A malign legacy. (The survival of culture: IV).

Wherever on this planet ideals of personal freedom and dignity apply, there you will find the cultural inheritance of England.

--Karel Capek

Most of the world for most of the time has lived under tyranny. Choice does not come into the matter. Years, centuries have to pass in order for people to be able to build the culture and supporting institutions of a democratic society--that is, one in which individuals have to be responsible for themselves and their choices. An highly complicated balance operates in a democracy between the myriad choices of individuals and the procedures of accountability they set up to adjudicate the moral, social, and political outcomes of their choices. There is no history, in Emerson's shorthand for the hard-won primacy of the individual over tyranny, only biography.

To be autobiographical, then: among my earliest memories is the exodus from Paris in June 1940 to escape the incoming German army. An image of the blurred faces of refugees along the road has stayed with me. Together with relatives, in due course I was able to leave Vichy France and cross into Spain. Many people--the German literary critic Walter Benjamin for one--were not so fortunate on that same escape route.

Grown-up, I began to come to grips with this experience. Why would unknown Germans have hunted down my relatives and my four-year-old self?. How had this complete collapse of democratic France come about? I read what I could about Nazism. I spent a year in Israel, where I was able to attend the Eichmann trial, and to discover, to my surprise, that the death penalty served to protect the innocent more than to exact revenge. In Germany, I was to interview many Nazis, some of them of the highest rank, intimates of Hitler. Albert Speer was one. A day with him in his house in Heidelberg brought me to a different conclusion from that of his biographer Gitta Sereny, who believed she detected regret, if not repentance. Faced with a rerun of the past, it seemed to me, Speer would have made exactly the same choices. Power corrupts. Murder runs deep.

In the era of Brezhnev, I travelled in the Soviet Union and its satellites. In Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948 (2001), a wonderfully evoked work, Sandor Marai describes how his very first sighting of Red Army soldiers in Hungary during March 1944 told him that these men were not going to bring him freedom; they couldn't, because they hadn't any for themselves. So I found it. Social and cultural permafrost had set in. In the presence of KGB minders, I sat in rooms with people unable to risk the simplest human exchanges. These encounters were initiations in tyranny. I knew I was contributing entries to their secret police dossiers and mine.

My relatives had had property in Hungary, deep in the countryside. The house was now a tank garage. The surrounding poverty was startling. The villagers wept; they beseeched me not to forget them. One day, they said, the Soviet occupation would be over. A former farm manager poured me a drink in a glass with my family's monogram on it, and on the wall behind him hung a portrait of a lady in the splashiest fin-de-siecle style, evidently removed from my family's house. I was glad that these token things had survived. Vladimir Nabokov made the point that he hadn't minded the Communists taking away his fortune, but he did mind that they believed him to be the sort of person who would mind. I felt the same. As a boy, listening to stories of the past and looking at family photographs and my grandfather's annotated copy of the poems of Petofi, I cherished romantic fantasies about Hungary, its beautiful country houses, and the Budapest cafes like Gerbeaud's, where the company would be the likes of Marai. More than material things, the Communists had stolen the freedom of the fully imagined life.