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Adam Michnik Adam Michnik Quiz! Course management notes 1. Today’s quiz is our LAST for the course. 2. We have big three assignments left for the course (in addition to the film-viewing and reading for our remaining classes). These are: 3. Your Poland question! It is due by the end of class on Thursday, 4/26. 4. Our Poland exam, which will take place in class on Thursday, 5/3 (the last day of classes for the semester). 5. Your Poland essay/project! Please see Assignments in Canvas for a description of the essay, a pdf on possible sources for it (we’ll emphasize a more traditional essay that uses secondary sources to analyze something about Poland in more depth than we’ve done in class), and the grading rubric. 6. Czechoslovakia essays are still being graded. Sorry, I haven’t had enough time! Please read the feedback that we’ve post. If you’d like to discuss your essay/grade with me, please email me. 7. A final note is that course evaluations will soon be active and you’ll receive an email about that. They are online. Please complete them! Note on the Poland module - It’s drive primarily by guest speakers, which means that some years, depending on the speakers, it’s not very coherent (we get pieces of the general puzzle but have a hard time seeing the big picture). 1 - This year, however, it has been very coherent: we’re looking at individual pieces of a large puzzle that we have a very clear picture of. Hurray! - Some threads that our speakers have looked at from different/complementary perspectives include: Solidarity, national memory/mythology, the Catholic Church, differences with Czechoslovakia, dissent in Poland beyond 1989 (ie, in the contemporary context). - It also seems to me that we’re getting a new and better idea of how the relationship between dissent and identity plays out (and Poland is a great case study for this, given the cultural homogeneity and the fact that we’re dealing with a mass movement), but I won’t say more about this in case someone wants to write a reflective essay about it. What do we already know about Adam Michnik? Who was/is he? We’ve certainly learned something about Michnik but let’s look at his backstory and analyze some of his writing that we’ve read in preparation for today’s class. Adam Michnik: A brief biography • Born in Warsaw in 1946. - He was of Jewish origin, but his family was not practicing. - His parents were pre-war communist militants and Adam in his youth was a zealous Marxist. - He and his parents become disillusioned with Marxism early on. • Arrested for the first time at age 18. 2 - He was involved in the writing and disseminating of an open letter to the Party that was critical of the regime; he was detained in prison for two months. • 1964: student of history at Warsaw University. - He was suspended for dissident activities in 1966. - Michnik is the Polish Havel, but one difference is that Michnik is a trained historian, although, as we’ll see, with a rather special interest in history. • 1969: sentenced to three years in prison for belonging to an underground organization. - No such organization actually existed, but he served 18 months in prison and then was released. • 1970-71: worked at a lightbulb factory. - He leaves in 1971 and enrolls as an external student in the history program of Poznan University. • 1975: He receives his Masters degree in history from Poznan. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Pictures • as youth, as young man, post 1989 -------------------------------------------------------------------- 3 • 1976: he co-founded KOR (Workers’ Defense Committee). - KOR is the theme of some of the readings for today and a key development in the Polish dissident movement. • “Church, Left, Dialogue” (“The Church and the Left”) - It was written in 1976 and circulated in samizdat; published in France in 1977. - I’ll come back to it in a moment. • May 1977: arrested again and in prison for two more months. - As many have noted, there was a certain irony to his being imprisoned by the regime since he did most of his writing while in prison: essentially the regime gave him a break from his social activism and he was able to write about it. - It’s one of those mysteries of the time how his writing got out of prison and was made available for other people to read. You’d think a totalitarian regime would prevented this! But of course we’re dealing with a post-totalitarian regime, and things like this were possible. • 1979: visit of Pope John Paul II (Cardinal Karol Wojtyla) to Poland. - Michnik comments on this in his 1979 essay “Lesson in Dignity.” -------------------------------------------------------------------- • Solidarity 1980-81: major intellectual figure. 4 - The basis of Solidarity’s strategy was outlined by Michnik in the 1976 essay that we read titled “New Evolutionism.” - Then 1980 “Time of Hope.” • Other activities: - He helped to found the Flying University in the late 1970s. - He was co-editor of underground newspapers and co-manager of one of the biggest underground publishing houses. - May 1981: Otwock incident. A crowd had surrounded some police officers whom they were accusing of police brutality. Michnik intervenes and calms the crowd and urges them not to hurt the policemen. This story becomes part of Michnik’s legend and aura. • December 1981: Jaruzelski declares martial law. - General Jaruzelski takes Solidarity by surprise and declares martial law, arresting everyone that he can and shutting down what was becoming a giantly popular social force. - Michnik is sentenced (without a trial) to almost 3 years; 6 months after his release, he is arrested again and given another sentence of 3 years. - The essay “Why You Are Not Signing…” is about this post-Solidarity imprisonment. - Incidentally, after 1989, Michnik met with Jaruzelski and interviewed him and became, somewhat paradoxically, his defender: he called Jaruzelski the “Gorbachev of Poland” and condemned attempts to prosecute him for his leadership under martial law. 5 - In our Drakulic fable about Poland – the Polish cat and dog – we learned more about the controversy surrounding Jaruzelski. • Post-1989: editor of Gazeta Wyborcza. - This is a large and influential Polish daily newspaper. - He declines to take part in politics and argues, against Havel, that the role of an intellectual is to be the conscience of society or the “critical conscience of a democracy.” - An essay for the Poland part of the course would be to look in more detail at Michnik’s post-1989 activities and writings and to do a follow-up on him. -------------------------------------------------------------------- More pictures -------------------------------------------------------------------- Some general points • Michnik as a transcendent figure during the culture of dissent: the “phenomenon of the domestication of Michnik’s name.” - There was what has been called a “phenomenon of the domestication of Michnik’s name” – he became popular even to the point of veneration by many Poles, and the Otwock incident greatly contributed to this. - In other words, he became a kind of folk hero, which is highly unusual for an intellectual; the same did not happen to Havel, for example, who was relatively unknown to the larger Czech public until his rise to the presidency in 1989. - People felt a personal connection with Michnik, one that wasn’t political but transcended politics: as one Michnik scholar has written, the popular conviction about 6 him was that “he is a strong, pure, incorruptible, indomitable, superhuman force for resistance.” • Michnik as historian. - He investigates history not for history’s sake but to help us comprehend the present. - History speaks to the present, which is an essential point that we have been trying to make with regard to the culture of dissent. - As Michnik himself has written: “History, I believe, only lets us find in its pages ourselves.” • Michnik’s texts. - It is generally agreed that his writings represent the most valuable guide to the origins of the Polish revolution and to its innovative aspects. - His writings thrive on questioning, comparing and contrasting. - His reasoning, as one critic describes it, is “dramatically constructed” and “makes the reader a participant in a sort of hearing on the Polish past”: so there is an inherent “appeal” component to Michnik’s style, which is something that we saw in the Czechoslovak cultural artifacts as well. - His writings are aimed at dialogue: Michnik wrote that the 20th century was a century of monologue, and that dialogue is an ethical imperative as well as a practical necessity; this is the spirit of his bombshell book “Church Left Dialogue” in 1976 – that laid the strategic foundations for the mass movement that followed. 7 - Central themes of this writings include: compromise and its limits or compromise vs. collaboration; the value of non-violence; the relationship between morality and politics; social activism understood at a pre-political level or as a kind of anti-politics in the sense that we have encountered the term; subjecthood or agentivity of a populace: how can people – even under a totalitarian regime – cease being mere objects of the regime’s manipulation and become active and creative subjects in their society? - These questions are not applicable just to a totalitarian society but have a universal resonance, much as we saw in Havel’s “Power of the Powerless.” -------------------------------------------------------------------- Our five essays - We’ll deal with them in chronological order and only say a few words about each, although you’ll have a chance to discuss them more in section tomorrow. - The question that I’ll be primarily concerned with here is: What does Michnik add to our understanding of dissent? - He and Havel are mirror images of each other, but Michnik approaches the same questions from a different – and complementary – perspective, so he can help us understand more completely what we’ve already discussed.
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