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As Mark Noll observed in the last issue of BOOKS &CULTURE, we have "not yet caught up to the Christian significance of what went on and has been going on in Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, the former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and the former Yugoslavia" in the years leading up to the breakup of the Soviet Bloc and the often disheartening aftermath. Noll's assessment indeed reveals a careful historian's habit of understatement. It would not be tabloidish to go further and say that in the places where such matters are discussed, the role of the church in these great events has been systematically ignored and distorted.
No single event was more influential in the transformation of East-Central Europe than the flourishing of the Polish labor movement, Solidarity. Adam Michnik was at the heart of that struggle, for which he was imprisoned by Poland's military regime. While his work is hardly unknown in the West, scholars routinely downplay Michnik's Christianity, which is in fact fundamental to his outlook.
In Letters from Prison and Other Essays (1986) and The Church and the Left (1992), Michnik's distinctive political vision is laid out. Because the telling is dense with particulars, many Americans have not bothered to digest it. That is a great loss. Now more than ever, American political discourse needs reinvigoration, and the publication of Michnik's new collection, Letters from Freedom, couldn't be more timely.
Michnik, it is important to add, is not your standard-order political theorist. At a conference last year, he ruffled the mostly impeccably liberal, Buddhist, agnostic academic audience by referring repeatedly to the Communists as a "gang" and by frequently invoking the Holy Trinity. Nor is he a saintly man; his comments about women are not only "pre-feminist" but also "pre-Christian." Nonetheless, his is a voice very much worth our attention.
What follows is an excerpt from just one piece in a rich collection of essays and conversations. Michnik's interlocutor here is the journalist and provocateur Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who is currently a member of the European Parliament, representing the Green Party. Born in France in 1945 to Jewish parents who had fled Hitler's terror in the early 1930s, Cohn-Bendit grew up in France and Germany. His active participation in the French student uprisings of the sixties led to his expulsion from France; today he resides in Germany.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit: Adam, when you talk about yourself, you always remind us that you are a Pole. I find that strange because it would never occur to me to attach such great importance to my nationality.
Adam Michnik: If you lived in a Germany where reading Thomas Mann, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Hegel, and Kant was forbidden, you would feel German to an extent that you can't even imagine. I identify with the Polish people just as I identify with all that is weak, oppressed, and humiliated. If Poland were a superpower, I would probably be cosmopolitan or a gypsy. But Poland is oppressed and humiliated, and the Polish people live in misery; which is why I am in solidarity with these people and this language. For better, for worse. And the fact that some people in Poland consider me Jewish rather than Polish further strengthens my national conviction.
Can you tell me how you managed to politicize yourself in the Poland you've just described?
My biography is not a typical Polish biography.
That doesn't matter.
I come from a Jewish family that Polonized itself through communism, a sort of Red assimilation. So I had a particular sense of nationality, one that had little relation to present-day national symbols. For example, in Polish families, young boys generally go to church; as for me, I was brought up outside any religious tradition. There is usually a family tradition, based on either the Polish wars of independence or on the Home Army (AK), but none of that existed in our family. My father was a known, active member of the Communist party. He spent eight years in jail, and after the war he did not want to play any political role. His entire intellectual formation rested in Marxism and communism. Even when defending extreme anti-Communist or anti-Soviet positions, his language was the Marxist language he had learned from the party.
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