How, on what occasion and by chance, I became convinced that communism, even after its formal fall, kept its habits, is a short and banal story. Now I will tell it.
If it did not evoke the memory of two philosophers, who, admittedly, were not from Prague, but were born in the Czech Republic, and were "citizens" of an empire in their childhood, this story would not be worth mentioning.
However, I classified them as eminent Prague Jews, believing that they are inseparable from the unique climate in the development of Judeo-Christian culture, Prague's enlightened Judaism, and even mysticism, Kabbalah (ha-kabala in Hebrew it means: tradition), which ignited with cultural inspiration, and turned Prague into what it is - a city of miracles.
Namely, in 1991, I delivered a Škoda Favorit, and I needed a sensitive spare part, which was not on sale anywhere in Prague. Such was the economic policy, they produced the brains of their citizens in the capital, but for the liver, elbow and knee, or the jaw, for example, you had to shoot coekudas inside. It so happened that I had to travel to Prostejov, the old capital of Moravia, for a spare part of the machine.
Semitic features
It was summer, not to be long (the novelist spends a lot of words describing a summer day, and the winter one runs past as if it were clicking from winter), I traveled by train, arrived right at noon, when the shops close. I slung my backpack over my shoulders, shoved my sandals under my arm, and went barefoot in search of a tavern, a sidewalk that once connected the Jewish ghetto.
Prostejov was founded in the twelfth century, it bled to death in the Hussite wars, it was burned in the fifteenth, but the diligent hands of Czechs and Jews raised it from the ashes. At the beginning of the sixteenth he already had a printing house, and when he was born there edmund husserl (1859-1938), was connected by railway to Brno, Vienna and Prague. Pšibram, birthplace Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), which is ten kilometers away from Prostejov, for example, was connected to Prague by railway tracks only half a century later.
Ha, the rumbling of the excavator!... Stone and brick howl under the fork!... There will be a tavern somewhere!...
Diluvial lethargy, oil in the air, sycamore leaf flickering, you already know the story of every stranger, who scans the main street at noon. And some thistle, with Semitic features, when I asked about the inn, motioned for me to sit next to him.
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edmund husserl
"You see, son, the sons of bitches are demolishing the old Jewish ghetto! Nothing is sacred to Communists!... The Jews raised this city from the dead half a millennium ago... Look at that house, which is being shaken by an excavator, in the middle of the ghetto, behind those small windows, a German scholar was born there... a great philosopher...!”
Edmund Husserl was surrounded by Czechs in his childhood, says his biographer Zdenek Mathauser (Básnivé nápovědi Husserlovy phenomenologie, Prague, 2006, 11).
Later, in Leipzig, he was dissuaded from his youthful prejudices about nationalism by a fellow Moravian Tomas Masaryk (1850-1937), future founder of Czechoslovakia. Husserl met him in Vienna, in 1882, during his studies, where he met a girl, also a native of that simple ghetto - his future wife, with whom he would convert to Protestantism.
Many years later, when the Nazi pressure on Husserl became unbearable, a friendship with Masaryk would emerge in a conversation with the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka (1907-1977), about his arrival in Prague, where it was planned, after teaching at the Charles University, in 1935, to move and work.
Since it is Hitler (1889–1945) took power, the philosopher seriously thought about emigration under the old days. Throughout his life, he struggled to admit his Jewishness and emphasized his loyalty to the German people. He converted to Protestants, and again the call of blood rang out at a critical hour, and reminded him of the tragedy, contained in the simple fact that being a minor means at the same time bearing the fate of not one, but many minorities:
"Germany is still unbearable," he writes to his son, "things have gone so far that I really can't go on, and in Prague I will try everything possible, and we will see what to do."
What is a minor world? Does a person become minor at birth, as is said and sung in the Bible?
If we are a minor by birth, what are our chances in perspective? The awareness that man is always at a loss, as oriental wisdom says, does it mean in the extension of his executive duration over him, that he is always minor and, as such, at a loss?
Anyone who has penetrated the speech of European metaphysical poets knows, well, what I am talking about.
Let your dreams go
None of everything. Let your dreams go. Hitler blacklisted Husserl. The philosopher was actually beaten by his own student.
The first part of Husserl's lectures was barely published in Belgrade in 1936, while something else could be done. key paper, The crisis of European sciences and transcendental philosophy, was published in Prague in 1972. Things were slow and difficult. Hardly, further, that he is a student Van Breda evacuated the legacy from Freiburg, which would later be translated into the edition of Husserliana (abbreviation of Hu). However, bad luck did not bypass him, and he experienced a calvary in the end - he was forced out of the subconscious by his own system, German philosophical idealism, which he built on to Hegel.
Removal from the current currents of German thought, whom he sponsored Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), it was cruel. Heidegger, after his accession to the Nazi party, built iron fences towards his teacher, with whom he was inseparable for two decades:
"Phenomenology in Germany, it's me and Heidegger, and no one else".
After all, the first edition of the work was dedicated to Husserl There will be time (1927), that, later, Heidegger would change his opinion. The persecution did not stop even after his death, when the Husserlian legacy was banished from Germany.
I understand phenomenology, which deals with the problems of internal observation of the world, and oneself in the world, as a minor aspect of the observer, in the shell of the major and robust viewpoint of other observers. The fact that these outside observers are not even aware of the existence of a minor actor, let alone his doubts and joys, makes this minority stronger in my eyes. I am drawn to small worlds. That's why I don't stop talking about them, because while there is a minority, there will be talk.
Mental problem of the individual
Kafka the name has become "a term for the mental problems of an individual, due to insecurity of all kinds in people, who are tormented by unreached or vague religiosity", as one of his schoolmates from Prague's Kolhovna says.
It was a street in the heart of the ghetto, where the writer used to go, where he grew up, and my mother-in-law, Ružena Blechova, born Friedová, right in that street, a decade after the writer's death, she would never say ghetto, nor the Jewish quarter, nor, say, the old town, but simply: Kolhovna. It is still called that today, its old name was returned, out of respect for the eminent Jews of Prague.
Aren't symbols, which make our soul tremble, stronger than vague realities?
When criticism says that Kafka's paintings "possess an autonomous existence", let's ask ourselves, is this anything other than a self-righteous claim that these poetic paintings of the "chronicler of the cosmic Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy" possess the true power of minor worlds?
I wonder that, thinking of another inimitable empirical art, which he had in his heart and could turn, whenever he wanted, into transcendence, and we, or most of us, do not have it, nor will we ever have it, no matter how hard we try. - it was the musical and meaningful skill of German poets. Early optimism, later pessimism of the enormous spoken values of German.
Leaning on childhood
Even for a moment, even in a minor edition, this omnipresence and omnipresence (das Eigentümliche) occupies a special place in my overall awareness of Prague Jews. - I said that I am adding Husserl's star to this group not by chance, even though it shone elsewhere, in a non-Prague atmosphere.
A return to the things themselves, a return to oneself - the Greek source, from which Western civilization is fed, continuously, with occasional pangs of conscience from discontinuity, i.e. moving away from the source - for me, it has always been a return to the minor world of inner beginnings (phenomenology as descriptive psychology). , that is, of inner beginnings (phenomenology as genetic psychology). In fact, a discreet reliance on the most influential minority of our life - childhood.
The minority of childhood, viewed in this way, is understood to be part of physiological phenomenology. Husserl, who "did not belong to Prague's German-speaking Judaism", like Kafka, what would he say Johannes Urzidil, Kafka's closest friend, nevertheless, in my understanding of phenomenology, occupies a place that can be conditionally called Prague (he himself expresses himself in correspondence, about Prague, as the city in which he wanted to live). Or, at least, in the context of the Jewish existential and linguistic minority, certainly not so wide, that a boy from a ghetto, in the eastern Czech Republic, would feel like a stranger there.
It is known that Kafka was warm to the Hasids and Hasidism, to Eastern European Jewry and spiritualism in general, and his schoolmates testify that he listened with excitement to a certain Ludwig Hart, and his "great East Jewish stories". But that's another pair of sleeves.
Husserl's case, at least as far as the Freiburg phase, and the relationship with his colleagues at the university, with the Nazi environment in general, takes place in addition to the Jewish one (although Husserl did not have much contact with Judaism, apart from his origins, neither did he want to, nor felt the need, as which he says in a letter from the Husserlian corpus) - is played out in other fields as well.
In a series of paradoxes, paradoxical situations and connections, with and around Husserl, in addition to the relationship with Heidegger (Mathauser says that the relationship between the two most important philosophers of the last century is one of the greatest paradoxes in the fate of the founder of phenomenology), the first edition of the famous work can also be counted Experience and judgment, which was published in Prague a year after the author's death.
However, the Akademija publishing house was closed, due to the annexation of Czechoslovakia, and the book was withdrawn from sale, and the entire circulation remained in the hands of the Nazis, except for 200 copies, which were evacuated to London and sold by the publisher Allen & Unwin. In particular, although this work was printed, discussed and quoted in Czechoslovakia, as the English publisher says, on the occasion of the renovated edition in 1948, it remained practically unknown on the continent (Ludwig Landgrebe: Editor's Forward to the 1948 Edition, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1948, 3).
The Nazi Party
After joining the Nazi party, Heidegger severed ties with his teacher, who had a hard time bearing it, in increasingly difficult conditions for himself and his family (son Gerhart he was expelled from the University of Göttingen, as a weak Aryan, although he fought in the war) - and the teacher, in his letters, emphasized the meanness of his existentialist students, including Heidegger:
"They grew out of caricatures of my thoughts" (Briefwechsel, III, 493).
The paradox of one of the most significant works was not helped by the fact that Husserl was known in Russia a quarter of a century earlier, where his teachings were extended Roman Jacobson, the Boris pasternak. The Russian circles did not help either, on the eve of the birth of structuralism, linguistics of world renown, which would change the cultural consciousness of the twentieth century. One of the students, Mr. Špetka, author of the study Appearance and meaning, he experienced a worse than Husserlian fate - he was liquidated in Stalin's purges.
Not long after Adolf Hitler took power in the Reich, the philosopher marked it with the words thunder, earthquake, flood, but still, because he and his family were blacklisted and subjected to persecution. Husserl was forbidden access to universities and libraries, he could not leave Germany for four years, his name was deleted from the list of German professors, he was forbidden to attend philosophical congresses in Paris and Prague.
He died as he had lived, in Freiburg, in 1938, lulled to sleep by the art of strictly controlled fiction, called philosophy. Heidegger forbade students to attend Husserl's funeral.
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