This is a book about collective guilt, individual fate, and repentance, a tale that explores how we can come to be responsible for crimes we neither directly commit nor have the power to prevent. Set in the Czechoslovakian borderland shortly after WWII amid the sometimes violent expulsion of the region's German population, Jaroslav Durych's poetic, deeply symbolic novel is a literary touchstone for coming to terms with the Czech Republic's difficult and taboo past of state-sanctioned violence. A leading Catholic intellectual of the early twentieth century, Durych became a literary and political throwback to the prewar Czechoslovak Republic and faced censorship under the Stalinist regime of the 1950s. As such, he was a man not unfamiliar with the ramifications of a changing society in which the minority becomes the rule-making political authority, only to end up condemned as criminals. Though Durych finished writing God's Rainbow in 1955, he could not have hoped to see it published in his lifetime. Released in a stillcensored form in 1969, God's Rainbow is available here in full for the first time in English.
Within the Czech arts, the novella God's Rainbow is a unique direct reflection of the expulsion from Bohemia of the German-speaking population following World War II. In it Durych brings fully to bear all the elements of his poetics – a narrative that is replete with Symbolist oneirism, is highly expressive, spiced with irony and written in a rhythmical poetic language.
A censored version of the book was eventually published during the Prague Spring, six years after Durych’s death in 1962. The current translation by David Short, the first to appear in English, is based on the original text and represents a formidable achievement: it deciphers and conveys the beauty of Durych’s rich, poetic and notoriously challenging language.
Zuzana Slobodová (
The Times Literary Supplement)
AFTERWORD:
IRA ET IRIS SEU LITTERA GESTA DOCET
In our own times, literature and cinema have become increasingly preoccupied with imagining the responses of human beings in a post-apocalyptic landscape after environmental or nuclear disaster or war. These stories often focus on the chance encounter of a small number of survivors, whose actions may ultimately offer a tentative hope that human society can be rebuilt, perhaps in a less harmful or self-destructive way. After 1945, fractured and devastated post-war Europe provided this context for real. For some, the answers lay in more 'progress', more 'modernity': new social and economic orders, greater international cooperation and the development of human rights law. For the author of God's Rainbow, however, the path to recovery and renewal lay not in new models, but in what twentieth-century Europe had, in his view, forgotten, abandoned or distorted: the God who set his bow in the sky as a sign of his love, mercy and forgiveness, to seal his covenant with Noah after the Flood that he would never again destroy the world. In God's Rainbow, the wanderer-narrator enters a postdiluvian landscape, a site of death, destruction and decay that - through repentance, atonement and reconciliation - becomes a place of renewal, redemption and rebirth.
A particular challenge to the contemporary reader is that everything in the novel appears in this Baroque-influenced, dual perspective of death and rebirth, terrestrial and celestial, evil and good. In the first, most difficult chapter, the reader accompanies the narrator as he is taken away from the mundane, one-dimensional material world into a space where everything appears in both a real and symbolic guise, where both must learn to see things differently. The narrator, unsure what has prompted his journey or what its purpose might be, is simultaneously a hiker and a Dantean pilgrim, led by the stirring of his soul into 'the borderlands of hell', an undulating desert where he expects to be tempted, but which will become the site of his salvation. The serpent guarding the threshold, however, recalls not only the Devil in the Garden of Eden, but also the wisdom that will replace the 'better judgement' the narrator has lost, and - for Jaroslav Durych, a physician by profession - healing. The narrator will eventually find the purpose of his journey in an apparently abandoned house by a stream, a symbol of life and hope, but also of the crossing into the underworld, where he is woken in the night by a light that signals the arrival of a young woman whose 'hellish' red hair signifies temptation, even witchcraft, but also initiation into mystical knowledge.
In the decades following the novel's first publication in 1969, the dominant critical interpretation sought to cut through its deliberately complex imagery, symbolism and patterns of thought and emphasise its implicit historical context: the initially violent, unregulated deportation of over two million Bohemian Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945. Durych names neither the setting nor its characters, nor reveals their ethnicity, but the action of the novel takes place in identiiable places in the northern Bohemian borderlands or Sudetenland, where the majority of Czechoslovakia's Bohemian Germans lived until the end of the Second World War. Durych came to the Lusatian Mountains, about one hundred kilometres north of Prague, close to the border with Germany and Poland, in July 1947 and for a very low price bought a cottage in Dolní Světlá (Nieder Lichtenwalde) previously owned by German weavers, where he would spend most of the warmer half of each year until his death in 1962. His decision to leave Prague for rural solitude resembles his narrator's departure in the novel, and might even be understood as an actualization of the 'internal exile' into which he was effectively sent after 1945. In his letters, however, Durych accepts the opportunity to withdraw (at a time when other intellectuals associated with Roman Catholicism and conservative nationalism faced imprisonment and hard labour), and presents the ascetic simplicity of his solitude almost as a form of religious retreat.
The significance of the setting is intensified by similarities between the narrator and author: both are widowers over sixty years old with five children and were supposed to have become priests. From the outset, Durych did not expect that the book would be published in his lifetime; indeed, he hid the manuscript under a pile of coal in the cellar of his house in Prague for fear that its contents would cause him problems. The private nature of the book perhaps explains why, unlike in most of his previous fiction, he uses a first-person narration and so many allusions to crucial, intimate aspects of his own life. In particular, the rainbow light of a fairytale world, first encountered in his Memories of Youth (1928), is linked for the author with the early death of his mother, whom he knew only from vague memories, dreams and the accounts of others. In the first draft of God's Rainbow, the narrator tells the young woman that while she fears the moon, because of the trauma she experienced at night, he fears the afternoon sun, which reminds him of his mother's funeral.
The description of the narrator's journey in the novel corresponds very precisely to the local reality. The narrator comes from the nearest town; this is Cvikov (Zwickau in Böhmen), where Durych used to go to confession to the local parish priest, Josef Dobiáš, with whom he formed a close relationship and to whom he even confided his plans to write the book. In a letter to Durych dated December 27th 1955, Dobiáš writes:
I think of you most of all and very vividly in Marenice in connection with God's Rainbow. The area, now covered in snow, looks very sad compared to the summer, but the attendance in church at Christmas was surprisingly large this year, apparently the largest for many years. Perhaps souls are softening and the rainbow of God, of reconciliation and forgiveness, will also appear here.
It is in Mařenice (Groß-Mergthal) that the narrator finds the coffin with the unburied, decomposing body. The description of the church with one tower corresponds precisely to the Church of Mary Magdalene, a name which undoubtedly resonated with Durych's preoccupations in the novel. Other locations are not so unequivocally identifiable, but the description of the school, the proximity of the border and the walk taken through the village by the two protagonists suggest Krompach (Krombach), a village neighbouring Dolní Světlá and Mařenice.
The precise setting lends authenticity to the story told by the young woman. She suspects the narrator of wanting to steal from her or drive her out, a realistic enough allusion to the Czech 'gold-diggers' who travelled to North Bohemia after the liberation. She also gives further indications of her ethnicity, protesting: 'I was born right here, alongside you (...) can't you tell by my accent?' She retells her fate only in possessive pronouns, but we can deduce that 'our people' -logically the defeated Germans - handed her over to 'them' - presumably liberating Soviet soldiers - who held her for a week in her school, where she was repeatedly raped. She was then taken home by 'your (the narrator's) lot' - the Czechs -who killed her mother as she tried to escape, then raped her while she stared into her dying mother's eyes before killing her mentally handicapped aunt.
These emblematic details about the actions of both the Red Army and Czechs in the Sudetenland at the end of the war were not discussed in Czechoslovakia at the time of writing, and indeed have only come substantially to light since the fall of Communism; in this respect, Durych's novel is ground-breaking. Historians have not been able to link the woman's story to a single, real-life case, though in the irst draft of the novel Durych includes many details left out of the inal version. Given that information about a similar, lengthy collective rape can be found in certain accounts about the liberation given by expelled Bohemian Germans, Durych may have drawn on a real-life episode that shocked even a writer who, as a military doctor, had experienced the Eastern Front in the First World War and written in depth about the horrors of the Thirty Years War, in a historical novel translated into English in 1935 as The Descent of the Idol. It is possible that the woman's story is composed from the fates of several German women; a local eye-witness account from Krompach reports that in 1945, during the liberation, a Soviet soldier raped the daughter of a German family and, when her father intervened, shot her mother to frighten him off.
Neither the publisher's internal reader reports on the manuscript from the 1960s nor post-publication reviews of the novel in 1969 and 1970 make reference to the implicit historical context. Perhaps it was not obvious to readers who believed, like the narrator of God's Rainbow, that the whole matter had been satisfactorily resolved, but more likely it was too politically sensitive to mention. In 1975, however, the dissident thinker, Jan Patočka, oversaw the publication of the novel in German translation in an ostensibly unsuccessful attempt amid the Cold War to overcome entrenched national positions and initiate a Czech-German dialogue that might lead to the reconciliation promised by the text. The German translation provided something of an artistic alibi for the German side at a time when thousands of Czechs who did not want to live under Soviet-led occupation after 1968 followed the expelled Bohemian Germans into West German exile. Patočka's afterword, which makes the historical context of the novel explicit, has accompanied every subsequent Czech edition and the French translation too.
Though important for broader cultural-political reasons, God's Rainbow is more than a documentary testament about the Czech role in atrocities relating to the Second World War and its subsequent moral condemnation, and the literal, historical reading does not do full justice to how Durych, an experienced writer still at the peak of his powers aged 69, combines the historical, ethical, allegorical and mystical to overcome this apparently unending, destructive cycle of blame. In June 1945, at the village of Lidice, on the third anniversary of the worst German atrocity against the occupied Czechs, at the very time that violence against Bohemian Germans of the type described by the young woman was taking place, the Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš, justified the expulsion of all Bohemian Germans from Czechoslovakia on the grounds of their 'collective guilt', their shared responsibility for an 'indelible, unforgivable sin'. In God's Rainbow, Durych seeks to correct this distortion of Christian language and concepts. In 1939, he had written:
Everything that is good about democracy, progress, humanism and universal ideals has from first to last been stolen from Christian teaching; if they had not robbed Christian teaching, they would have nothing to show off about and herein lies the worst shamelessness, that those who want to destroy Christianity had first to rob it and then present what they had stolen as their own superiority.
In a novel written as this attempted destruction of Christianity was reaching its peak in Stalinist Czechoslovakia, Durych reasserts that guilt, repentance and atonement are not merely discrete, empty rhetorical phrases, but essential components of an approach to life that endlessly enables the human being to heal, be healed and begin again in his relationships with others and with God, a way of being that the so-called civilised world has, in his view, fatally abandoned.
A study of the six surviving drafts of the novel, held in the archive of the Museum of National Literature (Památník národního písemnictví) in Prague, reveals how Durych gradually erases the traces of a story set in a real time and place and moves it to the level of a fairy-tale timelessness, thereby rendering the action allegorical, transferable to any traumatic context. The mystical is suggested by allusions not only to the Scriptures - the two protagonists as Adam and Eve - but also to the Roman Catholic liturgy. The quotations from the Dies irae at the beginning of the novel evoke the atmosphere of a funeral. The Lord's Prayer and Salve Regina mark the culmination of the melancholy confession and burial scene. The narrator is slow to grasp his connection to the young woman's horrific experiences and to recognize the sin of 'his people' as his own. Then, apparently to chastise himself, he presses her against her will to reveal every detail, but in keeping with the all-pervading ambivalence in the novel, Durych suggests that what torments may also heal. The woman refers to the narrator sarcastically as her 'confessor', but by speaking of what happened to her, she too is freed from suffering. Though her confession may remind contemporary readers more of Jungian 'talking therapy' and the 'search for closure', such notions would, for Durych, exemplify what he considers the pale imitation of Christian models in godless modernity. She joins the narrator in his punishing act of penance, and they bury the coffin, the embodiment of all the wrongs left unrepented in this place, together. Rid of these burdens, the protagonists can overcome the seemingly insurmountable differences between them and build a fruitful relationship founded in shared humanity. Only once they have been absolved do the first man and woman of this newly recovered Eden encounter other people, who must have been present before, but only now become partners in the communal life of this newly settled land. When they first meet, the reader senses hostility, but once it becomes clear that the 'hermit' knows who the 'schoolgirl' is and accepts her as such, relations between all the people present are restored. God's rainbow (iris in Latin), which follows the cataclysm of God's rage (in Latin, ira) is set in the sky over the human beings once again charged with tending God's earth.
In the Christian tradition, reading teaches action (littera gesta docet). In God's Rainbow, Durych, who between the wars had been one of the most penetrating, but also at times unforgiving and aggressive critics of the First Czechoslovak Republic petty-bourgeois establishment, tries with humility to show how even the most tragic wrongs in human history can always be overcome if human beings rediscover their place in the Absolute. In writing God's Rainbow, Durych became one of very few Czech post-war intellectuals who, despite his animosity towards Germans, evident in his inter-war writing, did not hesitate to step beyond his own shadow and show the power of genuinely committed art, which fights not for an ideology, however seductive, but for the human being.
Rajendra Chitnis (University of Bristol)
Jan Linka (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Science)