Thirty years ago today I was in college.  I went to college at Georgetown University, a very political school, and my friends and I were pretty gripped by politics and what we called (do the kool kids still use this phrase?) "world affairs," and 1989 was a year of some interest for geopolitics.  

I still remember the night of November 9th.  We had heard rumors all day that all sorts of things were happening, but you know, no one had the news on their phones or anything like that, so what we knew was spotty at best.

I got home at the end of the day.  By that time darkness had come, around 5 PM or so, and I remember watching the news at 6 or 630--was it ABC?  I think it was Peter Jennings I was watching, who said the East German state had said their citizens could travel to West Germany effectively with no restrictions.

I think it was later that night that the first images of people at the wall, people on the wall, came on the screen.  That was an amazing sight.  For me it was existentially palpable. In 1982 my family had travelled to Berlin, both West and East, and gone to Checkpoint Charlie, and seen the wall.  Somewhere in a binder there is a picture of me, twelve years old, with a US Army wall patrol.  The soldiers had weapons, but as I recall an army medic accompanied them; they explained to us that their main job was to be nearby whenever anyone from the East tried to escape over the wall; the expectation was that they would be, at best, heavily injured, and so require immediate medical attention to keep them alive.  Seeing the wall, and what it meant, was pretty foundational for my understanding of the world. Like everyone else, I never imagined that that era would end, or at least that it would end in the way that it did, without a major, apocalyptic, war.

That time seems possibly distant now.  11/9 was followed by a decade of possibility, which we as usual squandered, and then came 9/11.  In a way my life has been defined by that lost decade, a decade when it seemed possible to make not so much a better world as a different one, or at least to put in place some good things to help us face the future a little better than we do nowadays.

It was a decade of futility, perhaps.  But I am grateful for my youth, and for the heroes of my youth, who still seem to me to merit attention and study.  

I suppose the "Eastern European Intellectuals" have always been heroes of mine.  Not just them, of course, but a certain sub-species of human who seem most quintessentially embodied by them.  Others are claimants for that role as well, marginalized intellectuals victimized by their societies or their states who do not become bitter.  The Jewish exiles from Germany and Europe in the 1930s and 40s would be another group; African-American intellectuals in the United States at least from DuBois and Woodson forward, maybe before that too.  

All of these figures, for me anyway, embody a certain mode of hope in the world: deeply educated, unafraid to acknowledge reality, ironically self-knowing, wittily contemptuous of their opponents, and yet the contempt overlaying their recognition that the fight is absolutely not fair, that there is no way they're going to win, that the state they oppose has all the weapons, all the tanks, all the newspapers and radio and television stations, and--let's be honest here--most of their fellow-citizens.  

And they will not forget their fellow-citizens' collaboration with the State, and forgiveness is a complicated thing that could take decades at the quickest; but they recognize that their fellow citizens are still their fellow-citizens, more akin to sheep than wolves, people whose lives are not only essential to their own ongoing existence, but whose lives are also not without kindness, not without love, not without humanity.  They are not fighting people who are essentially other to who they are.  They are just another kind of victims--not to be trusted, perhaps, definitely not to be relied upon, but also not to be retributed against en masse, were the intellectuals and their allies ever to overthrow the system.  Humans aren't heroes, by and large; for them, coming to inhabit this planet reasonably adequately, indeed coming to enter adulthood, means recognizing this fact, that heroes are always the exception, and the exception proves the rule, and the rule applies to all of us, much of the time, and most of us, almost all of the time. 

I think they were sustained in that vision by a certain kind of ironic hope.  It is a hope  I have been chasing ever since then.

Many years later, when I had come to UVA and was teaching here, I had a number of encounters with people I thought of as exemplary heroes and leaders of the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism.  I once walked right past Lech Walesa while he was visiting the University, and reflected on how much money the KGB would have given at one point to get a guy with a gun right in the spot where I was standing.  Another time I spent several days with the poet Adam Zagajewski; he was a quiet but very funny exemplar of the tradition of literature formed under terror and ennui, and I have never forgotten it.

Another time I saw the Polish dissident, intellectual, and journalist Adam Michnik give a talk about civil society in the early 2000s, I think, and he saw some of his friends from Poland in the 1980s there in the audience.  He recognized them, thanked them for being there, and then reminisced.  "I believe the last time we were all together was in a detention building in Warsaw in about 1983," he said (as I recall).  "Who would have thought then that, the next time we would be together, we would be at the University of Thomas Jefferson, giving lectures to Americans about living in a free society."  That was a very moving moment.

Michnik came to UVA again in 2006 to give some lectures, and there I enjoyed a small dinner party with him and some others, and h told us a joke they used to tell during the 1980s.

"What will it take for the Soviet Army to leave Eastern Europe? Well, there are two ways it could happen--one realistic, one miraculous. The realistic way is for St. George the dragon slayer to come down from heaven, on a winged white horse, wielding a flaming sword, and drive the Red Army back across the banks of the Vistula. And the miraculous way? That's if they leave by themselves."

To recognize the miraculous for what it had to be, and to fight for it, clear-eyed, knowing our only salvation lies in the miraculous: that is for me a noble vocation.

Michnik's character was fundamentally shaped by stubbornness, I think.  In a famous piece he wrote once, in March of 1982--a dark, dark time in the Cold War, and in Poland in particular--explaining why he would not sign a statement, forced on him by the secret police, that would be for him a capitulation, he ends the piece by saying the following:

You know how profound the feeling of loneliness can be. You think that you are powerless against the police-army machine that was mobilized on that December night. You still don't know what will happen. You still don't know that people will begin to recover from the shock, that underground papers will appear, that Zbyszek B. will lead his Solidarity region from the underground, that in Wroclaw they will fail to capture Wladek F.; that Gdansk, Swidnik, and Poznan will again shake up all Poland; that illegal union structures will be formed. You still don't know that the generals' vehicle is sinking in sand, its wheels spinning in place, that the avalanche of repression and calumnies is missing its aim.

But you do know, as you stand alone, handcuffed, with your eyes filled with tear gas, in front of policemen who are shaking their guns at you--you can see it clearly in the dark and starless night, thanks to your favorite poet--that the course of the avalanche depends on the stones over which it rolls.

And you want to be the stone that will reverse the course of events.

The poet he's citing here is Czeslaw Milosz, one of my favorites as well.  As a final gift, here's a poem he wrote in 1944, during a previous experience of totalitarian terror. You're welcome.

Give a thought today to those who fought for, and still fight for, the miraculous.  Occasionally, despite themselves, despite the rest of us, they win.