A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

— The Guardian (London)

A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

In memory of my long-gone canine friends,

Poli, Kiki, and Charlie

Who controls the past controls the future.

Who controls the present controls the past.

— GEORGE ORWELL

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the Fischer Foundation in Germany for their generous grant, which enabled me to work on this book. My thanks to the IWM — the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and to their anonymous friend who financed my Milena Jesenská grant in 2008.

Special thanks for her help with the U.S. edition to Professor Marci Shore from Yale University, to Janos M. Kovacs from IWM for his help with the Hungarian story, to my Albanian colleague, writer Bashkim Shehu, for helping me with the story about Albania, and to Claudia Ciobanu, for her help with the Romanian story.

I am grateful to Rujana for her inspiration, to Andi for his enthusiasm and to Richard for his improvements — as well as to my dear friends for their trust and support.

A SHORT NOTE TO THE READER

I am aware that, if you are not familiar with Eastern Europe under Communism, some stories from this book might appear to you highly fictitious, if not outright fantasy. Therefore, I would like to assure you that, unfortunately, this is not the case. From the point of view of persons and events described, regardless of whether a story is narrated by a dog, a cat, or some other domestic, wild, or exotic animal, it all really happened. This is easy enough to check. Indeed, as a fiction writer I often felt shamed by the imagination of politicians, of which there is ample proof in this book!

However, writing again and again about the rule of Communism and its consequences for ordinary people, I came to the conclusion that we did not have “too much history,” as it is often said about this part of the world. Rather, we had too much memory and too many myths. And, in my life experience, this is a dangerous combination that has often resulted in ideology and manipulation leading to conflict and terrible suffering.

I. A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM

Come in, come in, please! Don’t worry, this is only a museum of Communism, not the real thing!

I am joking. But do come in, please. You are Hans, from Würzburg, I presume? I was expecting you. I am Bohumil, your distant relative. I live in this Prague museum in a school cabinet, among the old textbooks. It suits me. I am a bookish type, a book mouse, one could say, ha-ha! Some time ago my grammar school became a private university and the classrooms were refurbished. My cabinet was thrown out. I thought that would be the end of my comfortable life. But luckily, some people from the museum came along and brought the cabinet here, as an exhibit from the old times.

I share my days with Milena, an elderly cleaning woman who also sells souvenirs in the museum shop. She pretends that she doesn’t know that I live here. But why then, I ask you, did she try to kill me with her broom the very first time she saw me, an ordinary little mouse? Well, not kill perhaps, but scare me off. As I had no other place to go, she reconciled herself to my existence. Perhaps she thought that, after all, I am an underdog just like her? Now she leaves crumbs of bread and pieces of apple and cheese near my cabinet every evening before she leaves. Often, when we are alone, she is talking to me. She calls me Bohumil! She says, “You know, Bohumil, what happened to me today?”—and then goes on with her story. I usually stand on the windowsill and listen to her, keep her company. It took me some time to understand that since there is nobody around, Bohumil is — well, me!