Europe Cannot Disown Its Complicity : Havel’s Salzburg ‘theater piece’ was aimed at more than just Waldheim, but his choice of occasion upstaged its message.

I cannot think about Vaclav Havel’s visit to Salzburg, and the sermon he read there to Kurt Waldheim a few days ago, without thinking of the castle overlooking that splendid city. I happen to have toured that castle a month ago, on the way to see the aftermath of Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution.”

There, in a beautiful chamber, orchestras once performed string quartets while, in another part of the castle, accused witches and religious dissenters were tortured. From the guide came some mirth about the dungeon beneath the floor, the wheel with its blades, the rack. Levity, luxury of survivors, leaven of history.

There is a section of the castle where the tour guide does not guide, which includes a military museum. Here are artifacts of the history of the military units of the region since the Middle Ages. In one corner of the room is a display of captioned snapshots tracing the history of Salzburg’s mountain regiment from the 1938 Anschluss through World War II. Here we read in some detail about the problem of integrating the Austrian army into the German. Here we see a soldier in the German uniform. How similar they are! goes the caption, matter-of-fact. Isn’t that interesting!

Photos follow the regiment through the war. Here they are campaigning through Norway! Denmark! Finland! Russia! Skis are more evident than guns. In Russia, two soldiers frame a man with a bandage around his head.

The photos follow the regiment from Russia through Poland, ending up in France. The last we see of the soldiers, they are on their way into a prisoner-of-war camp. Here, the story ends, with the Austrians frozen in history as victims.

The captions are prideful, boyish and chatty. The war was a jaunt. History has become a scrapbook for the greater glory of the local boys.

No one in recent years has written more powerfully on the subject of human responsibility than Vaclav Havel. But perhaps, in our eagerness for heroes, we have misunderstood him--even misunderstood why. We may even have misunderstood why, over protests from some home allies, he went to Salzburg to inaugurate the music festival, bringing with him the West German president, and delivered a sermon in the presence of Austrian President Kurt Waldheim. The astonishing one-act piece he produced in Salzburg, for all its sinister symbolism to Jews, has other symbolic resonances as well, which may explain (not justify).

Havel’s writing is fairly obsessed with questions of complicity. So is Czechoslovakian society today. The government has a list of 140,000 citizens--one out of 100--who are said to have given information to the secret police during the Communist years. Lists of candidates for the June elections were vetted, and some forced off the ballot. There are Czechs who speak of purging the former nomenklatura. Who can blame them? After decades of degradation, the desire for vengeance is perfectly understandable. But vengeance is also the seabed of the next civil war.

In going to Waldheim and telling him to come clean, Havel may have been speaking to his own citizens about the tone in which to address the thugs in their midst; and to the Communist and others who disown their complicity in the last 40 years of totalitarian rule. He may also have been speaking allegorically to Slovaks who harbor fond memories of their puppet wartime regime. Indeed, throughout Central and East Europe, the persecuted have to face the formidable task of living next door to their persecutors.

Much as one wishes that Havel had chosen another stage for his theatrical piece, it would be wrong to think that all the results are bad--it cannot be bad, for example, that Munich’s Suddeutsche Zeitung reprinted the entire text of Havel’s speech decrying “the supposition that one can walk the tightrope of history and rewrite one’s own biography without being punished” as “one of the traditional crazy ideas of Central Europe.” This is not the last time the message will need to be delivered--and not only in Austria. But what can it be (a point Havel did not make) if it is not also knowledge of the complicity of European history in the act of destroying the Jewish people?

In much of Central and Eastern Europe, even Jews are no longer necessary for anti-Semitism. This makes the presidency of the unpenitent Waldheim not only a reward for lies but also a presumption that reprieve comes to those who wait long enough. This is where Havel fell off his own moral tightrope. This is why so many partisans of Havel ask, with due respect for the grayness of history, whether he could not have chosen another occasion to remind his vast admiring audience that Europe can no more free itself from the shadow of the Holocaust than Czechoslovakia can free itself of a boundary with Austria.