The heights of endless good humour

The heights of endless good humour

Regina Bärthel

Source: https://jungefreiheit.de/kultur/2023/kunderas-gute-laune/

In his novels, Milan Kundera wrote about life under socialism, where wishes and hopes are repeatedly thwarted by coincidences and the unexpected whims of the party apparatus. Now the writer has died in Paris at the age of 94. An obituary.

"Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia. He has lived in France since 1975." Behind this meagre vita, the only one Milan Kundera had released for his book publications, is the life of a Central European intellectual: a life between political oppression and rebellion, between identity and history. And again and again it is about questions of love; love as a motivation for life, as escape, as revenge, as betrayal.

Milan Kundera, born in 1929 to an educated middle-class family in the Moravian city of Brno, joined the Communist Party soon after the end of the war. The first conflicts, including a temporary expulsion from the party, soon arose, as he critically examined the doctrine of Socialist Realism and spoke out in favour of national values and patriotism.

The Prague Spring shaped Kundera's novels

In the 1960s, the author belonged to those intellectuals who advocated a "socialism with a human face" and supported the process of liberalisation and democratisation. His first novel, "The Joke", published in Prague in 1967, is a sarcastic critique of a totalitarian regime that not only interferes massively in the private affairs of its citizens, but also destroys their very existence because of trivial insubordination.

As a result of the violent suppression of the Prague Spring - and with it the end of all press and cultural freedom in Czechoslovakia - Kundera lost his lectureship at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts and his books were removed from the public domain.

At the mercy of the whims of socialism

His novels "Life is Elsewhere" and "Farewell Waltz", which deal with the relationship between the artistic avant-garde and revolutionary politics as well as the political arbitrariness of the communist system, were also only published in France. Kundera had lived here with his wife Věra Hrabánková since 1975, but the observation of the author by the Czechoslovak secret service did not end until ten years later.

Kundera's novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", published in 1984, established his international fame: In a brilliant mixture of love, eroticism and betrayal, he tells the story of the tolerant waitress Teresa and the love-hungry surgeon Tomáš, who - at the time of the Prague Spring and its violent end - loses his position as a surgeon because of a political statement and from then on pursues his numerous amorous relationships as a window cleaner. What choices are left to man in the face of restrictive politics? Do they succeed in escaping into the lightness of being or do they find it unbearable?

Psychological acumen meets political sharpness

Milan Kundera dealt with the political and psychological conditions that make people traitors to their values, their love and ultimately to themselves. He was also accused of real betrayal: He denounced an anti-communist agent in 1950, according to historian Adam Hradilek in 2008, an accusation seized upon with zeal by many media outlets, which Kundera vehemently denied and which is now considered refuted.

The world does not develop out of an inner logic, a plan. Kundera has made this clear in his novels. Life plans, desires and hopes are repeatedly thwarted by coincidences, unexpected turns and - of course - love. And yet Kundera's literary characters are constantly faced with decisions, having to do one thing and not another. Without even being able to foresee what new circumstances, new decisions the future course of the world will lead them to.

No return home

When the Eastern Bloc collapsed more or less unexpectedly, Kundera, unlike many exiles, did not decide to return to Prague. Like Irina, the main character of the novel "Ignorance" published in 2000, he did not wait longingly for a connection to life in the old homeland.

He had long since realised his everyday life in France. Incidentally, it was not until 2019 that the Czech state returned the famous author's citizenship, which had been revoked 40 years earlier. Kundera accepted it, although he did not travel to Prague to do so, but had the document presented to him in his Paris flat.

"Insignificance is the essence of existence".

Was he disillusioned in his old age? Kundera had long argued for a "socialism with a human face" and lost his former existence, his old homeland, over it. Subsequently, he repeatedly addressed this goal as an illusion with which he had deceived himself.

In his latest book, entitled "The Feast of Insignificance" (published in 2014), he has four old gentlemen ponder life and all the rest: "Insignificance is the essence of existence," it says, even in bloody battles and in the worst misfortune. In it, Kundera counters any need for reckoning with humour and wisdom: "Only from the heights of infinite good humour can you observe and laugh at the eternal stupidity of people below you."

Kundera voted for a lightness of being

In his writings, Kundera dealt with the conflict between the desires and hopes of the individual and political systems that are dedicated - not infrequently in a totalitarian manner - to combating all individuality. It is also a reflection on how political activism - be it by intellectuals, artists or citizens - can lead to them suddenly being at the mercy of the repression of the very systems they had supported or even helped to power.

Kundera advocated a lightness of being, even if it was unbearable. For: "Extremes mark boundaries beyond which life comes to an end, and the passion for extremes, in art as in politics, is a veiled longing for death." On Tuesday, 11 July, Milan Kundera died in Paris at the age of 94.