Speaking from the Heart of Europe
KAUFMAN, MICHAELT.
Writers & Writing SPEAKING FROM THE HEART OF EUROPE BY MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN As I was reading Timothy Garton Ash's The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (Random House, 335...
...Mikhail S. Gorbachev's formula of glasnost for perestroika was developed by Poles seeking to establish a civil society, and they have done the most with it...
...A reunified Germany...
...Each, in a sense, is reaching out for what the other enjoys: West Germans, for an authentic national community...
...He was among the first to feel the tremors...
...In the process he has kept faith with those who have developed and lived these ideas despite the risks involved...
...But Ash, a fellow at St...
...Ash notes that while in Hungary and Czechoslovakia the reconstruction of a somewhat fanciful Mitteleuropa dominates Utopian yearnings, few in Poland talk of Central Europe...
...The tectonic plates along the continental divide are grinding in accelerated movements after lying fairly dormant for half a century...
...Poles for authentic democratic participation...
...And if that is so, the political fate of the planet...
...Nevertheless, that is what has happened...
...The author truly knows the countries he writes about...
...In this book, he speculates wisely on the shape of things to come...
...As a Baedeker for those seeking to explore the new Europe of the imagination, a region now congealing out of wispy dreams and human yearnings, Timothy Garton Ash's book is stimulating and probably indispensable...
...The Poles enjoy a deep and confident national identity but are struggling for freedom...
...As Ash guides us through a region being formed by ideas, we see its various shadings and its textures...
...They know and they remind us—vividly, urgently—that ideas matter, words matter, have consequences, are not to be used lightly...
...The blow prompted many Western commentators to place the 1980 Gdansk strikes and the elation that followed in the context of other glorious failures, notably the Budapest uprising of '56 or the Prague Spring of'68, but Ash kept on testifying to the permanence and force of ideas...
...A Europe that extends from the Atlantic to Warsaw...
...is the continuation of a slow, messy, piecemeal process of differentiation in which the peoples of Eastern Europe will gradually, in quite diverse and convoluted ways, come in practice to enjoy more and larger areas of de facto pluralism and independence—cultural, social, economic— areas partly conceded in a planned and deliberate way by their rulers, but mainly wrested from them by pressure from below: not the progress of a 'reformed' and thus revitalized communism, but the regress of a decaying would-be totalitarianism...
...And he charts the courses, the dangers and the goals that he ahead...
...An end to Yalta perhaps...
...Then I thought of the many analysts who would have us believe everything important is determined by the two superpowers...
...The Ottomanization rather than the Finlandization of the Soviet empire.' Throughout Ash makes us aware of paradox and complexity...
...forms the framework of a thoughtful and elegant contemplation of where the heart of Europe seems tobe headed and what pitfalls lie ahead...
...The U.S., meanwhile, has been essentially inert or reactive...
...Writing about dissidents like the Polish essayist Adam Michnik, the much-imprisoned Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, the Hungarian scholar Jânos Kis, plus dozens of lesserknown men and women he has met, Ash unabashedly sings their praises: "At their best, they give a personal example such as you will not find in many a long year in London, Washington or Paris: an example not of brilliance or wit or originality, but of intellectual responsibility, integrity and courage...
...Together with the section on "The German Question" and one toward the end of the book called "Reform or Revolution...
...he has read their literature, debated their intellectuals, visited their churches, farms, bars, salons, and universities...
...Or the prospect of what Ash calls "Ottomanization...
...Casting about for something negative to say about The Uses of Adversity—if only to enhance the credibility of my praise—I considered criticizing its rather limited discussion of superpower actions and options...
...Anyone who doubts this need merely look at Washington's confusion about whether to applaud or deplore recent events east of the Wall...
...Michael ?. Kaufman, deputy foreign editor of the New York Times, served as that paper's bureau chiefin Warsaw from 1984 to 1988, andis theauthor of the recently published Mad Dreams, Saving Graces: Poland—A Nation in Conspiracy...
...Traveling to and fro between West Germany and Poland over the last five years, I have been struck again and again by the contrast between the two countries...
...Certainly the ground of Europe is again trembling...
...He binds and blends the prophecies of good, brave men who are his friends...
...Antony's College, Oxford, is ahistorian and he practices his craft well...
...To Kiev...
...He shows us how that other, orphaned Europe beyond the Wall has come so far so suddenly...
...With authority and ardor, he provides the antecedent detail to today's and tomorrow's headlines...
...In this febrile setting, where both hopes and anxieties abound, Ash's illuminating volume is especially welcome...
...Much earlier than world leaders and diplomats, not to mention the majority of us writing in the West, Ash sensed the beginnings of the present ferment in the rise of Solidarity, the movement he so ably described in his first book, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity...
...Although West German policies are discussed fully, little is said of Washington, and only slightly more of Moscow...
...Neutralization...
...When others buried the East European movements of dissent, he accurately gauged their vitality...
...The Germans enjoy freedom but are struggling for a national identity...
...Instead, they are permeated by the recognition that there are moral absolutes at issue here, and that the righteous struggle for a new Europe of free men and states precludes any compromise with evil...
...In presenting another example of diversity, rather than what is all too frequently seen as some monolithic anti-Communist reflexive shudder, Ash examines the writings of Michnik, Gyorgy Konrâd and Havel as they relate to a Europe beyond Yalta...
...His record over the last lOyears lends strength to his observations...
...As for his own prediction, he writes boldly: "What is definitely probable...
...At a time when some have proclaimed history finished or dying, and others, under the impact of shriveling Marxism, show little enthusiasm for contemplating what may be ahead, he moves with confidence from country to country tracing and contrasting emerging visions of both ideal and possible futures, offering references and insights drawn from the pasts of the nations being discussed...
...In Poland TrybunaLudu, the old Party organ, was billing itself as the "leading opposition paper," while Gazeta Wyborcza, the successor to Solidarity's underground broadsheets, had now become virtually the government daily...
...The simultaneous thrusts toward political and economic integration and growing cultural differentiation are portrayed through hard-edged reporting...
...In Hungary the Communist Party was voting to transform itself into something less doctrinaire, something more Western, something that would not be a liability in anticipated free elections...
...The Uses of A dversity picks up where that work left off, sometime after Solidarity was crushed by martial law in 1981...
...Taken as a whole, the effect of his book is similar to studying an Escher print where the stairs defy the laws of order and geometry...
...So, on reflection it occurs to me that playing down the superpowers in the story is probably not a flaw at all, but yet another virtue...
...Both brought together Christians and Socialists on the same platform, both driven by the energy and idealism of the younger generation—but what a world between them...
...policy planning...
...One of its greatest strengths is that the essays are not written within the dispassionate and disinterested conventions of journalism or relativistic history...
...that views the changes in Eastern Europe as bothreformist and revolutionary, this section, entitled, "Does Central Europe Exist...
...Writers & Writing SPEAKING FROM THE HEART OF EUROPE BY MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN As I was reading Timothy Garton Ash's The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (Random House, 335 pp., $19.95), thousands upon thousands of East Germans were marking the 40th anniversary of Communist rule by marching and chanting for reform...
...I even wondered whether the subtitle, Essays on the Fate of Central Europe, was misleadingly modest...
...Finlandization...
...Indeed, it is the most comprehensive explication extant of how brave, occasionally incomplete, often contradictory ideas that germinated in Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw have been inspiring deeds that threaten old orders and old alignments...
...Although a compilation of pieces previously published in the New York Review of Books, the British Spectator and elsewhere over the last decade, it has an integral unity...
...Are we not really talking about the fate of all Europe...
...Inhisessay, "The German Question"—which seems, if anything, more relevant now than when he wrote it in 1985—he trenchantly sets the conflicting perspectives of change as seen from Warsaw and Bonn...
...Yet, Ash continues, "Though still vague and halfarticulated, the notions of antipolitics and Central Europe" are critical to our understanding of what is happening in Eastern Europe...
...Demilitarization...
...For the Poles the Soviet Union is a reality that cannot be banished even in their dreams...
...Day by day, only recently unthinkable and unutterable concepts are percolating into common usage...
...A common European home...
...This book," he declares at the conclusion of his preface, "is dedicated to them...
...To Moscow...
...They never imply that truth lies midway between adversarial poles, nor do they shun passion as bias...
...In both countries, large popular movements arose at the same time —Solidarity and the peace movement...
...It can't be, some of them have argued, that the Polish tail is wagging the Russian dog, or that West German Ostpolitik has superseded U.S...
Vol. 72 • October 1989 • No. 15
