LETTER FROM EUROPE: Berlin Encounters
Gedmin, Jeffrey
LETTER FRO
Ef"ROPE
JEFFREY GEDMIN Y FRIEND ALICE KELLY, a producer for ZDF German television in Washington, had just told me about spending vacation with Mel and Hexi in London. Mel sat...
...He bought a new walking stick...
...Lasky saw it all...
...We met at a small room at the Literaturhaus, in West Berlin off the Kurfiirstendamm...
...He was in East Germany during the revolt of June 17, 1953...
...For a time, he seemed to be everywhere...
...If I recall correctly, Lasky found a charming way to give them both (and the rest of us) hell in the discussion round...
...Lasky made it his mission to cultivate and recruit them...
...A couple weeks later Mel Lasky returned to Berlin, where he quietly passed away...
...JULY/AUGUST 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59...
...Caldwell began by mentioning that the title overstated his case (I had borrowed it from the headline over an essay of his in the Weekly Standard...
...LETTER FRO
Ef"ROPE JEFFREY GEDMIN Y FRIEND ALICE KELLY, a producer for ZDF German television in Washington, had just told me about spending vacation with Mel and Hexi in London...
...He had first come to Berlin as an army captain at the end of the Second World War...
...He sat next to the Greens' chairman, Rheinhard Biitikofer, at a small discussion convened at the Havana Lounge in the Charlottenstrasse, a block off the famous boulevard, Unter den Linden...
...I remember Lasky being with us not long after I had arrived...
...He speaks in well-formed sentences, and can fascinate a drawing room as well as a crowded meeting hall with the unconscious art of a performer who gets his point across as effectively with a dramatic whisper as with an eloquent peroration...
...I think the last thing Lasky attended of ours was a roundtable with Christopher Caldwell and Jean-Paul Picaper of Le Figaro on "The Decline of France...
...a suggestion for a conference...
...He moved to London for a time to edit Encounter magazine, JEFFREY GEDMIN Europe's leading literary and political opinion magazine, for several decades...
...Our French colleague argued the opposite...
...He regularly accepted invitations to Aspen discussions...
...His friends, co-combatants, and sparring partners included Thomas Mann and T.S...
...magazine, the New Leader...
...The Mel Lasky I got to know walked with a cane, but seemed not to have lost a step...
...He has been called a "founding father of the Federal Republic...
...It is surely hard to imagine the intellectual battles of those years without Mel Lasky...
...He established the monthly magazine, Der Monat, an international intellectual review, and served as its editor for 15 years...
...Lasky, dapperly dressed and sporting a goatee¡ªhe had "a beard like Lenin's," as German radio put it recently¡ªwas in fine form...
...Mel sat in the corner, clipping and marking what seemed to be an endless number of newspapers, chatting away, commenting on the affairs of the world¡ªeach and every one of them...
...He was a combat historian...
...or copies of articles he thought I should read...
...Eliot...
...Mel lunched with a close colleague from the Encounter days...
...Lasky was in the Congo in Leopoldville after the assassination in 1961 of Patrice Lumumba...
...In 1997, a commission of German historians had named the Bronx-born Lasky "one of the most important Berliners...
...He succeeded...
...I got notes from him¡ªa column of mine with a "keep up the good work" scribbled on the top...
...He wrote and edited numerous books, of course...
...He always stoked and provoked and fought for his cause...
...He was in Berlin during the blockade and served as an adviser to General Clay...
...Jeffrey Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin...
...Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, Pasternak, Faulkner, and Irving Kristol...
...He had lived here since the early 1990s with his life-long companion, novelist Helga "Hexi" Hegewisch...
...He was in Budapest for the October 1956 uprising...
...No surprise that Lasky lamented in the last couple years that we appear shy an Indian fighter or two in today's war on terror...
...Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus...
...Lasky played a key role in the Congress for Cultural Freedom...
...This was generally the way Mel participated in Aspen discussions...
...Lasky "won the Cold War," as one German paper put it after his death...
...Sidney Hook praised Lasky in a January 1985 article in these pages as a man of "intellectual and moral courage...
...For four decades he worked tirelessly to unite the intellectual right and the non-communist left to defeat Soviet Communism...
...He was among the first soldiers to enter the Dachau concentration camp...
...I gathered it was nothing new...
...Lasky once said that occupied Berlin was like a Wild West frontier town with Indians on the horizon, but unlike the frontier town Berlin of those days was mightily short on Indian-fighters...
...He treated me kindly...
...I met Lasky for the first time when I arrived here in Berlin two and a half years ago...
...Lasky also interviewed Churchill, Eisenhower, Adenauer, Brandt, Kennedy, Havel...
...After the war, Lasky had stayed in Berlin as a correspondent for the left-leaning but staunchly anti-Stalinist U.S...
...Wrote Hook: Professionally trained as a historian, he seems at home in all the humanitarian and social studies...
...Lasky was 84 years old...
...Joshua Muravchik had joined us to present his book on the rise and fall of the socialist idea...
Vol. 37 • July 2004 • No. 6
