Books in Brief: My Mind on Trial

My Mind on Trial, by Eugen Loebl (Harcourt, Brace, 235 pp., $8.95). “When the plane passed I no longer heard the voice. I wondered if I had actually heard it, if it was real. I did not want it to be real.” Burdened with prose that drones on like that page after page, together with the usual psychoanalytic ruminations of a selfabsorbed intellectual, Eugen Loebl’s account of his arrest and interrogation behind the freshly erected Iron Curtain still escapes dullness: circumstances such as his would triumph over the most inept narrator. An economist and Czechoslovakia’s deputy minister of foreign trade, Loebl was arrested in 1949 and, during the course of a lengthy period of solitary confinement and interrogation, “confessed”— one admission at a time—to having been a Titoist agent, a Zionist, a bourgeois nationalist, and a spy for the “Anglo-American imperialists.” (The real reason for his arrest was the irritation he had caused the Soviets by advocating that Czechoslovakia trade with the West, although being Jewish didn’t help.) Of the 14 defendants in that show trial, only he and two others were not executed; he left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and now teaches in the United States. No longer a Communist, Loebl still has a maddeningly tenacious grip on the ideological mode of thought; he is the creator of something called “humanomics,” intended as “an intellectual tool that could be instrumental in creating a humane orientation for our economy and for society as a whole.” Forever beguiled by the sour apples on the tree of knowledge, Loebl dispels any notion one might have had that a political trial and imprisonment in the late Stalinist years would enforce clarity of vision.

GB

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George Bittlingmayer

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My Mind on Trial, by Eugen Loebl (Harcourt, Brace, 235 pp., $8.95). “When the plane passed I no longer heard the voice. I wondered if I had actually heard it, if it was real. I did not want it to be real.” Burdened with prose that drones on like that page after page, together with the usual psychoanalytic ruminations of a selfabsorbed intellectual, Eugen Loebl’s account of his arrest and interrogation behind the freshly erected Iron Curtain still escapes dullness: circumstances such as his would triumph over the most inept narrator. An economist and Czechoslovakia’s deputy minister of foreign trade, Loebl was arrested in 1949 and, during the course of a lengthy period of solitary confinement and interrogation, “confessed”— one admission at a time—to having been a Titoist agent, a Zionist, a bourgeois nationalist, and a spy for the “Anglo-American imperialists.” (The real reason for his arrest was the irritation he had caused the Soviets by advocating that Czechoslovakia trade with the West, although being Jewish didn’t help.) Of the 14 defendants in that show trial, only he and two others were not executed; he left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and now teaches in the United States. No longer a Communist, Loebl still has a maddeningly tenacious grip on the ideological mode of thought; he is the creator of something called “humanomics,” intended as “an intellectual tool that could be instrumental in creating a humane orientation for our economy and for society as a whole.” Forever beguiled by the sour apples on the tree of knowledge, Loebl dispels any notion one might have had that a political trial and imprisonment in the late Stalinist years would enforce clarity of vision.