'What I Think of America

I belong to that dwindling number of people who still remember the Second World War. I regard it as a quirk of fate that the very day we were carted off to concentration camp (I was ten at the time), Nazi Germany went to war with the United States. It was paradoxical: in the middle of their despair at what had happened to them, the people around me embraced each other. They believed that with America’s entry into the conflict, the decisive moment had arrived and the war would soon be over—Hitler had no hope of victory. The fighting didn’t come to an end as quickly as we imagined, but I well remember during the last year of the war squadrons of Flying Fortresses flying over the town where I was interned. I stood in the barracks yard and watched them with a sense of exalted terror and joy, because their clearly undisturbed flight heralded the German defeat that was now just round the corner.

Unlike my compatriots in West Bohemia, I didn’t encounter the Americans as liberators. Terezín camp was liberated by the Red Army, like Prague, to which I then returned. I loved American war films, although I was less enamoured of the sickly film musicals of the day—they seemed to me to belong to a different world to the one I knew. I later realized that musicals and war films symbolized the two extremes of the Americans’ attitude to life.

Soon after the war, all American films disappeared from Czechoslovakia, the war films and the sickly musicals alike—it was the beginning of the communist era. Along with them went books by all modern American authors with the exception of the communist Howard Fast. Nevertheless, in a lane not far from the Botanical Gardens in Prague I came across a sort of stationer’s-cum-bookbinder’s shop that had remained in private ownership. I used to chat to the owner about literature and one day he declared mysteriously that he had something to show me. From the depths of his shop he brought out two novels: one by Steinbeck, the other by Hemingway. In those days such books were something like contraband. I paid for the two treasures and took them away with me. I was hooked. Later, when censorship was relaxed, I got to read Dos Passos, Faulkner, Wilder, Heller, Mailer, Roth and others. They had a lifelong influence on me. I know that for many people American culture means Hollywood films and endless TV serials. For me American culture means above all its literature, which in the last century was undoubtedly among the most remarkable in the world.

I first visited the US in 1968, to attend the premiere of my play The Castle. I recall being overwhelmed by New York, which seemed to me like a city from another planet, from another culture. (That is precisely why I subsequently came to dislike it: it seemed to me that in that enormous agglomeration of concrete and asphalt, people, and particularly children, must either go crazy or suffer deprivation.) A year later I was invited to take up a visiting fellowship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. By then, the Soviet army of occupation was well ensconced in Czechoslovakia. The purges began, rigid censorship was reintroduced and culture was driven underground. I left the day before the frontiers were closed. At that moment I perceived the US chiefly as a land of freedom. (On the bridge I had to cross each day on my way to the faculty, someone had painted an enormous red hammer and sickle—a paradox for someone who had managed to escape the land of communist symbols for a short while.) Something else I’ll never forget is how, straight after a TV programme in which President Nixon eloquently defended the Vietnam War, a commentator came on the screen and started to take the president to task in a manner that seemed unbelievable to me. It was all part of the democracy and freedom that I still admire about America.

I have been told many times how superficial Americans’ relationships are—shallow because they are simply social convention. In my view this is not true. The Americans mostly live at peace, but the moment an accident or even a disaster occurs, they act. It needn’t be a terrorist attack. I once drove off the road into the ditch in a blizzard and got stuck in a snowdrift. It was about twenty degrees below zero and there was such a gale blowing that anyone out in the open would have started to freeze. Nevertheless, within moments a lorry pulled up and the driver ran over to make sure no one in the car was injured and to ask if we needed help. He gave one of my companions a lift to go and arrange for the car to be towed out. The next driver to pass by, a few seconds later, tried to pull us out with a chain. I don’t think drivers in our country would behave with such concern and self-sacrifice.

We returned from America six months later when the neo-Stalinist era in Czechoslovakia was at its height. America became the embodiment of freedom for all of us: we received uncensored news from there, and its journalists came and took an interest in our circumstances, and their interest and their reporting about the state of affairs in our country helped inhibit the inclinations of the communist regime to stamp on anyone who resisted them. And from time to time we actually visited the free territory of the American Ambassador’s residence. It was a great encouragement to me to know that there existed an entire continent where one could live freely, where they didn’t jail people because of their attitude to the regime, where they didn’t confiscate books or ban authors and where they didn’t expel professors from universities for rejecting a totalitarian (or any other) ideology.

For more than a century now there has existed a sort of American dream. For some it means boundless affluence, for others freedom. I am not a devotee of hypermarkets or of grandiose mansions containing dozens of rooms for just two or three people and a few pedigree dogs and cats. I’ve never yearned for more than one car or a private plane, jet-engined or otherwise. I have an aversion to profligacy, but I don’t share the view that there is an indirect relationship between America’s affluence and Third World poverty. Without idealizing the policies of the big monopolies (either American or European), I am convinced that America’s wealth, which derives from the work of many generations, is chiefly the result of the creative activity of free citizens. The Americans are not to blame for Third World poverty, which is mostly due to the circumstances in the Third World and the demoralizing lack of freedom that most of the people there endure.

On my visits to the United States over the past ten years, I have discovered that freedom continues to prevail there as it did years ago and there is even greater affluence. That affluence is certainly provocative with the world in the state it is. It would be better if the Americans—and we Europeans—exercised rather more restraint.

Freedom also tends to be viewed in different ways. For some it represents freedom of spirit and independence from authority, for others it signifies vice and spiritual and moral depravity. Freedom can indeed have paradoxical consequences. One of them is the unbridled cult of entertainment, which increasingly nowadays seems to be the supreme social value: witness the astronomical sums paid to hockey and basketball players, pop singers, and film and TV stars. And the tide of violence, horror and perversion, catering for the basest instincts, which streams every day from the gutter press and from film and television screens seems to me not so much an expression of freedom as a manifestation of moral decline that is ultimately a threat to the freedom of the citizen. In this respect I do not agree with the message of Forman’s celebrated film about Larry Flint.

Nevertheless I regard attacks by fanatics on American citizens in New York or anywhere else in the world as being, above all, an attack on the civic freedoms that America embodies and thus an attack on my own freedom too. To view them in any other way ultimately means siding with the reactionary and totalitarian forces which spurn democracy, civil rights, racial and sexual equality and the freedom to live according to one’s own convictions and to profess—or not—any belief.