I remember, therefore I am: Milan Kundera and the idea of Central Europe
ENIn The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978) Milan Kundera describes his protagonist Gustav Husak as the President of Forgetting—a man who needs the forms of mass culture and aesthetic and political kitsch as potent instruments of organized forgetting. After 1968, Husak refuses to take seriously the mass emigration of Czech and Slovak writers, composers, film directors, scholars, and medical doctors, but he reacts immediately to the emigration of a pop star named Klaus. Husak writes a warm, friendly letter to the pop singer, asking him to return to Czechoslovakia and promising him heaven on earth. Never mind that an exodus of the intelligentsia has deprived the country of its intellectual and artistic potential. The emigration of a music idiot is a tragedy, and Husak understands that they can work closely together to efficiently rob Czechoslovakia of its memory and history. They need each other. The President of Forgetting and the Music Idiot work for the same cause. [...].
