The Trouble With History: Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution - Rilegato

Michnik, Adam

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0300185979 ISBN 13: 9780300185973

Casa editrice: Yale Univ Pr, 2014

Riassunto

<div><b>A brilliant meditation on politics, morality, and history from one of the most courageous and controversial authors of our age</b><br><br> Renowned Eastern European author Adam Michnik was jailed for more than six years by the communist regime in Poland for his dissident activities. He was an outspoken voice for democracy in the world divided by the Iron Curtain and has remained so to the present day. In this thoughtful and provocative work, the man the <i>Financial Times</i> named &#8220;one of the 20 most influential journalists in the world&#8221; strips fundamentalism of its religious component and examines it purely as a secular political phenomenon.<br> &#160;<br> Comparing modern-day Poland with postrevolutionary France, Michnik offers a stinging critique of the ideological &#8220;virus of fundamentalism&#8221; often shared by emerging democracies: the belief that, by using techniques of intimidating public opinion, a state governed by &#8220;sinless individuals&#8221; armed with a doctrine of the only correct means of organizing human relations can build a world without sin. Michnik employs deep historical analysis and keen political observation in his insightful five-point philosophical meditation on morality in public life, ingeniously expounding on history, religion, moral thought, and the present political climate in his native country and throughout Europe.</div>

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

<div><b>Adam Michnik</b> is editor-in-chief of the Warsaw daily newspaper <i>Gazeta Wyborcza. </i>He is a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, the Imre Nagy Award, and the Goethe Prize, among many other honors. <b>Irena Grudzinska Gross</b> teaches East European literature at Princeton University.</div>

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THE TROUBLE WITH HISTORY

Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution

By ADAM MICHNIK, Irena Grudzinska Gross, Elzbieta Matynia, Agnieszka Marczyk, Roman Czarny

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Adam Michnik
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-18597-3

Contents

Foreword by James Davison Hunter and John M. Owen IV, vii, 
PART ONE, 
ONE Morality in Politics: Willy Brandt's Two Trips to Poland, 3, 
TWO The Trouble with History, 31, 
PART TWO, 
THREE The Ultras of Moral Revolution, 55, 
FOUR Will You Be a True Scoundrel?, 99, 
FIVE Canaille, Canaille, Canaille!, 145, 
Editor's Note, 175, 
Notes, 177, 
Index, 183, 

CHAPTER 1

Morality in Politics: Willy Brandt's Two Trips to Poland

It was a very difficult journey: in December 1970, Willy Brandt, the chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (commonly known as West Germany), came to Warsaw to sign an agreement recognizing the Polish-German border along the Oder-Neisse line. After signing the document, he laid flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and then went to the Ghetto Heroes Monument. He laid a wreath there as well. He straightened both ends of the wreath and stepped back on the wet granite. For a moment he was motionless. And then he fell to his knees, his head bowed.

Brandt did not prearrange this gesture with anyone on either the Polish or the German side. He always said that he did what people do when words fail. In this way, he honored the memory of millions of those who were murdered. It was commented then that he "knelt to give expression to his remorse, remorse for heinous deeds done in the name of Germany, thereby taking the guilt upon his own shoulders, though he did not in fact bear the guilt himself." This gesture, according to Brandt's biographer Peter Merseburger, showed him as a politician who establishes moral criteria that reach far beyond his country.

Brandt's moral criteria could be shocking for the politicians of the Western world. For us, Central and Eastern European dissidents, they were self-evident. Our political engagement did not arise out of struggle for power but out of struggle for freedom. Politics was for us, as for Brandt—an antifascist and ex-émigré—not a means of realizing the interests of specific social groups, but a struggle to rescue values. It therefore demanded—to use Aristotle's language—"moral courage."

Yet the moral courage of the dissident world changed its form in the world of real politics. This was at times surprising and painful for the dissidents. Real politics forced these uncompromising people to make a series of compromises between what they wanted to do and what they could do, between the voice of conscience and the pragmatic dictate of common sense.

When he came to Warsaw in December 1970, Willy Brandt was guided by political pragmatics. He sought to finalize German reparations for Nazism in the international arena. At the same time, the new Ostpolitik was to bring the Federal Republic out of self-isolation and make Germany a fully independent political actor on the European scene.

The formal recognition of the Oder-Neisse line aroused many critical voices on the German right, especially among the "expellees," former inhabitants of German territories annexed to Poland after the war. It was stubbornly repeated that one cannot relinquish old German lands in the east. One of the newspapers claimed that Brandt threw away the East Germans' right to self-determination and to their fatherland. In his replies Brandt pointed out that the agreement with Poland did not sacrifice anything that had not already been long lost—not by the government of the Federal Republic but by the "criminal National Socialist regime."

The new Ostpolitik was full of traps, but Brandt believed that it was realistic and morally indispensable. He said that words like Auschwitz will long accompany both Polish and German nations and remind them that hell on earth is possible. One should think of the future and recognize morality as a political force.

The photograph of Brandt kneeling before the Ghetto Heroes Monument made its way around the world and changed the image of both Germany and the German chancellor. It was only in Poland that it was never published—except in one Jewish paper which nobody read. At that time in Poland Jews were spoken of badly or not at all. In the eyes of anti-Semitic Polish nationalists he knelt in front of the wrong monument.

A young Polish sociologist, born a decade after Brandt's gesture, recently wrote—certainly without bad intentions—that even though it took place in Poland, Brandt's gesture was clearly addressed not to Poles but to Jews. I can only juxtapose my own memories against this: I took Brandt's gesture as an homage paid to all victims of Nazism, victims from all nations, although the choice of the Ghetto Heroes Monument was obvious—Jews suffered the most. At the same time, it was a slap in the face, very precisely aimed, at the anti-Semites from the communist government. By censoring the photograph of the kneeling Brandt from the papers, they unknowingly signaled that they correctly read the gesture of the chancellor and antifascist. During that time, I thought about Brandt often and with affection.

I thought: here is a man who risked his life in the conspiracy against Hitler. Here is a man who stood up against his own nation when this nation chose Hitler in elections; a man accused by nationalists of national treason because he worked for the anti-Hitler coalition. Today this man is a chancellor and he is extending his hand to Poles and to Poland. (I had a chance to say this to Brandt in person in Hamburg, in the fall of 1989.)

I

In Germany, commentators wrote that "Brandt the moralist" divided the nation. Public opinion polls said 41 percent of respondents believed that his "kneeling" was appropriate while 48 percent thought it was overdone. The older generation evaluated Brandt's gesture negatively, but, as Brandt's biographer points out, for younger Germans the image of the kneeling Brandt etched itself in their memory as a symbol of morality in politics, which they felt was lacking. No polls were conducted in Poland.

Shortly after Brandt's visit, strikes broke out in Gdansk and other coastal cities. For the communist leader of Poland, Wladyslaw Gomulka, his greatest political success—the acceptance of the Oder-Neisse border by the Federal Republic—coincided with his spectacular defeat: the rebellion of the workers swept him off the political scene forever. This does not change the fact that the success of Gomulka and his regime was self-evident. But we—the dissidents against this regime—also had our success. The agreement with the Federal Republic neutralized the most dangerous of the arguments used in the propaganda of "People's Poland": namely, that Poles should obey the government because Germans were waiting in ambush to attack Poland again and take back the western lands.

Memory of Nazi atrocities was vivid and constantly fueled. So this anti-German gun was always loaded. It proved effective in 1966 during the smear campaign organized after the Polish bishops' letter to the German bishops. It was fired once again in August 1968 in order to justify, in the eyes of many, the intervention of Warsaw Pact armies in Czechoslovakia as a way of preempting German encroachment there. In December 1970, this gun was useless—the shipyard workers from Gdansk and Szczecin were not accused of acting on behalf of West German revanchists.

Brandt was joined by a group of eminent German intellectuals, including Günter Grass. Grass, in turn, in his interviews for the Polish press, respectfully mentioned Polish writers, like Leszek Kolakowski and Slawomir Mrozek, who were censured after 1968. He also fondly recalled émigré writers. For me, this was a signal that Brandt's Ostpolitik was directed not only against the ruling communists, but also toward the society that was standing up to the dictatorship.

II

Günter Grass and Brandt were friends. In 1969, during the electoral campaign leading up to the success of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Brandt's term as chancellor, Grass was afraid that, if Brandt were to win, he would become an object of hate. Years later, Grass reconstructed a monologue of a hateful reporter, a monologue about the kneeling chancellor:

"It looks like the same old routine ... but no, he's got something up his sleeve: down he goes, down on the wet granite, with no support from his hands, no, he clasps his hands in front of his balls and puts a holier-than-the Pope look on his face, holds out for a good minute or so till the shutters stop clicking, then picks himself up, but not the easy way, first one foot, then the other, no, in one go—he must've practiced it for days in front of the mirror—and then he stands there as if he'd just seen the Holy Ghost, as if to show the Poles, no, the whole world—how photogenic eating humble pie can be."

The hateful reporter cannot stand that "a man who fought in a Norwegian uniform against us, against Germans, has come here with his retinue ... to hand our Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia to the Poles on a platter, and then does his knee-bend number for them to boot.... He makes my blood boil.... When I saw him kneeling there in the rain ... It was revolting.... I hate the guy's guts."

On various occasions, Brandt was accused of being a British, American, or Soviet agent, a crypto-communist, a crypto-Trotskyite, a cold-war revanchist, and a capitulator before the Soviet Union, as well as an alcoholic born out of wedlock. Insinuations, slander, hatred, and intrigue—all this accompanied him throughout his life.

Brandt, a young socialist, was deeply affected by the defeat of German social democracy in 1933. He belonged to the generation of the lost, homeless Left, which saw fascism as a product of capitalist economy, and believed that only a socialist revolution would be an effective prescription against it. This way of thinking was accompanied by the conviction that socialists and communists should form a united front against fascism. Yet communism, through its practice—the Moscow trials and the exploits of the Soviet security services during the Spanish Civil War—made this hope a hopeless pipe dream. Then he witnessed the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. He saw it as treason of the workers' movement, and he saw the USSR—a country where capitalism had been eliminated—as a state ruled by terror, oppression, and tyranny.

Later—despite his own hesitation—he confirmed this conviction when he observed the Sovietization of East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), the blockade of West Berlin, the uprising of Berlin workers (1953), the Hungarian uprising (1956), and the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961).

III

Konrad Adenauer, the leader of the Christian Democrats and the first chancellor of the Federal Republic, viewed Stalin without illusions. Starting in 1940, Adenauer claimed, Stalin carried out a consistent policy of subordinating successive countries, whether by annexation or by creating satellite states. This was also the meaning of Stalin's policies aimed at Germany—first, he wanted to remove American troops from Germany and Europe, so that he could later gain control over Germany by means of "neutralizing" the united German state.

To prevent this, Adenauer strove to integrate West Germany into the structures of the Western world. He did not believe in making agreements with Stalin regarding German unification because, at that time, such unification could have been possible only under Soviet hegemony. As a consequence of this reasoning, Adenauer denied legitimacy to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), an artificial creation of Soviet politics. This included the refusal to recognize the Polish-German border along the Oder-Neisse line. Adenauer stubbornly repeated that "the country on the other side of the Oder and Neisse rivers belongs to us, to Germany." At that time leaders of the SPD often voiced similar opinions.

Adenauer thought Stalin had a scenario for Germany analogous to the one he observed in the Korean War. The East German government would join the effort to "liberate the people of the Federal Republic," the United States would remain passive in the face of a German civil war, while "the population of the Federal Republic would remain neutral toward the invading army from the Soviet sector—for psychological reasons, since this army would consist of Germans." After Stalin's death, this political logic was subject to only slight modifications.

At the same time, Adenauer's politics led to rebuilding the economy, stabilization of the institutions of parliamentary democracy, and overcoming the post-Nazi trauma. Adenauer repeated that the subject of "German guilt" must be closed; that "one can no longer differentiate between two classes of people in Germany: those politically blameless and those burdened with responsibility." The success of his politics was indisputable—the German economy was experiencing its "miracle," the Federal Republic reached full sovereignty and became a respected member of the Atlantic community.

Adenauer's policies directed at the GDR were also effective: the Federal Republic was winning the rivalry between the two systems, and East Germans were leaving the "state of workers and peasants" en masse to live in the world of "rotting capitalism." As head of the communist government, Walter Ulbricht alarmed Moscow by warning that if the policy of open borders was not changed, East Germany's collapse was inevitable.

In response to this, the Soviets constructed the Berlin Wall. This was an obvious defeat of Soviet socialism on German soil. What is significant, however, is that it was also a defeat for Adenauer's politics, of the complete boycott of all Soviet bloc states except the USSR. The Americans (and other Western nations) limited themselves to verbal declarations. In the clash with aggressive Soviet power, no one wanted to die for Berlin.

Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, had to draw his conclusions from this. He observed the helplessness of German politics, imprisoned in the dogmas of anti-communist "indomitability." He understood that no war would return Germany to its prewar borders, that the West would not support any anti-Soviet revolutions, just as it did nothing for Berlin workers in 1953 or the rebelling Hungarians in 1956. This gave birth to his new Ostpolitik—if the "iron curtain" could not be knocked down, it had to be made permeable. Such was Brandt's political idea.

IV

Ostpolitik was to be an art of realizing concrete goals, such as, for example, the rights of the inhabitants of both sides of Berlin to contact one another; but it was also to open possibilities for more distant goals, which looked to the future to discern the outlines of utopia. Brandt wanted to open the way to a German-German dialogue, to a rapprochement, even to some form of German unity.

Already in 1963 he clearly formulated the meaning of Ostpolitik. The German problem, for him, could be solved only with the Soviet Union and not against it. This required time, but it would not seem so long if the lives of Germans on the other side of the Wall, and communication with them, could be made easier. And Ostpolitik had its successes. Agreements with East Berlin indeed made contacts between members of separated families and visits in both parts of Germany easier; they also enabled the Federal Republic to ransom political prisoners. The price of this was the gradual legitimization of the communist dictatorship in East Germany. And arguments about the limits of this legitimization were emerging.

It seems that the effects of Ostpolitik were ambiguous. Brandt was certainly able to maintain Germany's Adenauerian European and Atlantic orientation, while also enriching it with new and original policy toward the East. West Germany became a "normal" European state, breaking out of its self-isolation. But—at what price?

V

Brandt's Ostpolitik converged with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's policy of détente. Still, American leaders did not fully trust Brandt; they suspected that his flirtation with Leonid Brezhnev could mean that the cost of unification would be the Finlandization and neutralization of Germany.

Was there reason for such concerns? Brandt's biographer has described the chancellor's informal meeting with Brezhnev in Crimea in September 1971, when—in the course of sixteen hours of intensive talks—they developed trust and personal liking. Brandt's biographer wrote that there was "chemistry" between them, that they both loved wine, women, and carousing, that both told jokes and laughed readily.

This nice image of Brandt and Brezhnev's friendship was to obscure reality. People were suffering in Soviet gulags and dying from bullets when they tried to cross from East to West Berlin. This provoked sharp criticism of Brandt and his politics. Rainer Barzel, a leader of the Christian Democrats, announced, for example, that he would not have signed the agreement with the GDR unless the East Germans immediately agreed to stop shooting at escapees. Brandt nonetheless saw the continuation of the politics of rapprochement—described as "the maintenance of peace"—as an overriding goal.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE TROUBLE WITH HISTORY by ADAM MICHNIK, Irena Grudzinska Gross, Elzbieta Matynia, Agnieszka Marczyk, Roman Czarny. Copyright © 2014 Adam Michnik. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Yale Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0300185979
• ISBN 13: 9780300185973
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 194
• Redattore: Gross Irena Grudzinska
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile