A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

But you are telling me to go on? Okay then, where was I? Yes, I wanted to say that Communist regimes generally seemed to prefer numbers over stories. Numbers are abstract, they create a kind of “scientific” neutrality. Let me give you an example, used by Professor Perlík: In his history class I heard him tell his pupils that Hitler exterminated some six million Jews in Europe during the Second World War. They gave him a blank look and continued to chat, and to push and throw things at each other. The information didn’t even catch their attention — let alone their imaginations. But then, he took his class to Poland. They visited Auschwitz death camps. I remember them talking afterward about that visit, about how memorable that spring day had been for them. Of course, Professor Perlík had already told them before what had happened there, but still they were totally unprepared. Evidently, nothing can prepare you for such horror — and that is kind of good, he said. You grasp the horror better once you see, with your own eyes, heaps of human hair, shoes, glasses. heaps of them. All that, every item, belonged to an individual with a name, to a real live person. He also told them that during Communism, he could not have told his pupils that some thirty million people died in the labor camps in Siberia. It was taboo. But I suspect that the professor told them just that, landing himself in prison.

Now, let’s go back to what you actually see here — what you see here is only a pile of dusty things, like in an old antique shop or a flea market somewhere in Kosice (though I’ve never been there, I heard someone making this comparison). Therefore, it seems that it is more important to see the invisible yet omnipresent ugliness of the Communist mentality, of which the artifacts in this museum are just a reflection. By mentality, I mean a certain way of thinking and behaving that developed over decades under harsh conditions. Not solidarity, as you might expect of people living under duress, but its opposite, selfishness, a slow hardening of the soul

(this formulation, you rightly guess, comes from the more poetic side of our professor). Yet, only art, especially literature, can show you that. Novels like those of a certain Milan Kundera, a writer whose name I have often heard mentioned in this museum of late.

Our visitors usually want to take photos in this particular room. For example, if they stand here, where I am standing, they can take a photo of this beautiful nineteenth-century crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Indeed, they can get it in the same frame as the hammer and sickle — a really nice souvenir! By the way, this chandelier is widely considered by our visitors to be the only beautiful item in here. Although not intended as an exhibit, you could still say — as I have heard here — that it symbolizes the life of the bourgeoisie, the class enemy. As does this whole spacious apartment. “Look, a beautiful bourgeois apartment full of ugly things produced during Communism!” someone exclaimed recently.

I kind of like the fact that this is a museum of ugly things. By the time visitors like you arrive here, they have had their fill of the beautiful buildings in the neighborhood, so they don’t notice beauty any longer. Golden altars, baroque facades, angels, Madonnas, spectacular church paintings. Indeed, I have seen such things myself during my excursions into the neighborhood. Here, in this museum, like in real Communism, ugliness reigns. Sometimes I hear foreigners wonder aloud: “Why doesn’t Communism care about beauty?” You only need to go to the southern outskirts of Prague to see whole blocks of ghastly gray housing developments, called ʺpaneláky” because they were built out of prefabricated material in the seventies. By the way, that material is great for us mice; it is so easy to make a nice home there! Yet, these buildings provided a home for millions of people (and mice) — for the so-called proletariat! — who moved from their villages to the city to work in industry. Milena and her Marek still live in such a building, in a two-room 63-square-meter apartment. They were happy when they got it in the sixties, after years of waiting in a single rented room heated by a coal-burning stove instead of an electric one or a central heating system.