Milan Kundera

In The Curtain stelt Milan Kundera zichzelf en ons de vraag: 'And If the Tragic Has Deserted Us?'

Hij geeft het volgende voorbeeld: 'Antigone inspired Hegel to his magisterial meditation on tragedy: two antagonists face to face, each of them inseperably bound to a truth that is partial, relative, but considered in itself, entirely justified. Each is prepared to sacrifice his life for it, but can only make it prevail at the price of total ruin for the adversary. Thus both are at once right and guilty... Freeing the great human conflicts from naive interpretation as a struggle between good and evil, understanding them in the ligt of tragedy, was an enormous feat of mind; it brought forward the unavoidable relativism of human truths; it made clear the need to do justice to the enemy. But moral Manichaeanism has an indestructable vitality... Hitler not only brought unspeakable horror upon Europe but also stripped it of its sense of the tragic. Like the struggle against Nazism, all of contemporary political history would thenceforth be seen and experienced as a struggle between good and evil... Is this a regression? A relapse into the pre-tragical stage of humankind? But if so, precisely who has regressed? Is it History itself, usurped by criminals? Or is it our mode of understanding History? Often I think: tragedy has deserted us; and that may be the true punishment.'

Kundera's boek staat vol bewonderenswaardige beschouwingen.