is historian, publicist and editor-in-chief of the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. During the eighties of the last century he was advisor to the trade union Solidarnosc. He has published widely in for instance Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, New York Review of Books, The Washington Post and he has written a number of books such as L’Eglise et la Gauche, Le dialogue polonais (1977), Letters from Prison (1985), La deuxième Révolution (1990) and Letters from Freedom (1998). Was awarded with the Erasmus prize 2001.
For Adam Michnik, resistance to communism took many forms: reproaching another for their lack of heroism is impossible. Talking to Andrei Plesu in Bucharest in February 2011, he called for an end to the logic of accusation and warned against instrumentalizing the quarrel with communism.
As the fortieth anniversary of 1968 draws to a close, the focus of interest shifts to next year’s anniversaries commemorating twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. On 30 May, a debate was held at the Academy of Arts in Berlin entitled “Crossing 68/89”. The participants, leading protagonists of 1968 and 1989 in eastern and western Europe, were asked to discuss the Prague Spring and the student protest movement in the West in a European perspective – with particular reference to the cataclysmic year of 1989. First published in German in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Eurozine translates the debate into English.
For us, Europeans behind the Iron Curtain, the idea of Europe was simply a rejection of the Communist project, writes Adam Michnik: freedom instead of servitude, open borders and legality instead of the Berlin Wall and preventive censorship. This vision obviously contained an idealisation of both the practice of the European Union and of its theoretical foundations.
