Geremek – dissident, democrat, author of history

Bronislaw Geremek

“Today’s world would be worse than it is without [Bronislaw] Geremek’s contribution to its history,” world-renowned philosopher Leszek Kolakowski asserts. The process that ended communist rule in Poland “was also the process that started the chain of events which in subsequent years led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and finally the collapse of communism in Central Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union,” he observes. “We have no idea how this process would have been possible without the Polish example, how many years and how much bloodshed it would have caused.”

Kolakowski’s tribute was one of many written and verbal testimonies delivered at a memorial meeting for Geremek held at the National Endowment for Democracy today. An earlier European memorial event heard tributes from his former colleague Adam Michnik, amongst others. The Polish dissident historian’s “responsible moral engagement”, his friendship and solidarity “shaped our identity and connected us to history in ways that exceeded the dreams of our founders,” said Carl Gershman, the NED’s president.

Nadia Diuk, NED’s Senior Director, for Europe and Eurasia described the substantial funding provided for the underground opposition’s cultural and educational activities. Geremek was central to what Senator Richard Lugar called the “auspicious alliance” between workers and intellectuals, typified by the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), that was a rebuke to the communist claim on workers’ political allegiance, countered the deliberate “atomisation of society”, and led to Solidarity’s formation, the catalyst for communism’s ultimate collapse.

The US labor movement was a particularly vital and vocal supporter of Solidarity, Gershman and Diuk stressed, with AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland their leading advocate. Geremek was overwhelmed when Solidarity leaders received a tumultuous 15 minutes’ standing ovation at the AFL-CIO convention, declaring he “had no idea we had such support.”  

Geremek’s legacy transcends national borders, said Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs and Democracy Paula Dobriansky, who recalled strategizing with Geremek and Solidarity leaders alongside then deputy secretary of state John Whitehead. Few could have appreciated how those sessions for planning solidarity for Solidarity would have such momentous consequences.

But Geremek did. Librarian of Congress James Billington recalled how, during a long walk in Rome in the late ‘70s, the medieval historian turned political prognosticator, predicting communism’s demise and explained “what would happen exactly as it did happen.”

The moment that Geremek, a “profoundly humane human being,” signed the NATO accession treaty as foreign minister of a free Poland, signaling an end to the country’s historical insecurity and vulnerability, was both a profound historical and personal moment for him, said former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.  

Geremek was a Pole in Europe and a European in Poland, said Brzezinski, a sentiment echoed by his close colleague Adam Michnik. Geremek “wanted a democratic Poland united in solidarity with a democratic and strong Europe. Now that he is gone, we see how much he accomplished for such a Poland and such a Europe,” Michnik wrote. “He belonged to the tribe of great Kosmo-Poles, such as Chopin and Paderewski, Adam Czartoryski and Czeslaw Milosz, and-toutes proportions gardées-John Paul II. When times were hard, or virtually hopeless, as they were under martial law in the 1980s, Bronek repeated after Conrad, ‘One must.’”

NATO accession was a high point in the short-lived political ascendancy of the dissident generation described by Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl. Geremek was a “quintessential representative of a unique European fraternity” of dissident intellectuals, forced into menial jobs and isolation under communism, yet proceeding to build an alternative samizdat politics and underground culture that led to the 1989 revolutions. Yet this generation was too readily and tragically marginalized by the professional politicians of the new democracies they had nurtured, partly because theirs was a politics “based not on nationalism or populism but on morality.”  

Max Kampelman recalled how he described Geremek’s arrest as a “grave moment” at the CSCE Helsinki conference in Madrid in February 1982. He had been arrested as a “political gangster” shortly being attacked in a Moscow radio broadcast as a “Jewish Zionist”.

Both of his parents were murdered in Auschwitz and Geremek escaped the Warsaw Ghetto. Yet he was one of those “who not only somehow managed to survive the Shoah, but also managed, perhaps against all the odds, to find faith in humankind after the darkness that descended,” said David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “Geremek, early in life, became a witness to history, then, literally, its prisoner-first under the Nazis, later the Communists,” Harris noted. “He lived, remarkably, to become an author of history,” and a celebrated author about history.

Geremek was “one of the great heroes of democracy in the twentieth century,” wrote Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State and chair of the National Democratic Institute. At the Warsaw conference that founded the Community of Democracies, Geremek highlighted both the value and the fragility of freedom.  “The emergence of democracy as a universally accepted form of government is the most important development of our century,” he said.  “But another lesson of the century is it that democracy is by no means a process that goes from triumph to triumph.”

Johns Hopkins University professor Charles Gati recalled the tale of two citizens asked to sign a petition against a totalitarian regime. “I must, I have a child,” says one. ‘I can’t, I have a child,” says the other. Geremek was no moral absolutist and would sympathize with both positions, he said.

A former communist – he left the party in 1968 in protest at the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring – his commitment to justice, equality and human dignity eventually led him to  “a definite and unequivocal condemnation of the communist utopia and its totalitarian practices,’ write Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister.                              

For his fellow dissident and former Czech foreign minister Alexandr Vondra, Geremek’s legacy is more important than his laudable personal qualities, “particularly now that some politicians, especially in Western Europe, bury their heads in the sand to avoid tough challenges of the future, and resort to empty talk and more or less blatant anti-Americanism.”

Polish Ambassador Robert Kupiecki recalled the historian Geremek telling him that the reputation of a tradesman used to be measured not by the wealth he left behind on his death, but by his debts. These were the measure of his integrity and the number of his friends. Geremek’s liabilities must be considerable.