When Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened in Prague recently, its title was changed to Who's Afraid of Franz Kafka? The switch was significant. Not only did it mark Czech officialdom's resurrection of Kafka from the Communist limbo of "degenerate individualism," but it also reflected the intellectual ferment behind the Iron Curtain that made Kafka's redemption possible.
Today in Eastern Europe, the most outspoken challenge to Communist orthodoxy comes from Communist intellectuals who are demanding greater cultural and political freedom. Party bosses, who have always found it easier to deal with nonbelievers than heretics, are in a quandary. While recognizing the efficacy of "liberalization" as a cultural safety valve, they also realize that in the current Sino-Soviet ideological fracas, it is necessary to impose a certain amount of discipline in order to close ranks behind Moscow. Anxious to avoid the stigma of Stalinism, the satellite governments have for the present forsworn arrest and imprisonment in favor of less drastic measures, such as "educational" discussions of "erroneous views." Items:
— In Czechoslovakia, the literary journal Literarni Noviny published an interview with venerable Hungarian Philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs, 78, who complained that "as a result of the Stalinist era, we have missed 50 years of the development of capitalism," called for the adoption of "everything new and everything scientifically progressive that's originated in the West since Lenin's death." The Czech party organ immediately criticized all the major literary magazines for "serious gaps, political errors, and ideological confusion," scored them for "propagating revisionist tendencies."
>In East Germany, the Artists' Association Congress broke up in disagreement over "problems of reshaping life in our society." The dissidents were led by Sculptor Fritz Cremer, a longtime Communist, who called for greater artistic freedom in choosing form and content, and aired the heretical notion that doubt is a positive element in artistic thinking. Party bosses immediately accused Cremer of "negating the unity of politics, economics and culture."
> In Poland, 34 eminent Polish intellectuals sent a letter to Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz demanding that the government recognize "as necessary elements of progress the existence of public opinion, the right to criticize, freedom of discussion and of honest in formation." This kind of progress the party did not need. In a reply, the government-sponsored weekly Kultura maintained that in Poland there is no place for books or plays "whose ideological or moral content is antisocialist." Siding firmly with Socrates' accusers, the magazine pointed out that freedoms have been curbed ever since the ancient Greeks—"and so it is with us."