Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

Kundera develops this definition of “kitsch” in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (first published in 1984), in the sections that anatomize how sentimentality can become an ideological instrument. Writing as a Czech émigré in the wake of mid‑20th‑century totalitarian politics, Kundera is especially alert to public emotions staged as moral unanimity—images and rituals meant to produce instant, shared feeling and to exclude doubt, irony, or private complexity. The “two tears” example functions as a miniature theory of how aesthetic pleasure slides into self-congratulation: the viewer not only responds to the scene but also savors belonging to a community of the “moved.”

The first tear is a direct, spontaneous response to an appealing image (children running on grass). The second tear is reflexive: it celebrates the fact that one is moved in the “right” way, in harmony with an imagined humanity. For Kundera, that self-affirming second layer is what turns emotion into kitsch—feeling that flatters itself and demands consensus. Kitsch, in this sense, is not merely bad taste but a moralized sentimentality that suppresses ambiguity and individual judgment. The passage implies that kitsch is socially coercive: it rewards conformity by making shared emotion feel like virtue.