The Trouble with History: Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution
2015; The MIT Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/jcws_r_00556
ISSN1531-3298
Autores Tópico(s)Polish Historical and Cultural Studies
ResumoBeing asked to review a book by Adam Michnik is a tall order—to say the least. Michnik is one of the founders of the Third Polish Republic, which emerged from Poland's negotiated 1989 exit from Communism. Before 1989, he was a renowned figure in the Central and East European dissident community. In the post-Communist era he has been one of the most influential voices in Polish public life, especially in the pages of Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral Newspaper), the daily newspaper he has edited for more than 25 years.Through prolific advocacy and wide-ranging activism, Michnik has remained remarkably consistent in his insistence on the interconnectivity of dialogue, pluralism, and civic freedoms. More than almost any other Soviet-bloc dissident—with the possible exception of Václav Havel—Michnik has long stood out for his ability to put pen to paper and channel his own struggle into thought-provoking meditations on social and political ethics. His first publication—Kościół, lewica, dialog (1977), published in English translation in 1993 as The Church and the Left, a history of the pre-Solidarity rapprochement between Poland's secular left and its “open-minded” Catholic intellectuals—was conceived from the outset as a book-length work. He subsequently published many other books in English, French, and Polish as collections of essays, some dating back to his years as a political prisoner in Communist-era Poland. Prior to 1989, his essays originally appeared in émigré or underground presses. Since 1989, his default forum has been Gazeta Wyborcza.Such is likewise the genesis of The Trouble with History, a new collection of English-language translations of essays written over the past decade. At first glance, one wonders how well the five essays—organized into two parts—will fit together. The first part deals with political ethics in post-1945 Central and Eastern Europe, and the second focuses on the French Revolution and its long shadow. The book's first chapter explores the ethical complexities of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's career as a Cold War statesman, and the second looks at the pitfalls of political de-Communization and lustration in post-Communist Poland (particularly under Jarosław Kaczyński's Law and Justice Party government). The final three essays, inspired principally by the writings of the nineteenth-century French novelist Stendhal, concern the bitter fruits of revolution and restoration in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France.Taken as a whole, however, the collection is fully coherent. A single overarching lesson in political ethics and morality emerges from a mosaic of much smaller lessons. In book form, these essays represent a clarion call for non-monocausal, non-ideological, dialogue-driven—Michnik uses the term “polyphonic”—approaches to learning from the past. Acknowledging that narratives of collective accomplishments and failures play a central role in constructing a given community's contemporary political identity and mores, Michnik calls for, among other things, “a conversation with the Other, the one who thinks differently, who is differently situated, and who has been differently shaped by his or her social position” (p. 49).Ideals of “freedom” and “truth” have long served to anchor Michnik's writings. Abstract and elastic as these concepts might seem, Michnik fleshes them out in the most concrete possible terms in the book's eponymous chapter, “The Trouble with History.” The definition of freedom that Michnik provides is eminently practical: “the capacity for autonomous evaluation of the past, the confrontation of various points of view, and various interpretations of the sources” (p. 48).Too rarely do historians reflect on their craft—not only on its epistemology and ethics, but also on the power that historical narratives hold over current political and social imaginaries. For Michnik, political opposition to Communism was anchored in the power and possibility of narratives: “the democratic opposition confronted the monologue of the communists’ version of history with a polyphonic voice” (p. 47). As the one-time dissidents who worked for decades toward Communism's dismantling enter old age and pass out of public life, it is all the more important to have such a coherent set of reflections on the liminal space separating narratives of heroism from narratives of betrayal. For post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe, Michnik argues, the burden of negotiating the ethical straits of this transition rests with the current generation of historians: “This is why, as it turns out, the role and responsibility of historians acquires new meaning” (p. 46).Readers unfamiliar with Michnik's oeuvre should begin with the immensely helpful editor's note, which clarifies the links between the writings on France and those focused on Central and Eastern Europe. This note opens the door to understanding, for example, the role of the French Revolution in Michnik's book as that of a cautionary tale. He declares, “All of the French nineteenth century was a history of the grudge born of the bitterness of the Restoration, the era of the great disappointment, when grand ideas faded and turned into platitudes” (p. 169). This is precisely what Michnik does not want to see happen in Central and Eastern Europe.For scholars of the Cold War, The Trouble with History should serve first and foremost as fodder for ethical self-reflection on how and why we practice our craft. Although Michnik's judgments tend toward severity, the book's first chapter serves as a case study in the complexity of pronouncing judgment on any historical figure. Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor best known in Poland for his 1970 act of genuflection before the monument to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was the architect of Cold War Ostpolitik and one of the statesmen responsible for inaugurating détente.And yet, as Michnik points out, the same kind of stance that earned Brandt respect and moral authority in both West and East in the 1970s had, by the mid-1980s, made him—at least for Poland's democratic opposition—a problematic figure. When in 1985 Brandt visited Poland and honored the generals who imposed martial law, and then refused to meet with Lech Wałęsa or to acknowledge the social power of the suppressed Solidarity movement, he demonstrated—in Michnik's words—“the moral powerlessness of the powerful” (p. 22). In the 1970s, Brandt opened the door for international dialogue and human-rights protections, but this legacy proved wholly inadequate a decade later when confronted by new moral dilemmas.Just as the French Revolution began by declaring liberty, equality, and fraternity and then ended in terror and death, Brandt's example indicates the necessity for Cold War historians to see both sides of any figure or event they analyze. This, indeed, is the great service done by Michnik's new book.
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