2023-04-16 21:47:06
The Czech historian Michal Reiman was one of the masterminds behind the Prague Spring. He hoped for a humane way beyond capitalism.
Czech historian Michal Reiman.Archive of Michal Reiman
When Volker Braun was asked in October 1989 whether he believed that the turnaround offered a guarantee for a better future, he said: “Once upon a time there was a historical moment that almost offered a guarantee: the Prague Spring of 1968. What an ideal one , socialist renewal compared to the Polish and Hungarian reforms! The people and the party connected: what an irretrievable moment. Now you lick your fingers afterwards. Socialism is no longer that easy to obtain.” It was Czech intellectuals who made this almost perfect moment possible.
The pioneers of the reform politician Alexandr Dubcek had familiarized themselves with Marxist theory in search of the good core. When they found what they were looking for, the Soviet tanks came and crushed the Czechs: the intellectuals had come to realize that socialism could succeed if the system was flooded with maximum freedom. However, the Soviets saw themselves maximally provoked by the Czech special way of “creating socialism with a human face”.
The historian Michal Reiman, one of the young pioneers of the Prague Spring, later said in an interview that the hardliners asked indignantly whether their socialism had an inhuman face. Reiman later had to experience first-hand how brutally the system was fighting back: he had published his critical analysis of the October Revolution in the Italian communist newspaper, the Rinascita. He was summoned by the party. The commissioners accused him of being one of the “leading ideologues of the right”. When he demanded proof of this allegation, he was asked how he felt about the Soviet invasion. He replied that from his point of view the invasion was completely unnecessary. Shortly thereafter, he received a message from the party that said: “Michal Reiman – one of the leading ideologues of the right – will be banned from any work in his profession, only manual labor is allowed.” Reiman had to leave Czechoslovakia and was granted citizenship withdrawn. He emigrated to Germany, first to Tübingen, then to Berlin, where he taught at the Free University.
Wolfgang Eichwede, one of Germany’s leading researchers on Eastern Europe, says: “Reiman felt closely connected to the socialist idea and was repelled by socialist reality.” For a long time he saw himself as a socialist, only much later did he call himself “left-liberal”. , because of freedom. He suffered from homesickness all his life and was only able to return in 1989. In addition to Prague, Berlin remained the center of his life, which was not easy either: his Jewish family had had to flee Czechoslovakia from the National Socialists. The father went to London. Born in 1930, Reiman was taken to Moscow by his mother. Throughout his life he remained grateful to the Russians for saving them from the Germans, even if he quarreled with the development of Russia: A significant part of his academic work is Stalinism, which Reiman classified as a “counter-revolution”. He placed great hopes in Mikhail Gorbachev and saw the Yeltsin years as a catastrophe: “You couldn’t build a democracy on this wild, corrupt capitalism,” he said very early on, according to Eichwede.
Despite all the breaks and forced new beginnings, Michal Reiman was a cheerful man. He died in Berlin on March 10th. The obituary of Prague’s Charles University states: “We wish you, Professor, that you will find in the heavenly archives what you have not found in the earthly archives, and we regret that you cannot write to us about it.”
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