this museum shop, by the way, you can buy a history book about the dark past for only five euros. It's cheap. And it is only a hundred pages long, in large print. “The older I get, the more I appreciate it,” says Milena. You can read here, for example (I heard someone reading it with my own ears!), that the wife of President Klement Gottwald was rather fat, or that the wife of Antonín Novotný (the man who later became president himself) took the china and the bedsheets from the flat of Vladimír Clementis. Of course, only after he was executed in the purges of the fifties. You can also learn—as I did—that 257,964 people sentenced for political reasons were rehabilitated in 1990.

Some visitors don't care at all about such facts; they just purchase posters, stamps, T-shirts, and USSR military caps, along with wax candles in the forms of Stalin, Marx, and Lenin. These are the single most popular souvenirs sold in the shop, I can tell you, maybe because they are the cheapest. I admit that I can hardly imagine the excitement of a person watching Stalin slowly melt down into a puddle of wax, but there are buyers who enjoy such symbolic acts.

As you come in, you inevitably notice busts and statues of Marx, Lenin, Stalin. A young man, a Czech, was here recently. Looking at Marx, he said: “Is that some Orthodox priest?” You could say that Marx, with his beard, did indeed look like one. You could also say that he was rather orthodox in his views and, in some ways, even like a priest, preaching his doctrine. But even I was astonished by the young man's ignorance. What would Professor Perlík have made of his question? He would wonder what they teach them in history class nowadays, and would probably tell the boy, Well, read about him, you
durak
! That means stupid in Russian, but they don't teach them Russian anymore. It is sad, although understandable. From my limited perspective as a mouse, a language is a language. It is worth learning regardless of the historical circumstances, no? But what can such an ignorant person read here in the museum about a historical figure like Karl Marx and the origins of Communism? See, here it says that he was “a bohemian and an intellectual adventurer, who started his career as a romantic poet with an inclination toward apocalyptic titanism, a sharp-tongued journalist”—as if that would somehow disqualify him from writing
Das Kapital
! Or look at this text about Lenin: “From the very beginning, Lenin pushed for the tactics of extreme perfidiousness and ruthlessness which became characteristic of all Communist regimes of the time.” What can I tell you? I know from Professor Perlík's lectures that in Communist times, Lenin was glorified much too much, and that textbooks were even more seasoned with such descriptions and with the same kind of cheap psychology as this one! But the professor would probably say that there is no need for ideology nowadays and that we need history instead.

You know, sometimes when they come to this room with paintings from the Soviet school of socialist realism, with busts and a spaceship and a school class and a workshop—all in one room!—I can see how disappointed visitors are. I peek out at them from my cabinet, and our visitors look to me like those people who love to visit freak shows with a two-headed goat or a bearded woman—that kind of thing. Of course, I see why they are disappointed—there is no Stalin in a cage, not even a mummy of Lenin! They see only a heap of old things here, more like a junkyard, which in fact it is. Exhibits here are from flea markets and all kinds of garage sales, even straight out of rubbish bins. See, here Communism is finally reduced to the rubbish heap of history! Isn't that what the velvet revolution in 1989 was all about? That is what I would like to tell them when they make faces, like, Is that
all
you have here? What more would they want to
see
?

Permit me to say that, from what I have heard from the professor, Communism is not so much about exhibits, about
seeing
. It is more about how one lived in those times, or more to the point, how one survived them. From the lack of food or shoes to the lack of freedom and human rights. The question is, How do you present that kind of shortage, shortages that were not just poverty-induced, to somebody who knows very little about it? Because people who experienced life under Communism tend not to come here, anyway. I am afraid that our Innocent Visitor, as I call such people, has to use his imagination. Therefore, I sometimes think that Milena is the best “exhibit” they could see here, because she lived most of her life under Communism. If only visitors would ask her about her life . . . but nobody does.

Let me first tell you about the museum itself, advertised as “above McDonald's, next to the Casino.” Indeed, it is very properly situated in Na Přikope,
ʺin the heart of consumer capitalism
,ʺ as one visitor remarked the other day. It was opened in December of 2001 in the nineteenth-century Palác Savarin. It stores roughly one thousand artifacts in four rooms and was founded privately by an American of Czech origin. Why was it privately funded? Excellent question, Hans, and very logical too! Because, astonishingly enough, nobody from the democratic government hit upon this idea. Strange, you may think, that such an important era of the recent past would not have been documented had it not been for a couple of enthusiasts. You think the reason might be that it deals with too painful a time, that memories are still too vivid? Well, I wonder about that. If you ask Milena, there is another reason why the Czechs (or Slovaks, for that matter; this is their museum, too!) don't care about such a museum and don't visit it either.
ʺThey want to run as far away from Communism as they can.
Our young people don't care, for them Communism is the ancient past. Those old enough to remember it want to forget it now. And why?
Because they went along with it.
As I did. As my husband did, and our neighbors, and everybody we knew, every Pavel and Elena around us,” I heard her say.

I remember that I once heard Professor Perlík say that today everybody claims they were not members of the Communist Party, that they did not really belong. “If you believed what people here say, you would think that
not a single person
in this whole country was ever a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia!
They all were victims!
That is rather stupid, especially given the fact that
10 percent
of the population were party members, plain and simple. That means
one million seven hundred thousand people
! I understand that not all of them were believers; they were only formally members because of the job and career and benefits that went with membership. But no regime, however totalitarian, could exist without complicity on the part of the people—however unwilling it might be,” I remember Professor Perlík saying. “Let us not kid ourselves; most of us complied in order not only to survive—because Czechoslovakia was not the USSR—but just to live better. I admit it's a hard fact to face now. But yes, there is a difference between those who were members only formally and those who really collaborated. Perhaps it sounds to you as if there is no big difference between the two? Collaboration is a more active attitude, a kind of partnership. For example, while most ordinary members of the party merely complied, some collaborated with the regime. “There are many shades of gray,” he used to say. And then he quoted Vaclav Havel, the hero of the “velvet revolution,” who himself said that the line between victim and oppressor runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system.

I realized that it is not without reason that the history of the CPCz, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, is written on a single long scroll of paper, glued to the wall, almost as if intended not to be seen. I guess what I am trying to explain to you here is that I learned how the most important things about Communism are the invisible ones. And that in this museum you won't see
the shades of gray
that prevailed in everyday life. That is why such a museum
reaches only so deep
—this criticism comes from a very learned man who was here, maybe a curator in another museum, or some kind of critic. According to him, the museum does not—and cannot—show you the full depth of what people lived through. “There is no personal history given here, no individual destiny,” the man said. On the other hand, perhaps no museum of Communism is capable of doing that. And you know what I think? Not that the opinion of someone like me counts at all, but nevertheless I'll tell you that maybe this museum got it right! Maybe the absence of individual stories is the best illustration of the fact that individualism was the biggest sin one could commit.

Ah, but I am getting too pedagogical, I'm afraid! My dear Hans, you must tell me if I am treating you like a total ignorant, you must stop me if I am boring you! I guess my attitude comes from the fact that too many Americans pass the museum nowadays . . .

But you are telling me to go on? Okay then, where was I? Yes, I wanted to say that Communist regimes generally seemed to prefer numbers over stories. Numbers are abstract, they create a kind of “scientific” neutrality. Let me give you an example, used by Professor Perlík: In his history class I heard him tell his pupils that Hitler exterminated some six million Jews in Europe during the Second World War. They gave him a blank look and continued to chat, and to push and throw things at each other. The information didn't even catch their attention—let alone their imaginations. But then, he took his class to Poland. They visited Auschwitz death camps. I remember them talking afterward about that visit, about how memorable that spring day had been for them. Of course, Professor Perlík had already told them before what had happened there, but still they were totally unprepared. Evidently, nothing can prepare you for such horror—and that is kind of good, he said. You grasp the horror better once you see, with your own eyes, heaps of human hair, shoes, glasses . . . heaps of them. All that, every item, belonged to an individual with a name, to a real live person. He also told them that during Communism, he could not have told his pupils that some thirty million people died in the labor camps in Siberia. It was taboo. But I suspect that the professor told them just that, landing himself in prison.

Now, let's go back to what you actually see here—what you see here is only a pile of dusty things, like in an old antique shop or a flea market somewhere in Kosice (though I've never been there, I heard someone making this comparison). Therefore, it seems that it is more important to see the invisible yet omnipresent ugliness of the Communist mentality, of which the artifacts in this museum are just a reflection. By mentality, I mean a certain way of thinking and behaving that developed over decades under harsh conditions. Not solidarity, as you might expect of people living under duress, but its opposite, selfishness, a
slow hardening of the soul
(this formulation, you rightly guess, comes from the more poetic side of our professor). Yet, only art, especially literature, can show you that. Novels like those of a certain Milan Kundera, a writer whose name I have often heard mentioned in this museum of late.

Our visitors usually want to take photos in this particular room. For example, if they stand here, where I am standing, they can take a photo of this beautiful nineteenth-century crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Indeed, they can get it in the same frame as the hammer and sickle—a really nice souvenir! By the way, this chandelier is widely considered by our visitors to be the only beautiful item in here. Although not intended as an exhibit, you could still say—as I have heard here—that it symbolizes the life of the bourgeoisie, the class enemy. As does this whole spacious apartment. “Look, a beautiful bourgeois apartment full of ugly things produced during Communism!” someone exclaimed recently.

I kind of like the fact that this is a museum of ugly things. By the time visitors like you arrive here, they have had their fill of the beautiful buildings in the neighborhood, so they don't notice beauty any longer. Golden altars, baroque facades, angels, Madonnas, spectacular church paintings . . . Indeed, I have seen such things myself during my excursions into the neighborhood. Here, in this museum, like in real Communism, ugliness reigns. Sometimes I hear foreigners wonder aloud: “Why doesn't Communism care about beauty?” You only need to go to the southern outskirts of Prague to see whole blocks of ghastly gray housing developments, called
ʺpaneláky
” because they were built out of prefabricated material in the seventies. By the way, that material is great for us mice; it is so easy to make a nice home there! Yet, these buildings provided a home for millions of people (and mice)—for the so-called proletariat!—who moved from their villages to the city to work in industry. Milena and her Marek still live in such a building, in a two-room 63-square-meter apartment. They were happy when they got it in the sixties, after years of waiting in a single rented room heated by a coal-burning stove instead of an electric one or a central heating system.