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Over at the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash has written a eulogy on the passing this year of Ralf Dahrendorf, Leszek Kolakowski, Bronislaw Geremek, three European thinkers whose political engagement in the critical years of 1956’s Hungarian uprising, the 1968 Prague Spring and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, helped make European history. “With them,” he writes, “passes the last cohort of Europeans who were formed by the horrors of the second world war”.
BothKolakowski and Geremek grew up in wartime Poland, the latter “witnessing life and death in the Warsaw ghetto.” While Germany’s Ralf Dahrendorf, as a 15 year-old, was involved in a schoolboys' anti-Nazi resistance movement. Drawing from such experience each of them, argues Garton-Ash, contributed to the free Europe we live in today. Since “we children of luckier times” must sustain Europe without the “elemental drive that comes from personal experience,” we need, he concludes, “more and better history”. “History brought home with individual human stories.”
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