Localization | 2009.07.29
With the passing of the last wartime Europeans, history's time has come | Timothy Garton Ash
Three major continental thinkers died in the last year, little noticed in insular Britain. Their life stories are extraordinary
The last year has seen the death of three extraordinary European thinkers who engaged deeply with the public life of their time. Their combined publications on history, philosophy, sociology and politics would fill several bookshelves. At critical moments, in 1956, in 1968, in 1989, their political engagement helped make European history. Each of them had the kind of mind that was sheer joy to observe in action, but also a rich, complex, life-affirming personality. Besides feeling a painful sense of loss, I find a larger significance in their passing.
With them, there passes the last cohort of Europeans who were formed by the horrors of the second world war and its central European aftermath. They understood in their bones why we need a Europe of liberty under law, for, as teenagers and young men, they witnessed the opposite. Now we children of luckier times have to sustain that Europe without the kind of elemental drive that comes from personal experience.
Not that they talked much or willingly about their childhood encounters with evil. Quite the reverse. They did so seldom and reluctantly. So there are some things, presumably including the deepest horrors, that we will never know – and have no right to know. Yet in the last years of their lives, in autobiographical fragments and snatches of conversation, they did bequeath us glimpses of the gehenna from which today\'s Europe was born.
The one who lived through the very worst has left the least testimony. Only in brief passages, and in rare conversations with close friends, did Bronislaw Geremek – the medieval historian turned Solidarity adviser and Polish foreign minister, who died in a car crash last summer – speak at all about witnessing life and death as a child in the Warsaw ghetto. "I closed that box and turned the key," he once said, when asked by a friendly interviewer.
In a long autobiographical conversation published in Polish a couple of years ago, Leszek Kolakowski – the philosopher, historian of ideas, analyst, critic and co-dismantler of communism, who died in Oxford last week – recalled his experience of the war in occupied Poland. How he was sent to work making wooden toys at the age of 15. How, since the German occupiers had closed down the schools, he educated himself by reading in a half-plundered library. (From the encylopedia he knew everything about A, D and E, he joked, but nothing beginning with B and C, because the local farmers had taken those volumes to use as firewood.) How with his own eyes he saw the merry-go-round that continued to play on Krasinski square in Warsaw while the ghetto burned nearby and "in the air there fluttered charred scraps of clothing". (A scene immortalised by Czeslaw Milosz in his poem Campo di Fiori .) How whenever he saw a low-flying plane he had the instinctive feeling, even in old age, living in England, that any minute it would start dropping bombs. And how his father was arrested and killed by the German occupiers of Warsaw in 1943.
Oddly enough, it\'s the reticent, understated north German Ralf Dahrendorf – the German-British social thinker, politician and educator, who died last month – who has left the more extensive testament from Europe\'s gehenna years. His father, a social democratic politician, was arrested for involvement in the 20 July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, and only just escaped with his life. As a 15 year-old, Dahrendorf himself got involved in a schoolboys\' anti-Nazi resistance movement and was taken away by the Gestapo. (The bookish conspirators wrote secret messages to each other in Latin, believing the secret police thugs would not be up to reading them, but the Gestapo found a simple solution: they arrested the Latin teacher.)
He later recalled how 10 days of solitary confinement awoke in him that "almost claustrophobic yearning for freedom, that gut resistance to being closed in, whether by the personal power of individuals or by the anonymous power of organisations", which would be the foundation of his lifelong passion for freedom. In a German language memoir that should be published in English, he gives an unforgettable account of a Gestapo prison camp seen through the eyes of a 15-year-old. The inmates were lined up to see a prisoner being put to death for stealing a half pound of margarine. The man was hanged, Dahrendorf writes, "in a terrible way – that is, without the sidepieces that block the veins in the neck – and we had to watch the long death".
Each of those three exceptionally gifted boys could so easily have been killed, thrown on the pyre of Europe\'s crazed self-destruction, as many of their friends and relatives were. Each went on to live a long, full life, and to create work of enduring value. Each contributed, with brilliance, clarity, courage and humour, to the free Europe we live in today.
Not that the three professors all thought the same about the European Union. Far from it. Geremek was a true enthusiast for the project of European integration. I will never forget Bronek (as friends knew him) turning to me in a corridor of the Polish parliament and saying: "You know, for me Europe is a kind of Platonic essence." He believed in both the ideal and the reality. He ended his life as a member of the European parliament.
Dahrendorf was definitely what in Britain is called a "pro-European", and had been a European commissioner, but in the latter years of his life became quite critical of the way the EU was developing. His Europe was always a Europe of freedom, and he measured the EU by that yardstick.
Kolakowski was frankly sceptical of what he saw as the homogenising tendencies of the EU project. While acknowledging the evident advantages of the Union, he feared for national identity and cultural diversity. In many an evening\'s conversation in Oxford, he used to tease me gently about my Euro-enthusiasm. One might attribute this scepticism to his nearly 40 years of residence in the British Isles, except that I don\'t think Britain ever influenced him in any serious way. But he did believe passionately that central Europe, banished behind the iron curtain, should rejoin the larger family of free Europe, and he worked towards that end, both by his intellectual dismantling of communism and by strategic thinking about how to get out of it.
So when we speak of Europe, it is not the particular Brussels institutions we are talking about here. It is the totality, across still diverse European nations, of a legal, political and economic system, a form of society, an ethos, a commitment, which put individual human dignity and freedom first, last, and in the centre. That is the Europe all three believed in and fought for.
My conclusion is simple, though far from easy to translate into practice. As we can no longer rely on personal memory, or even on the force of personal encounters with this last of the wartime generations, so we need more and better history to be taught in our schools. History for everyone. History brought home with individual human stories. A good teacher might start with these three: of Bronek, of Leszek, of Ralf.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ar-europe-education-history-eu
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