Cultural, historical, personal, geopolitical perspectives from the ‘The Unbearable Lightness of European History: Czech-French Writer Milan Kundera on the Trauma of Foreign Invasion’
The presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU) has been turned over from France to the Czech Republic on July 1, with the presidency shifting every six months among EU members to drive forward the council’s work of building a stronger, fairer, freer, more peaceful Europe.
To commemorate the transition, the French and Czech embassies collaborated on a cultural program “The Unbearable Lightness of European History: Czech-French Writer Milan Kundera on the Trauma of Foreign Invasion,” at Alliance Francaise de Manille, in Makati.
The speakers, Czech socialist-era expert Adéla Gjuričová, French foreign policy specialist Nicolas Tenzer, and multi-awarded Filipino writer Sarge Lacuesta, analyzed the works and experiences of Czech-French author Milan Kundera in relation to current goings-on in Europe and the world today.
“ the handover and continuity of the EU and the upholding of our policy are a crucial and defining moment for Europe,” says the French ambassador Michèle Boccoz. She goes on to emphasize that the life and work of Milan Kundera “revolve around the native Czech, his adopted French nationality, a mirror through which we can reflect on Europe’s past, present, and future, inseparable from the events of the Cold War, including the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which we are reminded of today in Ukraine.”
To Jana Šedivá, the Czech ambassador, it’s the machinery of making people forget that exactly allows conflict and misunderstanding to occur. “The proliferation of disinformation has become a tool in creating alternative realities that have brought a fake sense of unity and foreign egoistic cause,” she explains. “It’s in forgetting important takeaways from history that we continually face the same problems of our past such as the occupation of sovereign nations, discrimination of people, or the belittling of human rights. The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people. We believe that standing together, solidarity, and empathy will drive us to rise above any oppression and forgetfulness.”
The event moderator, Manila Bulletin Lifestyle editor AA Patawaran oversaw the discussion, keeping the discussion going with thought-provoking questions he punctiliously prepared for the panelists.
What is the role of the intellectual in our pursuit of harmony as well as justice, fairness, and peace within and among nations?
Adéla: I think that an intellectual, a writer, an artist, should be such a good observer as Milan Kundera was and should also be willing to say things we’re not ready to hear, that we sort of don’t want to hear, or wish to be told. I am a fan of Kundera, but I am always unhappy when reading him. I don’t like his female characters. I don’t think they are loved by their partners. On the other hand, Kundera is saying something relevant about relationships and how human memory of previous relationships works.
Nicolas: I don’t think that the pursuit of harmony is the main role of intellectuals. Their role is to tell the truth, to show reality as it is, and to fight narratives that have nothing to do with it. Weeks ago, we had the Russian invaders burning books of Ukrainian libraries because they want to erase Ukrainian history. The truth is what belongs to us.
How is language important in the struggle for sovereignty, alliance, equality, and cooperation among nations?
Adéla: We should understand language as an instrument of storytelling, which is how memory is formed. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Nicolas: From an intellectual point of view, you have a kind of dialectic between belonging and distancing. All our friends from European and Nordic countries are universal, they learn in English because they want to share their memory. But we must not abandon all languages.
Sarge: I choose the language of my oppressor because it is the language by which as you mentioned, I can share more with the world and the world can appreciate what I write more.
‘The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.’
Is there such a thing as a big or small player in world affairs on a planet like ours that is now so interconnected?
Sarge: Never have we been more an island than over the pandemic years. I think we’ve also felt small over the past decades, and this is a very political smallness. All of a sudden, we’re small, we’re smaller, and we’re browner. I’d like to think that the other side of being able to speak in such a large way about your smallness carries a lot of pride in being able to one day deliver a personal truth that the world can learn from and that will eventually bring us to whatever “largeness” means.
Nicolas: I’d like to reflect on the greatness of the small nations and the smallness of the empires. I want to refer to an excerpt from the Lessons of Tacitus, “to rape, to slaughter, to torture, they do it in the name of a false empire.” I think this is exactly what we are witnessing right now. What creates the harmony of the world are the so-called small nations, and what creates the wellbeing of the people, the inspiration of the soul, are the small nations. If we want to restore peace among nations, it would certainly be based on small nations.
Adéla: The Czech Republic is a country of 10 million and we know what it feels to be small. A lot of national philosophies are built on being small and victimized. But Kundera wrote a text, which addresses the opposite. A few months after the Soviet invasion in 1968, he published an article called ‘The Czech Lot,’ in which he said that Czechoslovakia was actually a stage for the greatest attempt to build a socialist system without a dictatorship, without oppression.
Along the lines of Kundera’s existential themes in which the world is seen as a heap of contradicting truths, how do our concepts of good and evil come to play in politics?
Adéla: The difference between good and evil does not exist in practical politics. We all feel that there are crucial questions that politics can offer answers to, questions of personal freedoms, of civil society and its institutions, of public service and its availability. These are political questions, but once you still keep sincerely discussing them and looking for compromise and answers, I might say that is the good in politics. That’s something we tend to lose in current politics.
Sarge: Human values are almost completely externalized in this post-information, post-truth society. Now it’s a world where people can really agree to disagree about what’s good and evil. It’s a world where values are external and imposed upon you or displayed to you. The more you watch them, the more you’ll accept them as your own values without any reflection of your own story or even the stories of your parents, or your grandfathers who went to war and suffered. If intellectuals, politicians, or governments do not rise, even who we are or what we are will be a completely external value. Good and evil are so tied in with the truth.
What does the youth have to learn from history of communism?
Sarge: In the Philippines, communism is not an ideology but a label. Somebody said, “if you’re under 30 years old and you’re not a communist, you have no heart, if you’re over 30 and you’re still a communist, you have no brain.”
Adéla: I think there’s one very important lesson that everybody can learn from the history of communism and that is the history of communism. You really have to see it as a very complex chapter, and you better understand the whole dilemma. Populism did not originate in Russia or the Soviet Union. It was a western idea, a reaction to 19th-century capitalism. The foundation text, the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, was written in London.
Today storytelling is limited to 24-hour Instagram stories. We get our education from TikTok. Are we in danger now that our attention span is like that of a goldfish?
Nicolas: We have an education crisis everywhere, especially literature, history, political science, even mathematics. What’s even more worrying in my view is the feeling of unreality. The virtual things and real things are put in the same grounds.
Sarge: I’m a realist and I think the appendix has burst. We’re not feeling anything because we are already infected. Are we in an emergency? This is a good beginning to know that your appendix has burst. It’s a crisis of no education. We must go back to the beginning to know how to know things.