Background

Mr. Garton Ash, welcome to Berkeley.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Tell us a little about your educational background.

Well, as you gather, I'm English, although many of my readers imagine that I must have Central European blood in my veins. I had a traditional English schooling, and was very much influenced, as many people are, by my history teachers at school at Sherborne. I think, actually, that school teachers have much more influence than university teachers: they get people younger. I then read history at Oxford, and it was there that I became particularly interested in Germany.

I always say that Thomas Mann is to blame for my interest in Germany. I studied the history of the Third Reich. I went to Berlin, still divided Berlin, to write a doctorate about Berlin and the Nazis and the question that interested me was: what do people do about a dictatorship? What is it that makes one person a collaborator, another a resister? And what I discovered was that that was quite difficult to find out from the archives, many of which were still closed. But people were living those dilemmas in East Germany at that time, so I started writing about communist East Germany and thence about Eastern Europe. So I came to communist Europe through history and through Germany, not through political science and the Soviet Union, as many people did.

Would it be fair to say that the role that you assumed was a mixture of both journalism and scholarship?

That's right, I became, in effect, a "historian of the present." The phrase is not mine, it's George Kennan's, and in a sense it's a contradiction in terms. Not because we don't know a lot about what's happening in the present -- which is the traditional Rankean assumption -- because actually we know much more, but because we don't know the consequences of events. That's the difficulty of writing the history of the present. It's not the lack of evidence. We have masses of evidence. It's our ignorance of where events lead and therefore what their proper significance is. But I became, to put it another way, a chronicler of the emancipation of Central Europe from communism which, of course, took a dramatic step forward with the birth of Solidarity in Poland in 1980.

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