During the past 15 years, literatures from Central and Central Eastern Europe has been marked by a boom of testimonies of involvement in 20th century totalitarianisms. Müller's Atemschaukel (2009; "The Hunger Angel"), Denemarková's, Peníze od Hitlera (2006; "Money from Hitler"), Topol's Chladnou zemí (2009; "The Devil's Workshop"), and Stepanova's Памяти памяти (2018; 'Memory, Memory') touch upon the nationally and internationally sensitive topics of complicity with Nazi occupation, the Beneš decrees, and Stalinist terror. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, the paper addresses the question: Why the interest in past totalitarianisms now? Hypothesis is that these texts address convergences between involvements in past totalitarianisms and participation in wrongdoings of humanitarian, political, ecological, or other natures in present neoliberalism. This convergence is of particular interest in view of the global crisis of democratic participation, which is currently undermined by an often unwilling participation in economic structures known to be detrimental to social cohesion and global health.
Literary portrays of complicity with totalitarianism and the persistence of suffering have been discussed in terms of memory culture and (trans-/national) identity discourses. In stark simplification of the concept of trauma, readings often cast testimonies of violence in terms of a traumatic temporality that anachronistically protracts issues which supposedly belong to the past. Distinctions between the audiences' present and the narrated past is often parallel with the distance between the present position in the West via-à-vis the violence as belonging Europe's East. Such spatio-temporal distinctions serve to install a position of criticism untouched by involvements. Literary texts counteract such distancing as they outline modes of partaking in institutional violence that draws on heritage, culture, gender, social, and other distinctions. Possible modes of complicity stand out more clearly – and are acknowledged more readily – in past totalitarianisms; they are more complicated, but just as active, in the globalized world of the present.
Literature is a privileged medium to analyze issues of involvement and complicity as literary language relies, and reflects, on the audiences' structural participation in the discourse: on readers to lend an eye, a voice, and an ear in reading or listening to a text, or watching a play. Fiction, moreover, depends on the audience's suspension of disbelief, which allows to correlate (documentary) fiction with populist media discourses, wherein audiences are complicit in if they uncritically accept the media's representational claims. Interest of the paper is not to denounce individual instances of complicity but to bring out what Kutz calls the "hidden promise of complicity", namely "the conception of community upon which it draws: a world where individuals shape their lives with others". In other words, thinking about complicity and problematic implicated-ness, a subject many do not want to know about, might be a good way of thinking about functioning participation and relationality. This, however, requires overcoming some comfortable assumptions about the position of the critic (as distanced, non-involved, and non-complicit) – a task in which Rothberg's notion of "implication" may prove to be helpful.
