Volume 37, Number 3 · March 1, 1990
Witness
By George F. Kennan
The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe
by Timothy Garton Ash
Random House, 335 pp., $19.95
In the course of the 1980s the small coterie of Anglo-American writers who had been addressing themselves to the movement of life in Eastern Europe in the years since 1948 found itself somewhat abruptly enhanced by the accession to its ranks of a remarkable young English scholar, Mr. Timothy Garton Ash. Issuing, in the late 1970s, from that formidable stronghold of interest and sympathy for all things 'dissident' in the Communist world, St. Antony's College at Oxford, Mr. Garton Ash traveled extensively in eastern Germany, lived for some months as a humble postgraduate scholar in East Berlin, and capped these experiences by writing, in the German language, a book about the German Democratic Republic, which he published in western Germany.[1] This last seems to have deprived him, not surprisingly, of the privilege of access to eastern Germany for some time into the future. It did not, however, put an end to his intense interest in Eastern Europe, generally, and particularly in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. In the first two of those countries, he evidently formed close personal connections; he learned enough of the respective languages to allow him to communicate effectively with those who particularly engaged his interest and attention; and he cultivated to good effect the attendant associations.
Review, 3561 words
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