The Praxis philosophers were at once the Yugoslav system's most passionate exponents abroad and its fiercest internal critics. Yugoslavia's six republics and two autonomous provinces were already on a collision course by the mid-1980s, but even the most astute Western observers did not perceive what lay ahead. The most visible sign of trouble was in Kosovo, where martial law had only stoked the flames of ethnic strife. The Serb minority clamored for Belgrade's attention: In 1985 Kosovo's Serbs sent a petition to the central government, claiming that Serbs had been raped, murdered, and driven from their homes by the province's ethnic Albanians. Couldn't Belgrade do something? This orientation was hardly a Yugoslav invention. If anything, the Praxists took their cue from neighboring Hungary, where Georg Lukacs had amassed a following of like-minded dissidents. Like Lukacs, the Praxists were captivated by the early Marx’s theory of alienation. In an ordinary capitalist or a Stalinist socialist society, man was alienated from himself by the commodification of his labor and by the overweening power of a small, privileged class and its institutions. A utopian Marxist society, the Praxists imagined, would overcome that alienation; it would unleash human creativity — or “praxis” — by doing away with the ruling class through self-management. The workers would directly control not only their workplaces but also social and cultural institutions — even local political parties and governing bodies. The state, given enough time, would of its own accord “wither away,” just as Marx had predicted. It was in Dubrovnik that Habermas, Bernstein, and German philosopher Albrecht Wellmer hatched a plan to revive the Praxis journal that had so interested them in the 1960s. To provide the disfranchised dissidents with a new, international forum for their work could only do the cause of democratic socialism good, the Western philosophers figured. Together with Markovic and Stojanovic, they launched Praxis Internationalin 1981.

Yugoslavia’s six republics and two autonomous provinces were already on a collision course by the mid-1980s, but even the most astute Western observers did not perceive what lay ahead. The most visible sign of trouble was in Kosovo, where martial law had only stoked the flames of ethnic strife. The Serb minority clamored for Belgrade’s attention: In 1985 Kosovo’s Serbs sent a petition to the central government, claiming that Serbs had been raped, murdered, and driven from their homes by the province’s ethnic Albanians. Couldn’t Belgrade do something? in the final essay, the title of this book refers specifically to Max Brod's betrayal of Kafka's reputed request that his writing be destroyed after his death, although in fact, as Mr. Kundera points out, Kafka's testament That summer was particularly memorable at Korcula. Richard Bernstein, now a political philosopher at the New School for Social Research, recalls, "Everybody who was a significant leftist, in the East or in the West, came to the 1968 meeting. All the leaders of the student movements in Germany, Eastern Europe, and the United States were there." But even as the editorial boards of Praxis and The New Left Review sunned themselves on the beaches of Korcula, the Belgrade 8 held on to their jobs by a slender thread. Much has changed since Gerson Sher traveled to Yugoslavia to research his dissertation amid the political and intellectual ferment of the late 1960s. For one thing, the idiosyncratic country that captured his imagination no longer exists. Nor does Praxis, the group of Marxist humanist philosophers Sher studied. But this is not the only reason he responds warily to a request for an interview: “I am appalled,” he says, “that you should be interested in Praxis at this time.”

By this time, Mihailo Markovic was clearly the Yugoslav group’s leader, and he came to play a crucial role in the revived journal. A fluent English speaker, he was gregarious, cosmopolitan, and urbane. Both his anti-Stalinist and his antifascist credentials were impeccable: He had fought in Tito’s Partisan army during World War II and prided himself on extending aid to Yugoslav Jews. In his philosophical work, Markovic emphasized Marx’s commitment to human dignity, freedom, and self-realization. At its inception, the philosophical journal Praxis was merely the successor to Pogledi, a political journal issued from Croatia's capital, Zagreb, in the 1950s. Pogledi was a casualty of state interference: It lasted only three years. Chief among the defunct journal's contributors had been the University of Zagreb sociologist Rudi Supek, who participated in the French Resistance as an émigré during World War II and later led an underground prisoners' organization when he was interned at Buchenwald; and the University of Zagreb philosopher Gajo Petrovic, a Serb from Croatia who gravitated toward the early Marx, existentialism, and Heidegger. Birnbaum remembers, "Supek and Petrovic were impressive for their moral rigor, their utter disdain of careerism. They were people you loved to be around." From the ashes of Pogledi, Supek, Petrovic, and their colleagues went on to start their summer school on Korcula in 1963 and a new journal, Praxis, in 1964. The group that formed around these ventures consisted of a close-knit circle of friends and colleagues--some from Supek's and Petrovic's departments at the University of Zagreb and another eight from the philosophy department at the University of Belgrade. With the enthusiastic support of the Belgrade Praxists, student demonstrations convulsed the University of Belgrade in June 1968. The students protested their poor living conditions and demanded an end to authoritarianism, unemployment, and, for good measure, the Vietnam War. Local Serbian authorities urged Tito to send military troops onto the Belgrade campus. After all, it was that same summer that Soviet tanks would put an end to popular protests in Prague. But unlike his ham-fisted counterparts in Moscow, Tito deployed a feline cunning to dispense with his foes. In a televised appeal, he proclaimed himself deeply sympathetic to the activists’ concerns. In fact, he said, it was only Yugoslavia’s bureaucracy that stood in the way of the agenda he and the students shared. If the bureaucrats did not allow him to meet these students’ demands, he declared, he would resign. Of course, the demands were not met, and Tito did not resign. In fact, only two weeks after he gave this speech, he urged the University of Belgrade to dismiss its Praxis philosophers on the grounds that they were “corrupting” students. The plight of those philosophers, known as the Belgrade 8, became a matter of international concern. Many people have read Markovic as being a cynic and a betrayer of Praxis,” says Bernstein. But in Markovic’s distorted vision, Bernstein suspects, “Serbia represented the progressive element of Yugoslav society” — the element bent on keeping Yugoslavia united and on preserving its socialist structure. Over time, he lost all perspective. “That’s the tragedy of Mihailo Markovic,” says Bernstein. “Instead of seeing the dark and ugly side of Serbian nationalism, he committed himself to it.”

The allegiance of Praxis to a united Yugoslavia seemed clear enough. But given the ever present threat of government censorship, there was little that Yugoslav intellectuals published in those years that was completely transparent. The Zagreb philosopher Zarko Puhovski, the youngest Praxist by about twenty years, says that the group’s disputes over politics and ideology were often disguised as conversations about less controversial questions of aesthetics or ontology. “One kind of debate functioned as a replacement for other kinds of debate,” he recalls. To what extent Kosovo’s Serbs were persecuted remains debatable. To be sure, they were outnumbered, and there is no reason to doubt that they faced threats, vandalism, harassment, and even the occasional act of criminal violence from an Albanian majority that deeply resented Slavic rule. But to Yugoslavs outside Serbia, complaints of anti-Serb discrimination in Kosovo were incomprehensible. After all, Serbs were hardly an oppressed group in the nation as a whole, whereas the Albanians formed something of an underclass. This orientation was hardly a Yugoslav invention. If anything, the Praxists took their cue from neighboring Hungary, where Georg Lukacs had amassed a following of like-minded dissidents. Like Lukacs, the Praxists were captivated by the early Marx's theory of alienation. In an ordinary capitalist or a Stalinist socialist society, man was alienated from himself by the commodification of his labor and by the overweening power of a small, privileged class and its institutions. A utopian Marxist society, the Praxists imagined, would overcome that alienation; it would unleash human creativity--or "praxis"--by doing away with the ruling class through self-management. The workers would directly control not only their workplaces but also social and cultural institutions--even local political parties and governing bodies. The state, given enough time, would of its own accord "wither away," just as Marx had predicted. Although he had been permitted to return to the University of Belgrade in 1987, Zivotic was no longer happy there by 1994. He told the New York Times,“I could not stand to go to work. I had to listen to professors and students voice support and solidarity for these Bosnian fascists, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, in the so-called Republic of Srpska. It is now worse than it was under Communism. The intellectual corruption is more pervasive and profound.” A friend remembers that Zivotic “was physically destroyed by the time and the evil amid which he lived.”One of the points that the Czech novelist Milan Kundera insists on most strenuously in his stimulating new nonfiction work, "Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts," is Nietzsche's injunction that Furthermore, whatever else the Praxists were, they were Marxists. In Croatia, to go on being a Marxist — or a Yugoslavist — placed one in opposition to the right-wing nationalist regime of Franjo Tudjman. And indeed, many of the Croatian Praxists have remained strong supporters of human rights: Zarko Puhovski, who is now vice-president of Croatia’s Helsinki Committee on Human Rights, has raised his voice courageously against the Croatian army’s ethnic-cleansing campaigns. And the economist Branko Horvat ran for president in 1992 on an antiwar, anti-authoritarian platform.

Not all of the Praxists followed their leaders down the dark road of Serbian nationalism. The Croatian members cleaved to their humanist principles through the bloodiest years of the Yugoslav wars. And in Serbia, some of the most courageous and lonely expressions of dissent have come from former Praxists and their students. Despite the general intolerance for opposition, some philosophical currents called for a radicalization of Yugoslavia’s socialist democracy and a more humanist vision of social change. Prominent among these was the Praxis group, which from 1964 to 1974 produced among the most innovative Marxist journals internationally, also bound to the experience of a socialist state. Such was Praxis’s prestige, its yearly summer school attracted figures from Herbert Marcuse to Erich Fromm. At the end of the 1980s, the balance among Yugoslavia’s nationalities began to collapse, and many Praxis leaders joined the wave of ethnic chauvinism. There was little trace of the humanism the group had long preached. In his 1997 book, The Fall of Yugoslavia: Why Communism Failed, Stojanovic wrote that the revolution in his thinking occurred in 1990, when mass graves from Jasenovac, Croatia’s World War II­-era concentration camp, were disinterred for reburial. Stojanovic found himself confronted by his children’s anger: He had never talked to them about Jasenovac before. After all, such memories were suppressed during the Tito years. From that moment on, Stojanovic declared, he decided that his political work should be dedicated to the memory of Jasenovac. In 1989, Seyla Benhabib took over the American editorship of Praxis International. At the time, she knew that conflict was brewing over Kosovo, but she did not yet understand its history or its dimensions. Her Praxis colleagues were little help. It was curious, she thought, that Svetozar Stojanovic, her Yugoslav co-editor, never wrote about recent developments in his own country.

For more than a decade, the Belgrade 8--Mihailo Markovic, Svetozar Stojanovic, Ljubomir Tadic, Zagorka Golubovic, Dragoljub Micunovic, Miladin Zivotic, Nebojsa Popov, and Trivo Indjic--wandered the globe, accepting visiting professorships abroad and meeting secretly in Belgrade. Only Indjic accepted the government's offer of a low-profile post at an institute. The others insisted on nothing less than a full return to the University of Belgrade, which was not forthcoming. Markovic, the group's best-known member abroad, took a part-time philosophy post at the University of Pennsylvania. Stojanovic taught at Berkeley and at the University of Kansas. Meanwhile, in Zagreb, the situation was slightly less dire. "There were pressures," remembers Zarko Puhovski. "I couldn't publish for two years. But it was nothing remotely like the situation in Belgrade." Cosic and Stojanovic were open to various solutions: Croatian independence might have been acceptable, Stojanovic implies, if Croatia had been willing to guarantee substantial autonomy to its Serb-populated territories. In practice, critics would object, such solutions were untenable. There would be autonomy for the Serbs in Croatia; and within that autonomy, should there be autonomy for the Croats in Serbian Croatia? And what, then, of the Serbs in Croatian Serbian Croatia? It is tempting to see this line of reasoning, which leads ineluctably to a reductio ad infinitum, as a sophistic device whose real purpose was to force Yugoslavia’s reintegration on Serbian terms.

So instead of summing up what Mr. Kundera has to say in "Testaments Betrayed," one should begin by emphasizing that it is improvisational criticism. It treats many of the same subjects the author took up in his earlier work of criticism, "The The rest of the 1970s and the early 1980s were disappointing years for the Belgrade 8. They organized what they called the Free University, which mostly consisted of seminars held in private homes, but they could not advertise these meetings, and they were constantly on guard for police interruption. At least one Free University session convened at the novelist Dobrica Cosic's house. Neither a Marxist nor a philosopher, Cosic was a personal friend and shadowy influence on the Praxis group although never an actual member. In the 1980s, his ties to Praxis pulled tighter; but to what extent the Praxists already shared his incipient nationalism remains a mystery. Cosic collaborated with Tadic on two projects in the early 1980s: One, a proposed journal that would criticize bureaucracy and champion freedom of expression, was immediately suppressed by the government; the other, a petition against censorship laws, was also swiftly defeated. The government press denounced Cosic and his Praxis friends as "hardened nationalists and open advocates of a multi-party system," but the group continued to convene as a committee to promote freedom of expression. This was particularly evident when Puhovski himself edited a special issue of Praxis in 1973. He received a submission from the well-known Serbian novelist Dobrica Cosic. It was a short piece that argued that true socialism was not possible in an unenlightened society and that faith in the people--of which Cosic claimed to have little--was the "last refuge for our historically defeated hopes." Which people and what hopes? The article did not specify. But Puhovski detected a disturbing nationalist message all the same. Nor was he impressed with the article's argument or its rigor: "I had the junior approach of believing that philosophy and sociology were specialized fields," he recounts with a touch of sarcasm. "I didn't think Cosic's piece was up to the level. It was bad nationalist propaganda." He turned it down. Other contributors were equally impassioned. Danko Grlic, a Croat, vividly evoked the irrationality of nationalism. Once unleashed, he warned, it would be impervious to logic: “You do not reason or theorize about the nation; for the nation you only struggle and die; you love the nation as the flesh of your flesh, as the essence of your being, drinking it with your mother’s milk; it is body and blood …” The Praxis philosophers were at once the Yugoslav system’s most passionate exponents abroad and its fiercest internal critics. Issue of Praxis, 1970. But when Benhabib brought up Kosovo in 1989, Stojanovic seemed annoyed and stunned. “Why do you want to know about Kosovo?” he asked. Benhabib replied, “There is a conflict there, and we don’t understand what that conflict is about.” Said Stojanovic, “Have we ever written about the Palestinian conflict in Praxis?” It was Benhabib’s turn to be uncomfortable. “Sveta,” she remembers saying, “what are you talking about?”

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Certain of his points may seem provocative. He defends the right of artists to explore the horrifying or profane, as Stravinsky does in "Le Sacre du Printemps" or as Mr. Rushdie does in "The Satanic Verses." He calls a roll of those mentioned only certain of his writings. In Mr. Kundera's view, Brod betrayed Kafka further by creating the myth of the suffering saint whose novels describe, in Brod's words, "the horrible punishments in store for those At its inception, the philosophical journal Praxis was merely the successor to Pogledi, a political journal issued from Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, in the 1950s. Pogledi was a casualty of state interference: It lasted only three years. Chief among the defunct journal’s contributors had been the University of Zagreb sociologist Rudi Supek, who participated in the French Resistance as an emigre during World War II and later led an underground prisoners’ organization when he was interned at Buchenwald; and the University of Zagreb philosopher Gajo Petrovic, a Serb from Croatia who gravitated toward the early Marx, existentialism, and Heidegger. Birnbaum remembers, “Supek and Petrovic were impressive for their moral rigor, their utter disdain of careerism. They were people you loved to be around.” From the ashes of Pogledi, Supek, Petrovic, and their colleagues went on to start their summer school on Korcula in 1963 and a new journal, Praxis, in 1964. The group that formed around these ventures consisted of a close-knit circle of friends and colleagues — some from Supek’s and Petrovic’s departments at the University of Zagreb and another eight from the philosophy department at the University of Belgrade.