Testaments Betrayed: Essay in Nine Parts, an

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Other contributors were equally impassioned. Danko Grlic, a Croat, vividly evoked the irrationality of nationalism. Once unleashed, he warned, it would be impervious to logic: “You do not reason or theorize about the nation; for the nation you only struggle and die; you love the nation as the flesh of your flesh, as the essence of your being, drinking it with your mother’s milk; it is body and blood …” The Praxis philosophers were at once the Yugoslav system’s most passionate exponents abroad and its fiercest internal critics. Issue of Praxis, 1970. He explains: "The caesuras, or halftime breaks . . . do not coincide. In the history of music, the break stretches over a big part of the 18th century (the symbolic apogee of the first half occurring in Bach's 'The Art of the Fugue,' Of the Zagreb Praxists, very few of the old-timers were enthusiastic about the Belgrade group's new publishing venture. Zagreb's elder statesmen, Rudi Supek and Gajo Petrovic, attended the first meeting. Supek was amenable to the new journal; but Petrovic felt strongly that the name Praxis should not be used. Praxis, Petrovic argued, connoted a joint Belgrade-Zagreb publication, whose international component came at the Yugoslavs' invitation. This new journal, however, was to be published in English and dominated by Belgraders and Americans. It was international before it was Yugoslav, and for this reason, he insisted, it should have a new name and a new identity. Perhaps Petrovic also sensed that his Belgrade colleagues had changed and that political consensus was a thing of the past. If he did, he did not say so. Sometimes I felt like webs were being spun around me,” Benhabib says now. Not long after Markovic’s article appeared, Yugoslavia began its bloody disintegration. In 1991, Slovenia and then Croatia declared independence, touching off the Serbo-Croat war. Benhabib was in Frankfurt then, and people started approaching her about her colleague Markovic, who by this time was vice president and ideologue of Milosevic’s socialist party. “We’d run into individuals who would say, ‘Are you aware of what you are doing?'” she recalls. But it was after Bosnia ignited in 1992 that Benhabib became really uncomfortable. “We were being instrumentalized for prestige and credit,” she now believes. The last straw was an interview Markovic gave the New York Times in August 1992: “I don’t understand why there is so much opposition to cantonization,” he told the reporter, regarding the partition of Bosnia. “The alternative is creation of a Muslim state in the heart of Europe. Perhaps the Americans want to support this. … But we find this very disturbing.”

Today, some critics blame the constitution of 1974 for the growth of nationalist movements in Croatia and Slovenia. More likely, it was a response to the nationalist movements that were already stirring. In any case, the most scathing criticism was leveled by the Serb nationalists: The new constitution rested on a double standard. If Yugoslavia's units of political participation were its ethnic groups, or "constituent nations," then the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia, who were represented by Muslim and Croatian leadership, respectively, went unrepresented. But if the units were territorial, then why was Serbia the only republic whose territory included autonomous provinces over which it had little control? Yugoslavia, despite Tito's bold initiatives, fell far short of this ideal. In Yugoslavia's hybrid economy, the much-touted self-managing enterprises were exposed to market pressures, on the one hand, and capricious state control, on the other. Regional oligarchies took root: In the end, local power brokers manipulated and ignored workers' councils in much the way managers do everywhere. But the Praxists saw these problems as evidence that self-management had not gone far enough. They were at once self-management's most passionate exponents abroad and the Yugoslav system's fiercest internal critics.The allegiance of Praxis to a united Yugoslavia seemed clear enough. But given the ever present threat of government censorship, there was little that Yugoslav intellectuals published in those years that was completely transparent. The Zagreb philosopher Zarko Puhovski, the youngest Praxist by about twenty years, says that the group’s disputes over politics and ideology were often disguised as conversations about less controversial questions of aesthetics or ontology. “One kind of debate functioned as a replacement for other kinds of debate,” he recalls. I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires understanding its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty—there's the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a musical form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of the Sacre, the "Danse sacrale" ("Sacrificial Dance"): it does not dodge the horror. It is there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But if to shorter forms. Best of all, his sallies lead to fresh readings of such diverse writers as Rabelais, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Mann, Hemingway, Faulkner, Musil, Kafka and Salman Rushdie. That summer was particularly memorable at Korcula. Richard Bernstein, now a political philosopher at the New School for Social Research, recalls, "Everybody who was a significant leftist, in the East or in the West, came to the 1968 meeting. All the leaders of the student movements in Germany, Eastern Europe, and the United States were there." But even as the editorial boards of Praxis and The New Left Review sunned themselves on the beaches of Korcula, the Belgrade 8 held on to their jobs by a slender thread.

in the final essay, the title of this book refers specifically to Max Brod's betrayal of Kafka's reputed request that his writing be destroyed after his death, although in fact, as Mr. Kundera points out, Kafka's testament Yugoslavia, despite Tito’s bold initiatives, fell far short of this ideal. In Yugoslavia’s hybrid economy, the much-touted self-managing enterprises were exposed to market pressures, on the one hand, and capricious state control, on the other. Regional oligarchies took root: In the end, local power brokers manipulated and ignored workers’ councils in much the way managers do everywhere. But the Praxists saw these problems as evidence that self-management had not gone far enough. They were at once self-management’s most passionate exponents abroad and the Yugoslav system’s fiercest internal critics. One of the points he is getting at here is that modernism has been a "third (or overtime) period," in which the greatest works of fiction have tried to rehabilitate the first half by, among other things, refusing "any obligation to give he whom Stalin himself called 'the greatest poet of our epoch' -- how is it possible that Mayakovsky is nevertheless a tremendous poet, one of the greatest?" the reader the illusion of reality: an obligation that reigned supreme throughout the novel's second half." One way modernists have done this has been through what Mr. Kundera calls "playful transcription." Kafka,

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Norman Birnbaum, now a law professor at Georgetown University, explains, "When we went to Yugoslavia at that time, we did think the nationality question had been solved. It was the Titoist truce, or illusion, or parenthesis." Croatian-born historian Branka Magas puts it differently. The Western leftists who took up with Praxis as late as the 1980s and early 1990s, she says, "never really saw Yugoslavia. They saw self-management. They only saw the country through the lens of what interested them." Watching the growing nationalist militancy of their fellow Croatian academics, the Zagreb Praxists were horrified. And for this very reason, Tito suddenly found these Praxists indispensable: After all, nationalism was a greater threat to the fragile nation than Marxist critique would ever be, and the members of the Zagreb group were outspoken and eloquent against the greater evil. So even while the Belgrade Praxists, who were associated with student unrest, appealed to the international community for protection, their Zagreb counterparts, who were associated with the fight against Croatian nationalism, continued their work in peace. The philosophers published their new journal in a Serbo-Croat Yugoslav edition and in a multilingual international edition. And its editorial collective adopted an agenda that was more unified than anything Pogledi had ever set forth: The Praxis group advocated freedom of speech and of the press, and they believed that Stalinist authoritarianism had to be redressed in practice and rooted out of Marxist theory itself. To this end, they prescribed a return to Marx's romantic early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Marx's more influential later work would emphasize the iron laws of historical determinism. But the 1844 Manuscriptswaxed lyrical about the creative potential of human activity, through which man might realize his "species being."

With this history in mind, Tito’s regime walked a fine line between a strong central state, which was by and large favored by Serbs, and a loose confederation of republics, which was generally favored by Croats and Slovenes. Centralism prevailed in the early postwar years, but momentum started to build in the other direction in the mid-1960s. A new set of constitutional arrangements slowly took shape, offering greater autonomy to each republic. But this did not appease those who favored a looser confederation. A Croatian nationalist movement was born of the sentiment that the reforms of the late 1960s had not gone far enough. Among the activists’ grievances was that Croatia, which was more industrialized and generally wealthier than Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, carried more than its share of Yugoslavia’s economic burden. Extremists advocated Croatian secession. Students, intellectuals, and even local Communist authorities gathered around a Croatian cultural society called Matica Hrvatska until Tito disbanded the group, purged its participants from political life, and arrested student leaders.calls this experience essentially one of shame. "'Like a dog!'" Mr. Kundera quotes K. as saying when he is dying of his stab wound; "it was as if the shame of it must outlive him." Mr. Kundera comments:

Indeed, the chapter with the most virtuosity is "Part Three: Improvisation in Homage to Stravinsky." Here Mr. Kundera is at play in the field of esthetics, describing a feeling he "cannot shake" that both music and the novel in Europe At its inception, the philosophical journal Praxis was merely the successor to Pogledi, a political journal issued from Croatia's capital, Zagreb, in the 1950s. Pogledi was a casualty of state interference: It lasted only three years. Chief among the defunct journal's contributors had been the University of Zagreb sociologist Rudi Supek, who participated in the French Resistance as an émigré during World War II and later led an underground prisoners' organization when he was interned at Buchenwald; and the University of Zagreb philosopher Gajo Petrovic, a Serb from Croatia who gravitated toward the early Marx, existentialism, and Heidegger. Birnbaum remembers, "Supek and Petrovic were impressive for their moral rigor, their utter disdain of careerism. They were people you loved to be around." From the ashes of Pogledi, Supek, Petrovic, and their colleagues went on to start their summer school on Korcula in 1963 and a new journal, Praxis, in 1964. The group that formed around these ventures consisted of a close-knit circle of friends and colleagues--some from Supek's and Petrovic's departments at the University of Zagreb and another eight from the philosophy department at the University of Belgrade. If 1974 marked the beginning of Yugoslavia's national crisis, it also augured the end of the Praxis group's legal existence. Tito purged the Belgrade 8 from the university the following year. The six-year-long struggle between the state and the professors had simply exhausted itself. Not only were the Belgrade 8 suspended from teaching, but the journal Praxis was also banned. This time, the protests of American academics (including Noam Chomsky, Daniel Bell, and Stanley Hoffman) fell on deaf ears.The truth was very simple: In multinational Yugoslavia, Tito had deliberately redistributed power from the strong to the weak. And if his belief really was that a strong Yugoslavia required a weak Serbia, perhaps he was not mistaken. Much later, in 1989, when Milosevic finally did enforce Serbian control of its provinces, Serbia emerged strong--and Yugoslavia fell to pieces. The terrible irony in all of this is that the geographically dispersed Serbs may have benefited more than anyone from the years of Serbia's weakness. For of all the Yugoslav nations, only the Serbs needed a unified Yugoslavia more than it needed them.