Wolfgang Nehring, UCLA

Tschechisch, böhmisch, zentraleuropäisch, europäisch – unsterblichzum Erzählen des Autors Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera wrote in Czech, but since his ideas on Czech society differed from the communist authorities, he got into critical distance to the state and later preferred the old name Bohemia for his native country. When he was forbidden to publish and left his home for France he became famous as an exile. Particularly his success story The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as film even more popular than the book, was read and celebrated as a testimony of historical and political conditions in Czechoslovakia. Kundera had combined personal, philosophical, and political experiences into a seemingly simple, yet complex story of love, sex, melancholy, and homesickness. The great ‘essay’ The Art of the Novel (1986) was Kundera’s first work written in French. It demonstrates how the author was ready to emancipate himself from his specific Czech background – how close he felt to central European writers such as Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Witold Gombrovicz, and others and how he considered the whole European tradition from Cervantes to the present his home court.

Unfortunately the critics wanted to continue to read Kundera’s works as comments on or critique of Czech conditions. When he started writing in French, on French society or on general subjects the previous enthusiasm subsided to a conspicuous degree. His lates book addresses this problem, the expectations of the French and other westerners that a Czech author remains Czech even if he has been living for decades in France.

Kundera’s (in my opinion) most exciting book, his novel Immortality, is positioned in the middle between the Czech and the French tradition of his writing. The book was written in 1988 in Czech but was first published in French, in 1990. It is neither particularly Czech nor French in spirit. It is the exploration of what Kundera calls human existence, the realm of possibilities, which includes ideas, dreams, wishes. Past and present flow together; Goethe and Hemingway meet and discuss life after death; Bettina von Arnim and Rilke are hardly less present than contemporary, real or fictitious, French or European characters who pursue their happiness or unhappiness. The book is multifaceted and philosophical as Musil’s major work. Musil’s freakish death is recalled in the beginning!. I hope to show in my paper that this book is a masterwork and that nobody but a writer rooted in the central European tradition could have produced it.