Czech journalist Antonín J. Liehm was a leading public intellectual who passed away on December 4, 2020, aged ninety-six. One of the movers and shakers of the cultural and political ferment of the Prague Spring, he left the country after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and it was largely thanks to Liehm’s tireless work in exile that essays by Václav Havel and many other Czech authors reached readers in Western Europe and the United States before 1989. To help bridge the gap between the East and the West, he founded the ground-breaking journal Lettre International, which in its heyday appeared in thirteen different countries and languages. In this essay, Polish writer and journalist Aleksander Kaczorowski pays tribute to his mentor.
In the spring of 1992 my wife and I went to Sofia for our honeymoon. Don’t ask why, of all places, we picked Sofia: it was a random choice, yet one resulting in one of the major discoveries of my younger years. It was there, in the Bulgarian capital, at the Czech Centre, that I stumbled across a book that I bought and virtually devoured before our holiday was over.
The book, Generace (A Generation), was a collection of interviews with Czech and Slovak writers that was finally able to appear in Czechoslovakia, after a twenty-year delay. It featured many authors whom I had already come to love and whose books had enticed me to study Czech language and literature at Warsaw University: Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký, and Václav Havel, as well as many others whose work I would get to know only later, like Ivan Klíma and Ludvík Vaculík, or the great Slovak writer Dominik Tatarka. Many of them had joined the communist party in their youth, and in these interviews conducted by Liehm between 1963 and 1968, they take a critical look at their own involvement, as well as the contemporary social and political situation in Czechoslovakia. They called for political changes (many of them did indeed play a key role in the Prague Spring of 1968) but what interested me most was what they had to say at the time about literature, the sources of their literary inspiration, and their own plans. In particular, the interview with Kundera—whom Liehm had met when they were both young, their friendship lasting nearly seventy years, until his death—was full of extraordinarily interesting biographical details that are hard to find in later interviews with the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the book became unacceptable to the censors. Instead of Prague, it first appeared in Paris in 1970, together with a lengthy preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. German, English, Spanish, and Japanese editions soon followed. Over the next twenty years, several of the writers featured in the book achieved world-wide fame. However, until I encountered in Sofia the reissued Czech edition of A Generation published in 1990, I knew next to nothing about the man who had conducted the interviews: the Czech exile journalist Antonín J. Liehm.
And of course, I wouldn’t have dreamt then that some three years later I would find myself on the same Central European editorial board—his last, while, for me, my first. I couldn’t have wished for a more ideal guide to Czech history and culture than A.J. Liehm.
He embarked on his journalistic career shortly after World War II, when he co-founded the left-wing, though non-partisan, weekly journal Kulturní politika (Cultural Politics) with the legendary poet, actor, playwright, and director E. F. Burian (1904-1959). It was short-lived, with its publication being halted in 1949 under circumstances reminiscent of Kundera’s novel The Joke: one of the editors brought along a poem that parodied Stalinist works of the avant-garde Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval. Amused, Burian had it typed up in eight copies and the parody began circulating in Prague, eventually reaching Nezval himself. The enraged poet kicked up an enormous fuss, alerting the communist officials in charge of culture, who used it as a pretext for shutting down the paper published by left-wing fellow travellers, whose support after the 1948 communist takeover was surplus to requirements.
Liehm, who had joined the communist party under the German occupation, was not only sacked from the now defunct weekly but also from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where he had found employment thanks to his knowledge of foreign languages, which he owed to his father, a defence lawyer in Prague. At the age of twenty-six, Liehm was drafted into the army even though he was married with two children, with a third on the way. On the other hand, he could well have suffered far more serious punishment for a “crime” of this kind.
After completing his two years’ military service, he found a job at the foreign desk of ČTK, the Czechoslovak press agency, where he was reunited with his former colleague from the journal Kulturní politika, Stanislav Budín (1903-1979), a generation older than Liehm. The former editor-in-chief of the communist daily Rudé právo, who had been expelled from the party as long ago as 1936 for “right-wing deviationism,” Budín became Liehm’s mentor in the craft of journalism. He told Liehm about his eventful life, growing up in the Soviet Union and Poland, being active in the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the Komsomol, as well as his seven years in US exile, from where he returned right after the war with his wife and daughter Rita, who many years later became Czechoslovakia’s first post-communist ambassador in Washington D.C.
During the Prague Spring of 1968 Budín took on the editorship of the monthly Reportér and was later one of the first to sign Charter 77. It was he who had confirmed Liehm in his decision to dedicate the rest of his life to journalism, although he briefly returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the thaw in 1956.
But it was his work as staff writer and editor of the weekly Literární noviny (The Literary Newspaper) that proved pivotal for Liehm. He covered foreign affairs and wrote film reviews, becoming within a few years one of most recognizable faces of the journal that from the mid-1960s provided the main outlet for the leading Czech intellectuals. The editorial board included, among others, the writers Milan Kundera, Ludvík Vaculík and Bohumil Hrabal, as well as the philosopher Karel Kosík. All of them played a pivotal role in the social and political life of Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s, as under communism writers were virtually the only people able to voice and, to a large extent also shape, public opinion. But they often paid a high price for this, as shown by the fate of Literární noviny. In 1967 the journal was suspended, only to be relaunched during the Prague Spring under the slightly altered title, Literární listy. In 1968 Antonín J. Liehm was mooted as editor-in-chief of the relaunched pre-war interwar daily Lidové noviny. But these plans were thwarted by the Soviet-led invasion of August 1968 and A.J. Liehm and his second wife, the film critic Drahomíra Liehmová, decided to emigrate.
Although he originally planned to settle in Paris, he soon moved on to the US, where he spent the next thirteen years, becoming an American citizen and returning to Europe only in 1983. Many years later in Paris, when I asked him, naïvely, why was it that he couldn’t find work in France in the early days after the Soviet invasion when everyone was still rooting for the Czech heroes, he responded, mockingly: “I see you still believe in Father Christmas! My boy, back then the French right-wing government was busy making deals with Moscow and the last thing they needed was some East European émigrés sticking their noses into politics. Do you understand now?”
It didn’t take Liehm long to realise that the only people left in the West who still cared about the East were journalists and politically minded writers, including communists, such as Louis Aragon, whose books he had translated into Czech in the 1950s and 1960s.
And that is why—even if he spent most of his time in the 1970s teaching Czech cinema and literature at US universities—his real focus was on Listy, the paper of the socialist opposition in exile, which he co-founded with Jiří Pelikán, a former communist party official and director of Czechoslovak public television in the Dubček era. After 1968, Pelikán ended up in Rome, and with the support of the Italian socialist party he was even elected to the European Parliament. Under the editorship of Pelikán and Liehm, Listy became the most important journal of the Czechoslovak exile, together with Svědectví, a magazine published in Paris. But paradoxically, it was this political journal’s championing of Czechoslovakia’s independent literature that proved to be its greatest claim to fame. It was Liehm’s idea to start publishing an annual special literary supplement, Čtení na léto (Summer Reading), which featured the latest novels, short stories, and essays by Czech and Slovak writers, both those in exile such as Kundera, Škvorecký, Arnošt Lustig, and Pavel Kohout, as well as those who stayed at home, such as Havel, Hrabal, and Vaculík.
What made this possible was Liehm’s rare gift for making friends and the fact that he knew virtually every Czech writer in exile. In 1980, while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (on Philip Roth’s recommendation), he pulled off the Czechoslovak Days, an event in which many of the greatest Czech writers in exile participated. Milan Kundera, despite suffering from a bad cold, gave a talk on Kafka in the university’s largest lecture theatre. The next day, feeling slightly better, he joined Josef Škvorecký, Arnošt Lustig, Pavel Kohout and Antonín J. Liehm in a discussion chaired by Arthur Miller. Liehm later recalled that all five of them had to spend the following week in bed nursing the cold that the author of The Joke had brought across the ocean from France.
In 1984 he founded the journal Lettre International in Paris, attracting as contributors some of the best-known writers from every part of the planet. In its heyday the journal was published in thirteen different countries and languages. While each enjoyed considerable autonomy, the various mutations shared a commitment to publishing texts of the highest intellectual and artistic quality. Half of the texts were translated, as Liehm felt it was really important to introduce readers to the latest writing in other European languages as well as to key issues debated around Europe. He wanted the journal to serve as a bridge between East and West, a role it was able to fulfil in a more active way after 1989, when it became possible to produce editions in Czech/Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, and several other East European languages. Sadly, the early years of capitalism in the East were not conducive to this kind of enterprise: there were no private donors and such public funding as was available was allocated to propaganda. Starved of funding, most of the editions soon ceased to appear, with the longest-lasting one, in Hungary, closing down in 2017 after 100 issues. The German version of Lettre International is the only one still going strong today.
It was initiatives like these that helped to raise the profile of Czech and Slovak culture before 1989, while the success of translated works of Milan Kundera and Václav Havel helped to ensure that the Velvet Revolution in November 1989 aroused more interest than the first, partly free, election in Poland in June earlier that year.
Kundera’s essays on Central Europe and Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” are among the most inspirational intellectual achievements from the East in the waning days of communism. Both authors were regular contributors to Listy, their pieces appearing alongside incisive political analyses signed by Dalimil, which was the pseudonym Liehm used.
Perhaps his most celebrated article, “The New Social Contract,” originally written in 1973 for an international conference and translated into French by Jacques Rupnik, was a brilliant analysis of how communist societies functioned in the 1970s. It made A.J. Liehm an intellectual authority in the eyes of many Polish dissidents.
A.J. Liehm was the author of several seminal books. Apart from The Generation mentioned earlier, and a biography of Miloš Forman, he wrote two major studies of Czechoslovak and East European cinema (the latter jointly with his wife Drahomíra). His two final publications—the collection of memoir essays Minulost v přítomnosti (The Past in the Present, 2002) as well as Názory tak řečeného Dalimila (Opinions of the Pseudonymous Dalimil, 2014), which was awarded the Tom Stoppard Prize. These two books represent a kind of “private” history of the twentieth century, written by a brilliant witness to our era with a keen and smart observer’s eye which explain, among other things, why Liehm’s name has been nearly forgotten in the country of his birth, even though he spent the final years of his life back in Prague.
Over the past quarter of a century, I was fortunate enough to enjoy many conversations with him during our encounters in all corners of Europe, as he was constantly on the move, even when he was well into his seventies. He was the initiator of the Central European Newspaper, a four-page monthly supplement published jointly by the dailies Lidové noviny in Prague, Gazeta Wyborcza in Warsaw, SME in Bratislava, and Magyar Hírlap in Budapest. Liehm used his lifetime’s experience to convince George Soros that this was a project worth supporting. In the 1990s this was the only publication appearing in all the four countries known as the Visegrad Group providing regular information on events in the neighbouring countries and promoting the idea of regional cooperation and advocating for joint integration with the European Union and NATO. It is certainly regrettable that this initiative did not survive Central Europe’s accession to the European and North Atlantic structures. A decade on, the idea of regional cooperation, dismissed by pro-European intellectuals resting on their laurels, was taken up by nationalist conservatives who have shifted it in a distinctly anti-EU direction.
Antonín J. Liehm, whom I had the privilege of addressing by his familiar name “Tonda,” always referred to himself simply as journalist. But he was a journalist par excellence, a man who lived a remarkable life. For twenty years he contributed to Listy gratis, and after 1989 he didn’t seem too surprised that almost no one was interested in him, or in any other major exile figure either. In the 1990s, his favourite subjects such as the Prague Spring or the role of the intellectual in society were regarded as something of marginal, if any, interest. In addition, he had never made a secret of being “a lefty.”
For many years he lived modestly in his small flat in Paris close to Le Marais. Whenever I rang him, he would immediately put the phone down and call me back because, as a French pensioner—something he was quite proud of—he didn’t have to pay for international calls and made frequent use of this privilege.
Later I would visit him when he finally returned to his native Prague neighbourhood of Žižkov. Once, watching me pour his favourite beer, Budvar, from the bottle into a glass, he railed at me: “Just look at you, you can’t even pour a beer properly!” And he showed me how it was done. He was, in a word, my mentor.
Translated from the Polish by Julia Sherwood
Aleksander Kaczorowski is a Polish journalist, writer, and translator from Czech. His recent books include the biographies Hrabal. Słodka apokalipsa (Hrabal. A Sweet Apocalypse, 2016), Havel. Zemsta bezsilnych (Havel. Revenge of the Powerless, 2014), and, most recently, Ota Pavel. Pod powierzchnią (Ota Pavel. Below the Surface). He is also editor-in-chief of Aspen Review Central Europe, a quarterly journal published by Aspen Institute Central Europe in Prague.
Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia. Since 2008 she has been working as a freelance translator of fiction and non-fiction from Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, and Russian. She is based in London and is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia.
*****
Read more from the Asymptote blog: