Laughter and Hatred Are Neighbors

Stalinism and Cultural Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1948-1953

Recent historical research has presented a more nuanced understanding of communist rule in Czechoslovakia that undermines dominant interpretive paradigms from the Cold War era. Perhaps most importantly, a growing number of scholars have rejected the idea that the communist seizure of power in 1948 constituted an illegitimate coup against the democratic impulses of the Czechoslovak people, orchestrated from above by Stalin and his shadowy team of Soviet “advisors.” First, the CPCS enjoyed considerable political support following the collapse of the Nazi-led Protectorate, winning 31 percent of the vote nationwide, whereas its nearest competitor received only 18 percent. Second, as Brad Abrams has shown, the collapse of democracy in postwar Czechoslovakia was no less the product of CPCS (or Soviet) intransigence than the failure of democratic left (including Social Democrats) to offer a clear ideological alternative. ⁸ Third, according to Igor Lukes, the February coup was no less the product of CPCS plotting than Soviet interference from above, demonstrating the crucial importance of domestic factors to the seizure of power. ⁹ Finally, scholars including Jiří Knapík and Karel Kaplan have demonstrated widespread political strife in the months following the seizure of power—between Prague and Moscow, and the CPCS leadership and its various organs. ¹⁰ Stalinist Czechoslovakia, much like the functionalist “Hitler State” outlined by Martin Broszat, was less a monolithic regime than a convoluted and inefficient command structure riven by competing spheres of political authority. ¹¹

The fragmented, haphazard, and improvisational character of communist rule after 1948 was certainly evident from toward culture and the arts. Even as they introduced repressive measures against individuals or institutions deemed a threat to the emerging regime, their actions betrayed a decisive ambivalence as to what precisely the new socialist culture would comprise. Superficially, they called for the implementation of “socialist realism,” the official aesthetic doctrine of the Soviet Union since 1934, and officially reinforced by Andrei Zhdanov in 1946. However, they made no effort to impose socialist realism as state policy. This “moderate” position continued until the summer of 1948, whereupon the rift between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, combined with intensifying hostilities against the West, prompted a radicalization of the Soviet Union toward its East Bloc client states. Infamously, Stalin demanded that Party leaders “sharpen the class struggle” against their internal enemies, which sparked a brutal wave of investigations, arrests, and show trials. More broadly, Stalin’s demands signified a complete subordination of the domestic policies of East European states to Soviet strictures. By the closing months of 1948, Stalinism in Czechoslovakia was in full swing.

As the revolution began to devour its children, Czech Party functionaries strengthened their control over culture and cultural production, ostensibly to align it with the prerogatives of the Soviet Union. Their efforts culminated in January 1950 at a general plenum of the Czechoslovak Writers Union, at which they delivered official guidelines for an overarching theory of socialist realism and communist cultural criticism. Political purges and smear campaigns against artists and intellectuals deemed antithetical to socialism raged throughout the press in the months following, prompting ongoing police harassment, arbitrary arrests and a string of tragic deaths (often from suicide or heart attack). Underlying such harassment was an attempt by the Party leadership to offer a cultural “road map” that elucidated how artistic works could become “constructive” to the development of socialism. Their goal was to eliminate earlier ambivalence regarding the meaning of socialist realism and foster a newfound “socialist unity.” In reality however they catalyzed a series of vicious arguments over how this new Party line should be interpreted, and more importantly against whom.

Such questions had profound implications for those living in the nascent communist regime. Those with the authority to dictate the “true” meaning of socialist culture wielded great power over their rivals. As such, debates over the meaning of socialist realism quickly fed into a larger political struggle between competing pillars of cultural authority. This struggle grew especially heated between the Ministry of Information and Enlightenment (MIO), ostensibly a branch of state government, and the Cultural and Propaganda Division of the Party Central Committee or “Kultprop.” After 1945, both agencies had allied against a wide range common enemies, especially anti-communists and former fascist collaborators. However, relations between functionaries in the MIO and Kultprop soured in the “wild west” political terrain of the post-1948 communist state, as they scrambled to amass greater political power wherever they could find it. Under the growing shadow of the terror, as political rivals became existential enemies, these conflicts took an increasingly ominous tenor. By 1951, the right denunciation at the wrong time meant professional ruin, arrest, or even death. ¹²

Amid the political radicalization of the Stalinist regime, intellectuals continued to play an important role as mouthpieces of Party policies, including its doctrine of socialist realism. Lead among them were former members of the interwar avant-garde, who had loyally (and in most cases genuinely) repudiated their “decadent” artistic past under the “bourgeois” First Republic. Their position in the new order was nevertheless insecure. A number of leading Party functionaries, especially those too young to remember or participate in interwar cultural life, denounced them as bourgeois interlopers fundamentally polluted by their past. The Kultprop, which included a large number of these young functionaries, was most sympathetic to this hard-line position. Initially, the MIO also was amenable to persecuting those who refused to repudiate their decadent legacy and embrace socialist realism. ¹³ This position changed, however, as tensions between the two agencies escalated. Dozens of former avant-gardists had found work in the MIO after 1945, holding influential positions as section chiefs, political advisors, and state-sanctioned artists. Initially they were shielded from Party-led attacks against the avant-garde, thanks to their official recognition as “socialist realists.” Archival evidence suggests, however, that by summer 1950 Kultprop functionaries were planning to denounce them anyway. ¹⁴ The goal was to undermine the MIO by painting it as a bastion of bourgeois interlopers and enemy agents, thereby securing the Kultprop’s dominance in cultural politics.

The MIO leadership thus recognized its vulnerability and began shielding all avant-garde intellectuals from Kultprop attacks, including those who still refused to embrace socialist realism. ¹⁵ Meanwhile, as battles between the two agencies raged, the balance of power in Czechoslovakia began to shift. By fall 1951, the Stalinist terror had reached a crescendo with the downfall and arrest of CPCS General Secretary Rudolf Slánský, the second most powerful Party member in Czechoslovakia and the most prominent victim of its show trials. Soon thereafter, President Klement Gottwald ordered a complete reorganization of all Party organizations under Slánský’s purview, including the Kultprop, whose officials were now tainted by their fallen leader. MIO functionaries moved rapidly to consolidate their advantage, purging “Slánskýite” functionaries from arts unions, editorial staffs, and political oversight committees. By January 1951, the MIO enjoyed complete supremacy in cultural politics, whereupon it forbid any criticism of the avant-garde without explicit approval. ¹⁶ The underlying irony is thus that Slánský’s arrest, the culminating moment of Stalinist repression in Czechoslovakia, helped secure the legacy of the “bourgeois” avant-garde by eliminating its fiercest critics.

Superficially, the emergence of this more tolerant attitude toward the avant-garde resembles a partial thaw or “liberalization” of the regime’s cultural policies. By no means, however, should this be mistaken for an early “de-Stalinization” before the death of Stalin. ¹⁷ Documents from Russian archives suggest to the contrary that the policies of the MIO were closer to, not further from, the opinions of Stalin and his inner circle, insofar as they regarded cultural politics. ¹⁸ Progressive elements of pre-communist ‘bourgeois’ cultures were to be preserved, not annihilated. More importantly, this supposed ‘thaw’ only engendered further Stalinist repression. Former Kultprop loyalists, whom the MIO branded as the incompetent dupes of “Slánskýism” [Slánština], faced ongoing persecution and humiliating demotions into the mid-1950s, often at the hands of former avant-gardists. Although few Kultprop functionaries were arrested or executed, many emerged from the 1950s as the outspoken “reform communists” of the Prague Spring, having experienced the blunt end of the repressive apparatuses they enthusiastically helped construct. Regardless, in the short term, MIO dominance in cultural politics offered greater professional and personal security for former avant-garde intellectuals. In return, the Party expected them to express unwavering loyalty–or in the very least silent acquiescence –to the regime and the Soviet Union. Of course the MIO was willing to accept terrified silence as proof of this loyalty, but for those who wished to publish their writings or show their art, a more verbal fealty was the price of admission. By 1954-1955, even this position had softened.

Despite the coercion underlying the rise of the MIO in 1951, this new phase in Stalinism offered to former avant-garde members a modicum of creative space within heavily proscribed boundaries. Paradoxically, the MIO functionaries responsible for this policy of moderation, including several members of the avant-garde themselves, had ruthlessly eliminated their political enemies, both real and perceived, amid the Stalinist terror. Because MIO attacks ruined both careers and lives, both before and after the downfall of the Kultprop, the agency and its functionaries were forever tainted as willing participants in the terror. Today, leading MIO functionaries are remembered as some of the most radical extremists of communism in Czechoslovakia—the “grave diggers” of Czech culture. Forgotten, however, was their role in protecting artists and intellectuals from the ravages of the Kultprop in the early 1950s.

Adolf Hoffmeister: Stalinist Satire

Among the many Czech intellectuals who owed their livelihood in the 1950s to the graces of the MIO, Adolf Hoffmeister [1902-1973] offers a compelling case study. Hoffmeister had been a prominent writer, visual artist, and newspaper editor during the interwar era, counting among his friends such influential figures as President Edvard Beneš and the writer Karel Čapek. He was also a founding member of the avant-garde arts group Devětsil in 1920 and later played a formative role in the Czech Surrealist group, although he never became a full member. Hoffmeister is best known as a caricature artist who captured the likeness of his subjects with disarming simplicity, including European cultural giants such as Salvador Dali, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, George Grosz, Ilya Ehrenberg, and G.K. Chesterton, among many others. In 1938 he wrote the libretto to the children’s opera Brundibar, famously performed in the Terezín concentration camp under the direction of its imprisoned composer Hans Krása. During the war, Hoffmeister fled to Paris and later Morocco, where he was captured by Vichy authorities and imprisoned in a concentration camp. Hoffmeister escaped from Africa to the United States in 1941, where he produced antifascist radio broadcasts for Voice of America and USA Radio with other Czech exiles. His opposition to Nazi Germany was not merely political; his wife was a German-speaking Jew from the Sudetenland whose five siblings died in Terezín and Treblinka.

Hoffmeister returned to Prague in 1945 with a personal invitation from Minister Václav Kopecký in the MIO, where he served as an official liaison, courting various members of the avant-garde with lucrative political positions and job contracts. Kopecký promoted him to section chief of the Foreign Cultural Relations division of the MIO in 1946, where he served simultaneously as a delegate to the PEN club and UNESCO. During the communist seizure of power, Hoffmeister played an important role in various “Action Committees” organized by the Kultprop, which subordinated formerly independent organizations to the leadership of the CPCS. Shortly thereafter, President Gottwald appointed him the Czechoslovak Ambassador to France. ¹⁹ After living comfortably in Paris during the early phases of the Stalinist terror, the Party relieved him of his duties amid the downfall of Rudolf Slánský and the Kultprop in fall 1951.

Conflicting sources claim that Hoffmeister faced an “imminent purge,” “narrowly avoided arrest,” and “was even in jail for a few months” following his return from Paris. ²⁰ Whether such claims are true (at present they remain unverified by documentary evidence), they elide Hoffmeister’s relationship to Kopecký and his lieutenants in the MIO. According to various letters and postcards housed in the archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Hoffmeister maintained contact with Ladislav Štoll and Jiří Taufer, top MIO functionaries who were responsible for political campaigns against dozens of Czech writers and intellectuals. Hoffmeister was either uninterested or unaware of their involvement in these campaigns. Shortly after the publication of Štoll and Taufer’s Thirty Years of Struggle for Czech Socialist Poetry, perhaps the most notorious socialist realist text in Czechoslovakia, Hoffmeister invited both men for a ‘lovely’ spring vacation in Paris. Štoll declined the offer, citing his overbearing workload. ²¹ In light of such evidence, it is difficult to imagine that Hoffmeister’s political enemies during the Stalinist terror were more formidable than his allies.

As an artist, Hoffmeister’s works from the early 1950s emulated many of the ideas and imperatives underlying the communist regime, functioning less as fine art than political propaganda. This did not constitute a radical departure. Much like the antifascist illustrations he produced in the United States during the war, Hoffmeister combined simplistic illustrations with an explicitly political subtext. Many of these images are striking, ironically, for their thematic parallels to fascist art, which idealized masculine bodies and the sanctity of the family. ²² For example in the “Peacemaker,” a muscular everyman defends his family, dressed in traditional peasant garb, by shooting an arrow-like pen at a bald-headed eagle as it attacks their peace dove (Figure 1). In other works from this period, vicious eagles and flying skeletons dropped from U.S. bombers threaten women with baby carriages and peasant children. The underlying message is clear. The socialist realist artist must shield and protect his “family,” a metaphor for the Czech nation no less than socialism as such, by wielding his art like a weapon against their rapacious enemies. Although such illustrations bear similarities to Hoffmeister’s interwar works, the thematic content (traditionalism and patriarchy) is anything but avant-garde.

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Figure 1

Adolf Hoffmeister illustration, “Peacemaker” (1951)

Many of Hoffmeister’s socialist realist works also owed a considerable debt to the razor-sharp wit of the German Neue Sachlichkeit. Akin to the interwar works of George Grosz or Otto Dix, whom he deeply admired, Hoffmeister used humorous caricatures to satirize the inner “objective form” of wealthy capitalists, war-mongering imperialists, and corrupt politicians by twisting and exaggerating their external ugliness. Frequent among Hoffmeister’s targets was U.S. President Harry Truman, an ominous, scowling creature that threatened young children and elderly women with knives, bombs, and canisters of poison gas (Figure 2). Other targets included the banker J. P. Morgan, a fat beast in a top hat and coattails, and John D. Rockefeller, shown in a conspiratorial moment with the Grim Reaper as he unfolds stock ticker tape on Black Friday, October 1929 (Figure 3). In “Imperialists Divide up the World,” General McArthur, Truman, and various European leaders battle for control of a miniature globe as their servants scurry around them with cocktails and finger food. Harshly satirical and raw, but nevertheless neoclassical in form, such works straddled the boundaries between interwar objectivism and postwar political propaganda.

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Figure 2

Adolf Hoffmeister illustration, “Untitled” (1951)

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Figure 3

Adolf Hoffmeister illustration, “John D. Rockefeller or Black Friday (1959)

Given Hoffmeister’s stable position as a loyal patron of the MIO and a politically committed artist, it is unsurprising that within weeks of his return to Prague he had re-established direct contact with Ladislav Štoll and Jiří Taufer in the MIO. Under their auspices, he joined a campaign to subordinate the Czechoslovak Arts Union, a trade organization for artists and architects, to MIO functionaries. ²³ In an address delivered to the Second Congress of the Arts Union in January 1952, ominously titled “Criticism of the Critics,” he led an MIO attack against leading union members, whom he accused of cosmopolitanism, sectarianism, and dogmatism of the most “un-comradely” sort. ²⁴ Although Hoffmeister “coordinated” the ideological foundations of his speech through written correspondence with Štoll, his denunciations against leading members of the union were independently contrived. According to internal reports from the Central Committee of the CPCS, no one in the Party leadership had authorized the denunciation of specific individuals, which constituted a dire threat amid the heightened political tensions of the terror. ²⁵ Almost immediately, Štoll issued a statement that the Party neither wanted nor was able to “take the position of a concrete criticism” against those Hoffmeister had denounced. ²⁶ He nevertheless supported the basic outline of Hoffmeister’s attack (which he helped plan) as “fundamentally sound,” and later reprinted “Criticism of the Critics” in Literary News, the official journal of the Writers Union.

Hoffmeister’s motivations for participating in the MIO campaign against the Arts Union are beyond the ability of documentary evidence to assess. Careerism, anger, fear, revenge, ideological conviction, or any combination therein may have driven his attacks. One compelling theory is that despite the Stalinist trappings of the debate, he was seizing an opportunity to defend his legacy (and well-being) as a member of the interwar avant-garde. Among those implicated in the imbroglio was the artist Jan Čumpelík (1895-1965), a proponent of aesthetic realism who built his career painting landscapes and portraits. According to Čumpelík, who issued a spirited defense of the Arts Union at the January congress, Hoffmeister had no place calling himself a “socialist realist,” since he spent most of his life defending abstract art and experimental aesthetics. ²⁷ Indeed Hoffmeister and Čumpelík had long been rivals. In the early 1930s, when Hoffmeister led the charge to gain official recognition for avant-garde artists in the Mánes Union of Fine Arts (the predecessor of the postwar Arts Union), Čumpelík stood among his fiercest opponents. In 1933, over the objections of Čumpelík, Mánes officially sponsored a controversial exhibition of international Surrealist art that Hoffmeister curated. At stake in the “Criticism of the Critics” affair was thus an outstanding debate from the interwar era between the aesthetic vision of the avant-garde and those who supported the nineteenth-century tradition of realism. With striking historical irony, Čumpelík thus phrased his defense of the Arts Union against an MIO takeover as a necessary step to protect “socialist realism” against avant-garde interlopers.

From the larger perspective of Stalinist cultural politics, the conflict between Čumpelik and Hoffmeister reveals a set of complicated loyalties that do not readily fall into categories such as “victim” and “persecutor.” To the contrary, Party functionaries found themselves torn between a politically reliable avant-gardist and a recalcitrant realist. Štoll was among those with conflicted loyalties. According to his private notes, he expressed clear disagreement with Hoffmeister over the affair, not least because his attempts to “repay” Čumpelík for their longstanding artistic rivalry had created an embarrassing public rift. ²⁸ Štoll nevertheless sided publicly with Hoffmeister and other former members of the avant-garde, not least because their political loyalty mattered more than Čumpelík’s realist aesthetics. ²⁹ Thereafter, in a series of articles published between January and June 1952, various MIO functionaries (including former members of the avant-garde) defended the view that aesthetic realism was not necessarily the same as socialist realism, since the formal dynamics of a realistic painting did not necessarily reflect the dialectical tensions central to the reality of class struggle. ³⁰ An “anonymous” letter to the editors of Literary News went so far as to suggest that Čumpelík, who received several “well-known commissions” under the interwar republic, had been a lackey of the former “bourgeois regime.” ³¹ “Socialist realism,” in other words, could take various “non-realistic” forms, just as banal landscape paintings occluded the oppression of bourgeois society by ignoring it. That such arguments came from leading members of the MIO—the guarantors of Stalinism in culture and the arts—is nothing short of astonishing. It was the interwar avant-garde that first employed such arguments in the 1930s against their opponents—not just the realists in Mánes but also their critics in the CPCS.

All things considered, neither Hoffmeister nor Čumpelík fared poorly during the Stalinist era, notwithstanding the heated conflict between them that emerged amid the abortive efforts of the MIO to Stalinize the Arts Union. Despite his opposition to the MIO, Čumpelík won a commission soon thereafter to produce the painting “The Czechoslovak People Give Thanks to the Generalissimo,” in which young pioneers (the communist equivalent of boy and girl scouts) greet Stalin with bouquets of flowers. Thereafter, he became a leading proponent of artistic “collectivism” in the Army Arts Studio, which produced large-scale, collectively painted landscapes. Today art historians regard him the most “official artist” of Stalinist Czechoslovakia. Hoffmeister also managed to weather the storm of Stalinism. Soon after the “Criticism of the Critics” debate, he was appointed to the Academy of Arts and Industrial Design (UMPRUM), where he taught animation and puppet theater. He later joined the Central Committee of the Arts Union after it fell under MIO control in late 1952. Allowed to travel after the onset of de-Stalinization in 1956, he began publishing illustrated travelogues of his experiences in China, Egypt, Japan, and Latin America. In the 1960s he emerged as a gray eminence of the Prague Spring. Only after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 did he lose official favor with the regime, which he bitterly criticized for accepting the occupation. Banned and ostracized as an official “non-Person,” he died in 1973.

Considering Hoffmeister’s active personal involvement with Kopecký and the MIO in the early 1950s, can we readily classify him as an ‘official’ artist, or Stalinist? An affirmative response does not readily account for the complex motivations underlying his actions, which may have been driven by ideological conviction, a desperate attempt to survive, or anything between. Moreover, as his debate with Čumpelík demonstrates, Hoffmeister was not just an errand boy for his political superiors. Not only was he settling a score with an old political enemy (and potential threat under the current regime), he was defending his heritage as a former member of the avant-garde. However, he was not entirely a victim, especially given his close alliance with MIO functionaries, who were simultaneously leading a widespread purge of Czech cultural life. Ultimately, both Hoffmeister and Čumpelík engaged in a common intellectual endeavor to conceptualize, within the constrictive restraints of Party policy, a genuinely “socialist” art. Moreover, both had framed their artistic rival as a political or “class enemy” of socialism, notwithstanding the link between such denunciations and the state-sanctioned violence of the terror. By his own estimation, Hoffmeister like Čumpelík saw himself as a socialist realist, which neither he nor his patron in the CPCS saw as fundamentally incompatible with his heritage as a member of the avant-garde.

Like so many idealists of his generation, Hoffmeister was incapable, or unwilling, to acknowledge that his ideological worldview had helped to engender the terror and violence that Czechoslovakia witnessed. Shortly after the death of Stalin, he went so far as to publicly denounce the radical excesses of the regime while defending those who perpetuated it as noble protectors of the Czech people. Speaking at a conference of caricature art that he organized in June 1953, Hoffmeister called attention to the “dangerous blight of grey fog” that had transformed communist Czechoslovakia into a bleak dystopia. With poetic flourish, he lamented how Czechs had “forgotten how to smile” even though “we are in essence a happy people.” ³² Those responsible for spreading this pestilence were the careerists, soulless bureaucrats and humorless automatons of the regime, “of whom there are an unacceptably high amount.” Ultimately, happiness was the only cure in both culture and politics, where “happy people and humanist personalities” were battling the blight with “laughter from their hearts.” Among these ‘joyous warriors,’ whose love for the Czech people was matched by their hatred for the enemies of socialism, stood such figures as President Gottwald, Minister Kopecký, and MIO functionaries. In their hearts ‘laughter and hatred were neighbors.’ ³³ Whether Hoffmeister privately believed such remarks is immaterial. He publicly acknowledged the negative effects of Stalinism—indeed he suffered through them—but blamed these effects on shadowy internal enemies such as Rudolf Slánský and other victims of the terror. If laughter and hatred could coexist in the human heart, so too could a man become both a victim and a perpetrator of Stalinism.

Emil František Burian: Army Art

As Hoffmeister worked with MIO functionaries to defend his legacy as a former member of the avant-garde, the theater director and dramaturge Emil František (E.F) Burian (1904-1959) followed a similar path with the Ministry of Defense and Czechoslovak Army. Like Hoffmeister, Burian came of age during the First World War and rose to prominence under the democratic republic. He began his career in the avant-garde group Devětsil, under whose auspices he sang in a jazz band and conducted the experimental orchestra Voiceband, which blended words, songs, and poetic verse in different combinations to create a choir pastiche. Despite these early successes as a musician and composer, Burian is best known as the artistic director of “Divadlo D” [Theater D] or simply “D,” which he founded in 1934. While at Theater D, Burian became a leading innovator of theater in Czechoslovakia, similar to Vseovolod Meyerchold or Bertolt Brecht, whom he counted as personal friends and admirers. Burian called his performances “synthetic theater,” by which he meant a collective fusion of all artistic forms and technology—including music, magnetic tape recordings, film projectors, and early PA systems—into a synthetic supra-reality (Figure 4).

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Figure 4

D 37 set design for “Procitnutí jara” by Miloslav Kouřil

Burian’s passion for collectivity and synthesis stemmed from his political beliefs as a member of the CPCS, which he joined in 1923 at the age of nineteen. Although a devout communist, he was never afraid to criticize the Party leadership or Soviet Union when he disagreed with their policies. His most frequent targets of opprobrium, however, were Nazi Germany and Czech fascism, which he relentlessly criticized both on- and off-stage. His political beliefs and outspoken bombast thus transformed Theater D into political lightning rod, scandalizing Czech fascists, Nazi-apologists, conservatives, liberals, and communists in equal measure. He bowed to no one. During the “Munich Crisis” of 1938, he stood among the most vocal opponents of capitulation to Nazi Germany. Even after the occupation he remained defiant, often to the point of recklessness. When Gestapo agents threatened to arrest him unless he staged more “German performances,” he responded with a public announcement that Theater D would henceforth stage only Czech “national” authors, performances which he intermixed with scenes lifted directly from Nazi concentration camps (Figure 5). ³⁴ After months of threats and hysterical diatribes against him in the fascist press, the Gestapo raided his theater in April 1941 and dragged out him in handcuffs. ³⁵

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Figure 5

Figure 5: E.F. Burian’s staging of Karel Mácha’s nationalist epic “Maj,” (1940)

Burian miraculously survived four years in German concentration camps, a death march to the North Sea, and an abortive RAF bombing of a prison ship filled with thousands of camp survivors. When he returned to Prague in June 1945, the press had already taken him for dead as a martyr of the anti-fascist and communist resistance. ³⁶ Feted like a hero, and with almost stunning fortitude, he returned to work almost immediately. Within months he had become the director of a rehabilitated Theater D, a communist parliamentarian in the Czechoslovak National Assembly, the host of a popular radio broadcast, and the editor-in-chief of his own Party-funded news weekly. With typical hubris, he portrayed himself as a savior of Czech culture who returned from the dead to deliver his people from the torpor of the capitalist past into the socialist future. ³⁷ At an early meeting with his reestablished troupe, Burian promised them: “I will be able to press just one key, and the typewriter will take off with precision and in all things it will be splendid.” ³⁸ Despite his megalomania, Party functionaries were eager to capitalize upon Burian’s popularity, and promoted him as a hero of the communist resistance to further their own political ends. In private, however, they regarded him a potentially dangerous loose cannon and did everything they could to limit his political influence. ³⁹

Burian’s tenuous position as a Party hero rapidly eroded after the seizure of power in 1948. Within weeks, the Ministry of Education and Enlightenment recommended to the Party leadership that it shut down Theater D for its “avant-garde tendencies.” ⁴⁰ Although Kopecký and other leading functionaries managed to prevent the closure, Burian’s critics nevertheless sought every opportunity to marginalize him. Most bizarrely, he was implicated in an “anti-state conspiracy” in 1949. His involvement in the conspiracy began when a group of student editors at his journal brought in a copy of a satirical poem mocking the celebrated communist poet Vítězslav Nezval, also a former member of the avant-garde. The students read the poem, made a few carbon copies, and returned to work. Because Nezval was a valued Party insider beyond reproach, the students’ lampoon, once discovered by the Party leadership, was branded a political conspiracy. Although the poem was circulated privately and never published, and despite a complete lack of evidence pointing to a political conspiracy, the case was transferred to an investigator in the Ministry of State Security. Within weeks, forty-eight people were netted as perpetrators or accomplices in the “Nezval affair,” including Burian, who was accused of facilitating anti-state violence among his staff for laughing at the poem. ⁴¹ The Party leadership, swayed by Kopecký, refused to label Burian a “traitor,” but they nevertheless found him guilty of “naivety” and “carelessness” for laughing. ⁴²

This experience profoundly rattled Burian, who immediately ceased his bellicose behavior in favor of complete submission. ⁴³ His efforts at supplication culminated the following year with a massive self-criticism in the form of a socialist realist epic drama entitled Hotbed: A Play about Faithfulness and Treachery. ⁴⁴ As a play, Hotbed brought to life the fantastical enemies inhabiting the scripts of show trials, transforming the most excessive fantasies of Stalinism into theatrical drama. Through each of the six acts, Burian’s protagonists struggle with their political responsibilities under socialism, until the climax, when they valiantly denounce a disloyal bourgeois intellectual (their friend, husband, colleague) to the state. The play received mixed reviews and low attendance, doing little to rehabilitate Burian in the eyes of Party leaders, whose political and financial support were no longer forthcoming.

A surprising turn of events came in fall 1951 when Burian accepted an offer from the Ministry of Defense under Alexej Čepička to assimilate Theater D into the theater division of the Czechoslovak army. According to this new arrangement Burian renamed his troupe the “Army Arts Theater” (AAT), offered discounts for military personnel, and organized traveling theater shows to entertain the troops. He became, in other words, a Czech communist equivalent to Bob Hope. The self-avowed pacifist even accepted an honorary military post. ⁴⁵ Arguably this Faustian bargain forced Burian to sacrifice his independence and integrity, but it also offered him benefits. Although the Ministry of Defense takeover constituted a “nationalization” of Theater D, Minister Čepička allowed Burian to keep all theater property, including props and costumes, under his private control. The deal also kept Burian’s fiercest critics at bay, especially in the Ministry of Education. No one in Czechoslovakia had the ability to overrule Čepička’s decisions or countermand his authority—he answered directly to Stalin and the Soviet Politburo. ⁴⁶ As Minister of Defense and head of the military, all industries and organizations under his control maintained independence from Party and state control. Čepička also allocated significant resources to the arts and culture, which he believed were crucial to the ideological development and personal well-being of soldiers and their families. Thanks to Čepička’s virtually untouchable status –granted at Stalin’s personal behest –army cultural organizations were shielded from the more radical effects of the regime. Burian thus became the only pre-revolutionary theater director in Czechoslovakia to survive the Stalinist era with his theater, career, and life intact. ⁴⁷

During his first year with the Ministry of Defense, Burian struggled to remain relevant as a cutting-edge theatrical director working within the social and political constraints of the Party’s official line. For the most part, he staged classical standards by nineteenth-century Czech and Russian realists, and contemporary socialist realist works by writers such as Nazim Hikmet and Johannes Becher. However, he also managed to perform more outlandish fare such as Alfred Jarry’s controversial absurdist classic “King Ubu,” and western classics by the likes of Balzac and Shakespeare, the first performances of their kind in communist Czechoslovakia. Burian also took personal risks outside his performances, for example by supporting persecuted friends and colleagues with his money and moral support. ⁴⁸ Burian’s political immunity, indirectly provided by Stalin himself, thus served as a cultural bastion for writers and artists banned in Stalin’s name.

Burian’s position changed rapidly after March 1953, when the death of Joseph Stalin triggered a series of political upheavals throughout the East Bloc. The tensions were especially acute in Czechoslovakia, where, just weeks after the death of Stalin, President Gottwald also died (allegedly of a broken heart). A wave of strikes followed in May 1953, triggered by devastating currency reforms that eliminated private savings. The new Party leadership under President Antonín Zapotocký responded to the protests with brutality, which it justified as necessary to liquidate the “agents of imperialism” stirring labor unrest. Even the Show Trials continued apace (unlike Poland and Hungary, where Stalin’s death prompted their immediate cessation). Not even the downfall and arrest of NKVD head Lavrenti Beria in July 1953 slowed the pace of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. To the contrary, Slánský’s cooperation with Beria and the NKVD in the early 1950s merely justified his execution –henceforth he was denounced as the ‘Czech Beria.

Alarmed at the continuing Stalinist hard line in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Politburo compelled Zapotocký to introduce greater political and economic reforms, which after months of heated debate culminated with the so-called New Course in December 1953. Among these New Course reforms were two proposals designed to address the marked decline in quality and quantity of new cultural works. The first provided greater material and moral support to artists, freeing them from the so-called Slánskýite dogmatism of the preceding era. The second promised to offer greater support for popular culture such as carnivals, operettas, ballet, cabaret, satire, fashion, and interior design. In reality these proposals were anything but “reform”—their underlying goal was to expand on the definition of socialist realism rather than to supplant it. Moreover, the proposals were mostly a rehash of the policies initiated by Kopecký and the MIO in November 1951, only now articulated as a corrective “revision” to earlier policies.

The New Course nevertheless provided opportunities for artists and intellectuals to expand the definition and meaning of socialist realism in Czechoslovakia, while offering greater breathing space for those who disagreed with Party dogma. More importantly, the “New Course” allowed artists and intellectuals an opportunity to capitalize upon growing confusion and uncertainty in the Party leadership, exposing differences in opinion within the CPCS, or between functionaries in Prague and Moscow. In other words, intellectuals were able to use political disagreements to their advantage, playing different sides against each other to ensure that their personal vision of socialist culture emerged victorious. When the works of a heretofore banned or persecuted writer or artist surfaced in Moscow, Czech intellectuals would immediately follow suit, proclaiming the importance of following the “Soviet line.” The Party leadership was often left gaping from the sidelines. The result was a perpetually changing cultural landscape defined by a paradoxical insistence on aesthetic and ideological consistency.

Among the institutions responsible for pushing the boundaries of the New Course, Burian’s AAT was among the most effective, given its relative invulnerability to the CPCS leadership outside the Ministry of Defense. Perhaps most significant was the role Burian played in rehabilitating two influential Czech authors from the interwar period: Karel Čapek (1890-1938) and Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923). Karel Čapek was a leading light of Czech cultural life during the interwar republic whose works had been banned by the communist regime for their associations with the “bourgeois republic.” Appealing directly to the Ministry of Defense, Burian received permission to perform a rendition of Čapek’s play “Mother,” which opened shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953. ⁴⁹ Although Burian’s decision to break the taboo against Čapek was risky, it was also an astute assessment of a changing political climate. Not long before, in a move that had shocked the CPCS leadership, the Soviet Writers Union published a compendium of Čapek’s works in Russian. Immediately thereafter, the Czechoslovak Writers Union released a translation of the compendium’s introduction, which among other things proclaimed Čapek “valuable to the builders of the new People’s Democracy in Czechoslovakia.” ⁵⁰ As a result, the CPCS leadership faced an embarrassing problem: the ongoing ban against Čapek was now at odds with the official Soviet line. Burian thus recognized an opportunity to outmaneuver Party censors and helped pave the way toward Čapek’s official rehabilitation at the Tenth Party Congress of the CPCS in 1954.

Burian was also among the first to capitalize upon the rehabilitation of author Jaroslav Hašek, best known for his internationally acclaimed picaresque masterpiece The Fate of the Good Soldier Švejk during the War. Party intellectuals had long been conflicted in their opinions of Hašek and his works—the author had been a bigamous drunk, plagiarist, and anarchist. His work was extremely popular in the Soviet Union, however, where Hašek fought alongside the Bolsheviks during the Civil War as a decorated commissar. Gambling on Soviet approval and unbeholden to Party censors, Burian premiered a theatrical rendition of “The Good Soldier Švejk,” which he adapted from an earlier performance that debuted in 1936. Although the 1954 rendition was considerably less obscene than the original stage performance, it became a smashing success. ⁵¹ Theaters throughout Czechoslovakia began staging their own renditions of Burian’s adaptation, transforming Švejk into a national hero. Two of Burian’s avant-garde colleagues, Jiří Trnka and Jan Werich, released a puppet film based on his adaptation in 1955. A full-length feature film followed soon thereafter, featuring several actors from Burian’s stage performance. The rising star Rudolf Hrušinský—who studied with Burian at Theater D in the 1930s—played Joseph švejk in what became one of his most memorable performances.

Although Burian was uncanny in his ability to anticipate, or indeed precipitate, changes to the political climate, he was not always successful in his efforts, nor was his theater completely immune from external pressure. Evocative was the fate of the musical cabaret “Scandal in the Picture Gallery” [Skándal v obrazárně] by Václav Jelínek, which premiered at the AAT in October 1953. Drawing on the bawdy musicals Burian enjoyed in his youth, “Scandal in the Picture Gallery” was a lighthearted and satirical portrayal of life under the communist regime, featuring musical numbers with singing shock brigades and agricultural laborers on collective farms. Although the jokes in “Scandal in the Picture Gallery” are subtle and discrete, the performance pushed the boundaries of socialist realism in what was still an extremely repressive political environment. With a wink and a nudge, the irony of agricultural brigades singing about their lives struck Czech audiences as hilarious. “Scandal in the Picture Gallery” became a runaway hit, perhaps the greatest of Burian’s postwar career. Within six months, “the musical” had spread to dozens of theaters across the country. Even President Zápotocký, who replaced Gottwald after his death in 1953, came to see a performance. ⁵² According to Burian’s own estimation, the waiting list was more than three months long. ⁵³ Soon thereafter, in a nod to his resurgent popularity, Burian was named a National Artist and his theater was awarded the Order of Labor.

Initially, the success of “Scandal in the Picture Gallery” precipitated a shift in the Party’s attitudes toward comedy. When the MIO began rolling out cultural reforms in December 1953, Kopecký used the opportunity to proclaim that satire, cabaret humor, and operettas were compatible with socialist realism. ⁵⁴ By no coincidence, Kopecký’s speech came as “Scandal in the Picture Gallery” reached the zenith of its popularity, making it less a policy shift than an acknowledgement of reality. This shift would prove temporary. Within months, the Party’s General Secretary Antonín Novotný, began denouncing satire for hiding “the danger of slander,” and “Scandal in the Picture Gallery” disappeared from state-run theaters soon thereafter. ⁵⁵ However, neither the Party leadership nor its state ministries had any authority over Burian, who, backed by Čepička, refused to remove the piece from his repertoire. Ultimately the Party Central Committee had to appeal directly to the Soviet embassy to sidestep Čepička and ban the performance. ⁵⁶

Despite his charge as “honorary lieutenant,” Burian also poked fun at military life. In spring 1955, Burian began staging an updated version of his 1930s performance “Military Service” [Vojna]. ⁵⁷ Based on a cycle of poems by K.J. Erben, “Military Service” was a montage of experimental music and dance numbers that criticized the military and promoted pacifism. Among the numerous jabs at military culture were such unambiguous lines as: “Those real men are bonny champs [jonáci], it’s a pity, super pity, they made soldiers out of them.” ⁵⁸ Like his performance of Švejk, Burian’s “Military Service” did not offer a specific criticism of the communist regime and its military goals, but rather a generalized sentiment that appeared fully consistent with the Party line, which accused the West of military aggression and portrayed its own military buildup as purely defensive. Nevertheless, Burian’s decision to perform ‘Military Service’ held symbolic meaning for those willing to seek it. The performance was extremely controversial under the democratic republic, and was banned outright under the Nazi Protectorate for its subversive anti-militarism. As such, the meaning of “Military Service” was ambiguous and plural. On the one hand it constituted a challenge to the artistic intolerance of the communist regime —an avant-garde experiment that criticized warmongering and cultural conservatism. On the other hand, by allowing it to continue, the socialist state demonstrated its tolerance toward experimental performances once persecuted under less hospitable regimes.

As Burian’s theater regained credibility after 1953, tensions began to erupt with the Czechoslovak Army and Ministry of Defense. Increasingly secure in his political position, Burian began asserting his authority against his bureaucratic superiors, whom he treated with hostility and disdain. For example, when “Scandal in the Picture Gallery” began selling out, Burian reneged on his obligation to supply the military with an allotted amount of free tickets for soldiers on leave, claiming that the show was booked for months in advance. When an official from the Army’s booking agency contacted the theater regarding the matter, Burian sent a bitter, condescending response. ⁵⁹ Burian also faced criticism for the mistreatment of (unpaid) military volunteers assigned to his theater as extras, musicians, and stagehands. One soldier sent an anonymous letter to the editors of a leading newspaper to complain that working conditions at the theater had become unbearable. When the editors forwarded the letter to the AAT with a request for clarification, Burian demonstrated little remorse, deriding them for “occupying your time with anonymous [complaints].” Instead he promised to root out the person responsible for the complaint and punish him. ⁶⁰ Such conflicts were thus less the product of ideological debates than Burian’s poor management skills and megalomania.

Although Burian enjoyed more commercial and critical successes in the AAT than he had since the late 1930s, his tenure in the Czechoslovak Army was ultimately short-lived, thanks to the onset of de-Stalinization and the downfall of Alexej Čepička. As part of the New Course reforms in 1953, the Party Central Committee had initiated the most substantive restructuring of state ministries in Czechoslovakia since 1945. At the same time, Party leaders used these changes to jockey for power and eliminate rivals, much as they had in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin in 1953. Among the “victims” of 1956 was Čepička, whose influence waned as the Soviet leadership backed away from Stalin’s policies of military brinksmanship. When the Czechoslovak military began a massive demobilization in 1954, as part of a broader arrangement between the Soviet Union and the West, Čepička found his heretofore unlimited power placed firmly in check. Equally fateful was the rise of Khrushchev, who intensely disliked Čepička and endeavored to supplant him. ⁶¹ The CPCS leadership, long resentful of Čepička’s power and influence, ascertained this shift and moved quickly to sideline their rival. As a result, shortly after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in February 1956, Čepička was removed from power and labeled the “Czech Stalin.” Burian’s patron was thus the first major victim of de-Stalinization in Czechoslovakia and the first Politburo member to fall victim to a purge since Slánský in November 1951. ⁶²

As Čepička’s star began to fade, the Party Central Committee entered into discussions with Burian to dissolve the AAT and re-open the Theater D under their authority. ⁶³ Burian welcomed this return to the civilian sphere, which he saw as a vindication of his earlier mistreatment at the hands of his Party enemies. In a speech to the CPCS Central Committee in August 1955 he addressed the imminent transfer with enthusiasm and a surprising level of candor, betraying his growing optimism that the regime had entered a new, more liberal era. Regarding the fate of his theater after 1948, he acknowledged that he had had “great adversaries, both artistic and political,” but now that his success had been proven, the political climate was shifting in his favor. His experiences in the Czechoslovak Army had been nothing more than an inconvenience, and he welcomed the decision of the Party to “cripple the culture of military hypertrophy that has created harm by dividing culture into two different fronts.” His transfer was an opportunity to “go my own road, not wait on orders from above, but rather to help govern the state from my artistic capabilities from below, to lead the Party, to work for the workers and peasants.” In other words, Čepička’s “second front,” which had once protected him from his enemies, was now a hindrance to the development of his artistic vision. In conclusion, with his typical megalomania, he proclaimed himself the savior of socialist culture, intending to “reinvigorate” [obnovit] theater with the “spirit of the interwar avant-garde.” ⁶⁴

Although it is impossible to determine the sincerity of Burian’s speech, he clearly understood his departure from the Ministry of Defense as an opportunity to hope for (or perhaps subtly demand) greater creative independence. A new Theater D, free of the Ministry of Defense, could combine the “revolutionary traditions” of the avant-garde with the tendentious and “militant function of art in [socialist] society.” To reflect this avant-garde rebirth, Burian chose to rename his theater D 34, harking back to the year of Theater D’s original founding. His choice was both ironic and telling. Although the interwar Theater D had a constantly changing number affixed to its title, reflecting the year of the current theatrical season, the new Theater D would permanently fix itself at “34.” Although Burian argued that this was meant to demonstrate “the firmness and certainty of today’s realities,” it also betrayed his fidelity to the interwar avant-garde, no longer as an act of political or aesthetic defiance, but now as the nostalgic transformation of his youthful radicalism into dry kitsch. Whatever the case, the interwar legacy of the avant-garde was for Burian a living and vital component of socialist realism and thus deserved greater tolerance.

Despite such optimism, Burian was mistaken to believe that his return to the civilian sphere signified a rehabilitation of the interwar avant-garde. Certainly the transition resulted in more than just cosmetic changes. Theater 34 kept only four of its AAT performances for the 1955-1956 season, including Čapek’s “Matka” and two plays by Hašek. Among the new productions were several satirical performances and lighter operas, including Stefan Zweig’s “Napoleon in Jaffa” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Stalinist paean “Nekrassov.” Nevertheless, the degree of “liberalization” these changes represented was slight—Burian’s performances were still subject to approval by the Party and several were immediately rejected. ⁶⁵ Moreover, as the cultural life of Czechoslovakia slowly began to liberalize in the late 1950s, Burian increasingly found himself under attack as a symbol for, rather than a bulwark against, the Stalinist regime. According to internal Party memos, Burian’s actors had been criticizing his “cult of personality” since the release of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” and in 1957 petitioned the Party Central Committee to have him removed from the theater. Although their petition failed, Burian’s correspondence indicates that he lost at least eight members of his troupe over the following two years. Their signed resignations cited “ideological conflicts,” Burian’s “socialist repertoire,” and Theater 34’s “isolation from its viewers” as reasons for their departures. ⁶⁶ One of the resigning members linked his ideological disagreements with Burian to the theater’s ongoing financial troubles, suggesting that their repertoire had failed to win audiences. Outraged, Burian wrote back:

Are you suggesting that Theater D is squandering the workers’ money [through state subsidies] by standing uncompromisingly behind its socialist repertoire? Are you suggesting that Theater D would waste less of the workers’ money if it pandered to spontaneous bad taste or endeavored for more of a so-called international repertoire? This, my friend, is a tragic mistake. . . . A full cash register is never, in any case, a measure of the genuine ideological services [we provide] to working class people. ⁶⁷

The idea of subordinating his theater to public tastes and economic reality had become just as odious to Burian as political subordination to the communist regime. He was no longer willing, or perhaps capable, of envisioning an ‘avant-garde’ theater outside the framework of socialist realism, which had rendered ‘bourgeois’ profit motives and public taste irrelevant to his larger artistic and ideological vision.

Although Burian defended the idea of artistic freedom until his death, this increasingly meant not only freedom from bureaucratic interventions but also freedom from market pressures. Regarding the actual content of his performances, he remained fully amenable to adapting his work to meet the ideological and political needs of the Party leadership. Thus he saw no contradiction when, shortly after making his 1955 speech in defense of artistic freedom, he began inviting Party critics to his dress rehearsals so they could air their criticisms before the show, allowing him to make appropriate “adjustments” to his performances. ⁶⁸ To the only theater director with the acumen and serendipity to survive the Stalinist terror, this seemed par for the course. By the late 1950s, however, such notions of artistic “independence” were increasingly anachronistic. Despite Burian’s courageous efforts to breathe fresh air into the stifling cultural life of Stalinist Czechoslovakia, he now appeared to his contemporaries as a Party hack whose work had lost its creative vibrancy. Even his more courageous works from the early 1950s, although highly controversial and indeed even dangerous for their time, were now disregarded as communist pap. As his audiences dwindled and his troupe fled for greener artistic pastures, he died of a heart attack in August 1959. ⁶⁹

Conclusion

This article has endeavored to demonstrate how two influential Czech intellectuals operated within the restraints of Party-imposed strictures of “socialist realism” during the most repressive and restrictive period of communist Czechoslovakia. In doing so, it challenges our received impression of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia as fundamentally different from the more liberal period that followed, when improvisation and innovation re-emerged from stultifying grayness. Both Hoffmeister and Burian, –notable members of the interwar avant-garde whose worked proved highly influential to the Prague Spring of the 1960s –appropriated the vocabulary. As early as 1951, at least in Czechoslovakia, leading artists and cultural producers such as Adolf Hoffmeister and E.F. Burian enjoyed a modicum of freedom and creative space, albeit heavily restricted compared to the more tolerant cultural climate of the interwar democratic republic. To be sure, Burian and Hoffmeister were both legends, and the immunity they enjoyed from the terror was exceptional. Hundreds of lesser known writers and artists toiled under communist strictures and suffered repression, oftentimes arbitrarily so, for failing to meet unclear expectations. Nevertheless, because the names of the former avant-garde are rarely mentioned in discussions of the Stalinist era, this study offers a much-needed corrective. Hoffmeister and Burian were not dissidents, but neither were they Party hacks or collaborators. Both men occupied an ambivalent space in the communist regime, an ideological grey zone, in which they struggled to surmount various social and political pressures to become active agents in a political fantasy (turned dystopia) they helped to create. In their socialist hearts, to paraphrase Hoffmeister, “conviction and fear were neighbors.”