Comment by morbicer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morbicer | Hacker News Reader

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The reason Kundera never returned is because he was ashamed that he snitched to secret police and other intellectuals knew it.

Author of the article tries to downplay it with

  > The article didn’t produce any evidence apart from hearsay and a police protocol mentioning that Kundera was the source of the information.

But the evidence was solid, he ruined a young man's life by putting him for 20 years into prison that was almost gulag-like.

I think Kundera always regret it and that's why he withdraw to France and stayed there. Yet he never apologized or even commented on that topic.

I grew up with his books and they had great impact on me when I was 18. He's a great writer. I wouldn't even mind that he snitched if he went through some acknowledgment and redemption. But he hasn't and remains a flawed character in my eyes. Almost every Czech author who emigrated helped the dissent that stayed home in some way. He didn't.

Havel is a great man, one of our greatest. He's a fine author. Kundera is a great author. Not a fine man.

Could you point to this evidence? And how do you know that that is what kept him from returning to his country?

Of course that's just my hunch why he always visited home country in the secret.

The evidence is

direct:

- the original police report of Miroslav Dvořáček's arrest

witness:

- Iva Militká, one of the persons involved in the arrest

indirect:

- police lecture from 1952 made by interior minister Jerman. Kundera is only mentioned by initials but it's another piece of the puzzle https://www.lidovky.cz/domov/novy-objev-udani-v-kauze-milana...

There's a huge Kundera biography written by Jan Novák. Critics say it's biased but it's well sourced. It paints Kundera's character as someone who could easily do it.

I guess the main evidence is the police report. Secret police was of course known to blackmail people and fabricate things. Everybody accused of collaborating with them used the defense that all documents were made up. There were other several high profile people that were accused and used this defense but eventually enough evidence was discovered and the people admitted guilt.

With Kundera, the "blackmail" angle is weak. The record was not attached to his file, it was forgotten in the file of pilot Dvořáček who was arrested. Also at that time Kundera was just communist student functionary, not someone famous worth blackmailing.

For someone unfamiliar with the specifics this was an interesting rabbit hole to go into. I was curious what Dvořáček thought about it. It looks like, in the end, "neither he nor his wife had any doubts about Kundera's role."

1. It didn't. He did come back quite regularly. The article simply ommits that.

2. The evidence is mostly based on a police report which names Kundera. You could make a case that the secret police would occasionally falsify these things, but in general they'd also do this for a reason (mostly because they'd use for some blackmail / publicity stunt). This does not seem to be the case here...

https://www.respekt.cz/respekt-in-english/milan-kundera-s-de...

Visiting back is not what he meant, rather a permanent move.

The thing is, regardless of him collaborating with regime, is that if you spend decades elsewhere, its very hard to come back. The "back" changes without you being part of it, so technically its impossible and you move into relatively foreign place with people you know and don't in the same time, even if folks still speak your language.

Also, I presume most of you don't know this, but if he had in 90s any longing for home after communism fell, a quick visit would cure practically anybody. Society was a mess, wolves robbing state and society of everything possible, leaving bloody trails everywhere. People were beheaded (in my town one morning a cop's head was found on top of his car), or dissolved in acid (again even people my parents actually knew). Ministers were mafia-style executed in broad day (still not solved). Common folks were robbed in privatizations of state's properties (literally some form of ponzi scheme or worse were happening on state level). Organized crime and top politicians were very tightly intertwined.

This all improved nowadays but not as much as we would like.

If you see this and much much more, why on earth would anybody move from France? That's much more advanced, free and intellectual-friendly society, at that time by mega-parsecs.

Sounds like a strong exaggeration. The 90s were rough in comparison to time before and after, but no, beheadings and dissolving bodies in acid were not normal.

1998 was the absolute worst in the Czech history in regard to murders with 3 murdered people per 100 000 people. In comparison, US rate in 2021 was 6.8.

> This all improved nowadays but not as much as we would like.

There's always room for improvement, but today Czechia is one of the safest countries on earth (safer than France, for example).

> Ministers were mafia-style executed in broad day (still not solved).

What country are you talking about? Certainly not Czech Republic.

What? Nineties were a bit wild but not "society was a mess".

  > Ministers were mafia-style executed in broad day (still not solved).

I am not aware a of a single one and you are using plural. Can you name who do you mean?

I'm pretty sure he means Slovakia. Not sure about any minister, but the policemen is true and there was the Kovac case -- maybe not minister, but president's son.

Yes I meant Slovakia, which for part of 90s, the wilder part of that decade as we all can probably agree, was part of Czechoslovakia.

Jan Ducky was the minister executed, he was connected via corruption to many many politicians still active today, even former Czech prime minister Babis (who comes from Slovakia), he is actually one of the suspects who ordered it back in 90s.

Dissolving folks in acid was done in both states, before and after we split. Of course we only hear about cases which were discovered, back home many ended up permanently "missing". But anyway I don't think I was clear (or you guys misunderstood me) - its not for the crime rate alone that would make people like Kundera not wanting to come back, but overall state of society and state itself. If you paint yourself 90s as some sort of pinnacle of our history where everybody was happy and people were singing and dancing on the streets, we must have lived in different universes then.

I mean its 2023, I happily live in Switzerland for many years, having lived in both Czech republic and Slovakia long term in the past, and I would not go back for exactly same reasons. What most rich folks back there (CZ and SK too) do is create a bubble around themselves to not be part of rest of society - but that's desperate attempt for quality of life which is a baseline in other places. Kind of South Africa approach although you can see it in other places where middle class evaporated. Definitely not a place I want to raise my kids, or grow old with all that it brings.

>Yes I meant Slovakia, which for part of 90s, the wilder part of that decade as we all can probably agree, was part of Czechoslovakia

No, we don't agree. Wild part of 90s was result of voucher privatization, which barely started before the split of Czechoslovakia.

Also, the president's son was hijacked, but not executed. He came out of that unharmed (harming him also wasn't planned at all).

Contrast him with a western dissident who was so disillusioned by the "intellectual" caste he thought reporting famatics was a democratic citizens duty. Orwell reported stalinists and other enemy of the people all day long and he was right too do so.

>The reason Kundera never returned is because he was ashamed that he snitched to secret police and other intellectuals knew it.

That never stopped thousands of other artists, politicians, writers, businessmen, and so on having done the same or much much worse. Heck, most of Germany's ex-Nazi establishment continued to not only live in Germany, but to hold positions of power post war, be public intellectuals and so on.

Perhaps, unlike them, Kundera had a sense of shame.

This. I think he was quite affected by it. You do a stupid thing when you are young and naive, it destroys other person's life and you have to live it with it forever.

Germany and many other European countries did have these scandals in the 60s and 70s when the new generation asked uncomfortable questions about what their parents did in the war.

There's an interesting detail around Gunter Grass; he was part of the big literary voices asking the uncomfortable questions, which was part of his success in the 1960s and 1970s. Long after that success, in 2006, he revealed that he was in the Waffen-SS himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Grass#Waffen-SS_re...

According to his account, the alternative to the SS was a punishment unit:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/06/04/how-i-spent-th...

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