The Magic Lantern

“The meeting was held in the same hall that the inter-factory strike committee had used in August 1980, with the same model ships in glass cases, the same white eagle on the wall, and the same bust of Lenin. As he walked up on to the platform, Lech Wałęsa—the same—gave that Lenin a laughing glance, as if to say, ‘So who whom to you, old chum.’ Later, each candidate had his photograph taken shaking hands with Lech Wałęsa. Two hundred and sixty-one handshakes.”

This anecdote emphasizes historical continuity and the importance of Solidarity. The labor union first met in 1980, and the building is the same—with the “same model ships in glass cases” and “the same bust of Lenin.” But this outward conformity is belied by the actions of the protagonists. This time, Wałęsa is “laughing” at Lenin, as if to suggest that his time has gone, and he is no longer worthy of deference. It is Wałęsa who becomes the new icon, every candidate seeks out visual proof of their association. The old symbolism has given way to modern political campaigning. Wałęsa is asserting his own individual power, and that of his movement, in contrast to that of Lenin.

“The historian can gather all the witnesses’ accounts and is generally unswayed by that first-hand experience. What happened afterwards changes our view of what went before. The historian usually knows more about what happened afterwards, simply because he writes later. Finally, there is partiality in judgement. ‘I am a camera,’ said Isherwood. I was not a camera. A camera would not give an election speech in a Silesian coal-mine. Certainly, I have made every effort to get at all the facts, to listen to all sides, to be both fair and critical. But the reader will see that my sympathies are generally with those who made these revolutions rather than with those who attempted to prevent them, with the former prisoners of conscience rather than the former gaolers of conscience.”

Garton Ash explains how his work straddles genres—it is intensely personal even as it describes historical events. Historians are active only in gathering sources, remaining, “unswayed” suggesting a lack of flexibility and an implacable distance from the emotions of the time. Garton Ash rejects this role for himself, as he notes that a “camera” or a passive recorder would not have participated directly in the election progress. He asserts that he remains “critical” but openly admits to “sympathies.” For him, the project is personal and ethical. He calls the revolutionaries “prisoners of conscience” in contrast to their “gaolers,” emphasizing that the fight against communism was more than a political struggle.

“‘You see, it’s after Mass,’ was the explanation given me for the length of the queues in almost every case: that and the sheer complexity of the voting procedures. Some voters came directly from their children’s First Communion, trailing little girls in long white dresses. The first communion and the first election. And not only for the children. ‘Yes, sir,’ confided one not-so-young couple, holding hands and simpering, ‘it’s our first time!’”

In this scene, the importance of religion is juxtaposed with the new secular ritual of democracy. The voting lines grow long only after religious obligations, and some bring their children “in long white dresses.” Both are rites of passage, individual and national. The “not-so-young” couple is new, at least, to democracy, and jokingly compare it to courtship and sexual intimacy. All participants in the elections treat the episode as noteworthy for their personal histories, though Garton Ash is also there to emphasize the importance for a region, nation, and the world.

“Instead of some sinister character in dark glasses I found myself confronted by a woman dressed like a cleaning lady, in a cheap floral dress, with a glass of tea and a fag hanging from her lower lip. This was the censor. She took the proof copy of the cartoon, carefully scanned the article to which it related, presumably for subversive content—though also, I felt, to demonstrate that she could read—and then, marking the back of the cartoon, handed it back to me dismissively, and returned to her glass of tea. Bowing, I gratefully took my leave. Even then—not knowing what the next months would bring—I felt that I had been privileged to witness a minor rite of some endangered tribe.”

Garton Ash’s description of the censor emphasizes how much communist ritual and repression depended on ordinary, even harmless individuals. The censor is “dressed like a cleaning lady” as though to emphasize that her work is menial and not valuable. He suggests she is interested in proving her own literacy and returning to her tea-drinking, not in defending any particular ideology. He calls the experience a “minor rite of some endangered tribe,” suggesting that communism is a religion but without strong adherents, one that will soon die out.

“One name is not mentioned in any of the speeches, although it is in everyone’s mind. It is that of János Kádár, and Kádár remembered not as the leader of the West’s favourite ‘liberal’ communist country in the 1970s, but as the traitor who took over from Nagy on the back of Soviet tanks, the man who was directly responsible for the murder of Imre Nagy. Where is he today, that sick old king? Is he watching on television? Does he see Banquo’s ghost lying in state on Heroes’ Square?”

The Hungarian episode of Garton Ash’s narrative underlines the power of historical memory. Nagy’s funeral is important in part because it serves as rebuke to the current government. Garton Ash spares no moral condemnation, dismissing Radar’s popular image in the west as a reformer as a kind of cover for his crimes. He calls him a “traitor” and Nagy death a “murder” for which Kádár bears responsibility. Kádár is a “sick old king,” a monarch whose time has gone, with no popular support, whose name is not even said aloud. While in other parts of the narrative Garton Ash emphasizes economic pain, here, Hungary is in a kind of moral bankruptcy.

“Once upon a time, and a very bad time it was, there was a famous platform in West Berlin where distinguished visitors would be taken to stare at the Wall. American Presidents from Kennedy to Reagan stood on that platform looking out over the no man’s land beyond. They were told that this, the Potsdamer Platz, had once been Berlin’s busiest square, its Piccadilly Circus. Their hosts pointed out a grassy mound on the far side: the remains of Hitler’s bunker. East German border-guards watched impassively or rode up and down the death strip on their army motorbikes. On the morning of Sunday, 12 November I walked through the Wall and across that no man’s land with a crowd of East Berliners, a watchtower to our left, Hitler’s bunker to our right. Bewildered border-guards waved us through.”

Garton Ash begins the East German chapter with the language of a fairy tale to signal to the reader that this is a story of heroes and villains that nevertheless has a happy ending. The Berlin Wall was once a part of history, as the catalog of American presidents who spoke near it indicates. “No man’s land” evokes the trench warfare of the First World War, a perilous territory of vulnerability. The Cold War, too, had its elements of armed conflict and danger. The square is no longer busy, instead it features the reminder of a failed dictatorship and the “death strip” patrolled by guards. This underlines that unauthorized passage across the wall cost individuals their lives.

“They may have been ordinary people doing very ordinary things, but the Berliners immediately grasped the historical dimensions of the event. ‘Of course the real villain was Hitler,’ said one. A note stuck to a remnant of the Wall read: ‘Stalin is dead, Europe lives.’ The man who counted twenty-eight years and ninety-one days told me he had been most moved by an improvised poster saying: ‘Only today is the war really over.’”

The repetition of “ordinary” here stresses that 1989 was remarkable not merely for its impact on geopolitics, but also on everyday life. Even still, the Berliners Garton Ash meets think in broad historical terms. They evoke Hitler, Stalin, and the specter of the Second World War. The wall, then was a symbol of dictatorship, of conflict, death, and tragedy for ordinary people, not just distant observers like Garton Ash. These remarks are not interviews, but spontaneous expressions of hope and a reckoning with the past.

“My contribution to the velvet revolution was a quip. Arriving in Prague on Day Seven (23 November), when the pace of change was already breath-taking, I met Václav Havel in the back-room of his favoured basement pub. I said: ‘In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!’ Grasping my hands, and fixing me with his winning smile, Havel immediately summoned over a video-camera team from the samizdat Videojournál, who just happened to be waiting in the corner. I was politely compelled to repeat my quip to camera, over a glass of beer, and then Havel gave his reaction: ‘It would be fabulous, if it could be so …’ Revolution, he said, is too exhausting.”

Garton Ash makes clear that his observations from Prague are direct and personal, blurring the line between historical account and memoir. He knows Václav Havel, future Czechoslovak president, well enough to socialize in a pub and make a joke. Havel’s smile is “winning” emphasizing the power of his personality and his charm. He has, unsurprisingly, the playwright’s instinct for a good line, and has Garton Ash deliver it, including the use of prop, the glass of beer. Revolution, then, involves staging and performance as well as spontaneity.

“Then it was a green card worn around the neck, with my name typed as ‘Timothy Gordon Ash’, and the smiling cat again. Then it was a xeroxed and initialed paper slip saying, ‘Civic Forum building,’ this time with two smiling cats (one red, one black) and a beaming green frog. I have it in front of me as I write. Beneath the frog it says ‘très bien.’ In any case, the tickets worked wonders. For nearly two weeks I, as an historian, was privileged to watch history being made inside the Magic Lantern. For most of that time, I was the only foreigner to sit in on the hectic deliberations of what most people called simply ‘the Forum.’ But before describing what I saw, we must briefly rehearse the first act.”

The lengthy descriptions of the passes Garton Ash used to enter the theater underline the sense of spontaneity and even whimsy within the Magic Lantern. The pass features cartoon cats and a frog, with the frog declaring “very good” in French—formal entry, then, can still proceed in a humorous spirit. Garton Ash emphasizes his privileged position, as the lone foreigner present, a historian enraptured by the power of the present moment. He draws even more directly on the theater when he notes that the revolution had a “first act.”

“Through the heavy metal-and-glass doors, past the second line of volunteer guards, you plunge down a broad flight of stairs into a curving, 1950s-style, mirror-lined foyer. People dart around importantly, or sit in little groups on benches, eating improvised canapés and discussing the future of the nation. Down another flight of stairs there is the actual theatre. The set—for Dürrenmatt’s Minotaurus—is like a funnel, with a hole at the back of the stage just big enough for a small monster to squeeze through. Here, in place of the Magic Lantern’s special combination of drama, music and pantomime, they hold the daily press conference: the speakers emerging from the hole designed for Dürrenmatt’s monster. Journalists instead of tourists are let in for the performance.”

Garton Ash emphasizes the built environment of the revolution, likely to impart both a sense of wonder and how improvised and unlikely the setting was. The building is old, and the path to the revolution itself is circuitous, a kind of complex maze where only the favored pass, since the participants are also guarded. The mention of canapés evokes a social event, but this time the guests in the salon are discussing the “future of the nation”—the weightiest philosophical topic possible. The theatrical set has been transformed into political theater, adapting the existing decorations to the needs of the moment.

“The true leader of this movement, in Prague at least, is Havel not Dubček. But for the moment none of this matters. For the moment all that matters is that the legendary hero is really standing here, addressing a huge crowd on Wenceslas Square, while the emergency session of the Central Committee has, we are told, been removed to a distant suburb. ‘Dubček to the castle!’ roars the crowd—that is, Dubček for president. The old man must believe he will wake up in a moment and find he is dreaming. For the man who supplanted him and now sits in the castle, Gustav Husák, it is the nightmare come true.”

Once again, Garton Ash evokes both historical memory and the power of location. Dubček, the former hero of the Prague Spring, has re-entered politics through Prague’s largest square. He is the “legendary hero” whose previous effort at revolution was thwarted, returned to life again. The Communists, in contrast, are in a “distant suburb”—language which suggests they have surrendered power already, if not formally. Prague’s castle makes for an easy extension of fairy tale or metaphysical metaphors, as Dubček may imagine he is dreaming and Husk is in hiding from a nightmare, perhaps like the proverbial monster or dragon.

“He wears jeans, open shirts, perhaps a corduroy jacket, only putting on a suit and tie under extreme duress: for example, when receiving one of those international prizes. Negotiations with the government, by contrast, do not qualify for a suit and tie. His lined yet boyish face is constantly breaking into a winning smile, while from inside this small frame a surprisingly deep voice rumbles out some wry remark. Despite appearances, he has enormous stamina. Few men could have done half of what he has done in the last fortnight and come out walking, let alone talking. Yet here he is, at one o’clock in the morning, in his local, laughing as if he made revolutions every week.”

Garton Ash describes Havel in terms of his personality, humor, and casual approach to life, making him both extraordinary and a man like any other. Formalwear is for “extreme duress” and international audiences—fame, then, is a kind of constriction on his free-spirited nature. But fame has not prevented him from humor and energy, “laughing as if he made revolutions every week.” Havel is engaged in serious work but dedicated to joy. This is clearly a portrait of a hero, reflective of Garton Ash’s proximity and personal investment in Czechoslovakia.

“‘Unhappy the land that has need of heroes,’ cries Brecht’s Galileo. Unhappy the land that has need of revolutions. The twenty years, and in many respects the forty years, were really lost. Lives had been ruined. Damage had been done that could never be repaired. But if a land has to have a revolution, then it would be difficult to imagine a better revolution than the one Czechoslovakia had: swift, almost entirely non-violent, joyful and funny. A laughing revolution.” 

In evaluating 1989 in Czechoslovakia, Garton Ash balances his assessments between pragmatism and partiality. He notes that a “cold and critical” observer would find the Forum’s lack of attention to detail naive—but he does not use I statements, suggesting that he lacks such distance or interest in the topic. He notes that the Forum might be considered “theater rather than politics” suggesting that politics is grave and calculating. He notes that the “external winds” were favorable, a phrase that emphasizes contingency and luck rather than inevitability. He calls the communist period an unquestioned tragedy, as “lost years” that produced little. In the end, Garton Ash focuses on freedom and joy, calling the revolution “joyful and funny” in its rapidity. The emphasis on mirth suggests Garton Ash is both historical observer and drama critic—though the play will not repeat, he finds it generally satisfactory.

“This was the year communism in Eastern Europe died. 1949–1989 R.I.P. And the epitaph might be: “Nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it.” The thing that was comprehensively installed in the newly defined territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and in the newly created German Democratic Republic after 1949, the thing called, according to viewpoint, ‘socialism’, ‘totalitarianism’, ‘Stalinism’, ‘politbureaucratic dictatorship’, ‘real existing socialism’, ‘state capitalism’, ‘dictatorship over needs’, or, most neutrally, ‘the Soviet-type system’—that thing will never walk again.”

Garton Ash retains his celebratory tone, quoting Macbeth once more. The allusion cements the view of history as a grand drama depending on individual actors and chance. Garton Ash suggests the various nomenclatures are ideologically motivated, as “totalitarianism” is the most negative, while “real existing socialism” was a self-descriptor from regime officials and loyal ideologues. Language reflects not merely reality, but also one’s sympathies. It is telling that Garton Ash calls the system a “thing” and that it will “never walk again,” evoking unnamed monsters, deserving of fear and condemnation.

“The combination of censorship and a nearly complete Party-state monopoly of the mass media provided the army of semantic occupation; ideology, in the debased, routinized form of newspeak, was its ammunition. However despised and un-credible these structures of organized lying were, they continued to perform a vital blocking function. They no longer mobilized anyone, but they did still prevent the public articulation of shared aspirations and common truths.”

“Semantic occupation” invokes the language of military control and force, but in the realm of language, not physical weapons. The military metaphor underlines that the Cold War was a real conflict, deadly and harmful. The evocation of “newspeak” is a reference to the totalitarian regime depicted in George Orwell’s 1984, linking recent reality to a classic of dystopian fiction. The “blocking function” emphasizes that the ability to organize was curtailed, a specific offense to autonomy and free expression.

“A banner I saw above the altar in an East Berlin church vividly expressed the same basic thought. It said: ‘I am Cain and Abel.’ In order to understand what it meant for ordinary people to stand in those vast crowds in the city squares of Central Europe, chanting their own, spontaneous slogans, you have first to make the imaginative effort to understand what it feels like to pay this daily toll of public hypocrisy.”

The Biblical allusion here emphasizes that ordinary people became both victims and perpetrators, as the communist state demanded their loyalty and culpability while also making them victims. This language of sin and suffering stresses that the communist regimes of Eastern Europe were morally bankrupt, deserving of vengeance and exile. The newly conscious public is seeking a reckoning, justice, and recovery from trauma.

“In fact the ruling élites, and their armed servants, distinguished themselves by their comprehensive un-readiness to stand up in any way for the things in which they had so long claimed to believe, and their almost indecent haste to embrace the things they had so long denounced as ‘capitalism’ and ‘bourgeois democracy’. All over Eastern Europe there was the quiet flap of turning coats: one day they denounced Wałesa, the next they applauded him; one day they embraced Honecker, the next they imprisoned him; one day they vituperated Havel, the next they elected him president.”

Garton Ash emphasizes the personal cowardice of Eastern European political leaders and suggests they lack conviction. The success of the revolutions, then, partly depended on their unwillingness to remain true to their professed values. Garton Ash is clearly appreciative of this hypocrisy, epitomized by the “quiet flap of turning coats”—a self-betrayal to the region’s benefit. The mention of Havel and Wałęsa indirectly underscores the personal bravery of the revolutionaries compared to those they replaced.

“For what most of the opposition movements throughout East Central Europe and a large part of ‘the people’ supporting them were in effect saying was: Yes, Marx is right, the two things are intimately connected—and we want both! Civil rights and property rights, economic freedom and political freedom, financial independence and intellectual independence, each supports the other. So, yes, we want to be citizens, but we also want to be middle-class, in the senses that the majority of citizens in the more fortunate half of Europe are middle-class. We want to be Bürger AND bürgerlich! Tom Paine, but also Thomas Mann.”

In invoking Marx, Garton Ash suggests that the revolutionaries of 1989 understood the ideology they had been immersed in, perhaps better than their rulers had. They agree that all history has a materialist basis, with the departure being that middle class values are essential for human flourishing rather than antithetical to it. They embrace Europe as it is and see their heritage in “bourgeois” authors—Paine and Mann are stand ins for all of the European liberal heritage.

“Yet even if the darker prospect were to be realized, something would remain, at least in memory, in culture, in spirit. At the very least the Europeans from over there would have offered us, with a clarity and firmness born of bitter experience, a restatement of the value of what we already have, of old truths and tested models, of the three essentials of liberal democracy and the European Community as the one and only, real existing common European home. Intellectually, dare I say spiritually, ‘1989’ in Eastern Europe is a vital complement to ‘1992’ in Western Europe.”

Garton Ash admits that the celebratory moment of 1989 is not guaranteed to endure. He embraces, in this moment, not his role as close observer or associate, but as a Western European. He speaks of “us” and “we” and calls his subjects those “over there.” They are a kind of mirror, or a light on a dark corner, demonstrating the normative value of Europe’s current path. His insistence on a “common European home” is, in effect, a restatement of his belief in the power of economics. 1989 is a vindication of the European project, founded on a belief in common markets and capitalist cooperation.

“A student leader in the velvet revolution and still bubbling with energy thirty years later, blond, bespectacled Monika takes a smartphone out of her handbag and scans the barcode on my bottle of mineral water. The phone buzzes and displays a green-ink caricature of Andrej Babiš, the agribusiness oligarch and former secret police informer who is now the Czech prime minister. Beneath his frowning face are the words ‘Bez Andreje’ (loosely translatable as ‘does not contain Andrej’), indicating that this bottled water is not a product of any of his companies. ‘It’s all right,’ says Monika, ‘you can drink it!’

The Garton Ash of 2019 revisits old friends and reinforces that the “return to Europe” has been successful. His colleague uses a smartphone and engages in consumer politics—she has exchanged street activism for ethical consumption. But the villains are, in a sense, the same, as Babis is a police informer who prospered under the old regime. Change, then, may have its limits.

“Irony of ironies: the autocrat in question, Viktor Orbán, had been introduced to me thirty years before by János himself, who commended him as a shining light of the new, young generation. Orbán had subsequently studied on a scholarship funded by George Soros at Oxford University and in 1989 had been—as I describe in this book—the standout figure of that very ceremonial reburial of Nagy. Yet now he and his political party, Fidesz, were systematically dismantling liberal democracy inside a member state of the European Union.”

Orbán has gone from “shining light” to “autocrat” just as Garton Ash has turned from an unfettered optimist to a realist. Parts of his trajectory highlight the limits of the European project: study in Oxford did not produce a commitment to liberal values. This anecdote underscores that progress is not guaranteed, and that individuals remain unpredictable. If the key figures of 1989 did their part to guarantee progress, this was not predestined, but dependent on their choices and temperaments, just as Hungary’s trajectory has been shaped by Orbán’s new populism and disdain for democracy.

“Just look at those concrete blocks in advanced states of decay, recolonized by the forest, dripping with rain and occupied by rough-sleepers, gangsters and school children playing truant. Sprawling state-owned factories have become epic, weed-wrapped, abandoned ruins, like Inca temples. These are the ruined temples of a vast experiment in the self-deification of humankind. Yet thousands of men and women had once worked in these ruins, and many of them were now unemployed, or forced through a process of harsh adaptation.”

Garton Ash presents communism as a sight of wreckage and loss, no longer productive. Only children and criminals occupy the factories that were once meant to signify progress. Instead, they are “ruined temples” the God they memorialized human and as extinct as the Inca. But the ruins once held meaning and provided a livelihood: Garton Ash admits, in this moment, that their past was perhaps more fulfilling than their capitalist present. Their transition to capitalism was not voluntary, but “forced.” The Garton Ash of 2019 is willing to acknowledge what socialism produced, and what capitalism destroyed.

“The fact that, thirty years after 1989, Central Europe was roiled by the same kind of nationalist populism that was shaking many other European countries, as well as the United States under Donald Trump, is a kind of backhanded tribute to the success of the transition. They had the West’s problems now. […] [T]he same use and abuse of social media (Fidesz had a particularly effective Facebook presence); the same denunciation of liberalism; the same cultural sociology of populist support in the half of society that feels itself left behind, one way or another, by the churnings of globalization, Europeanisation, liberalization and digitalization.”

Garton Ash takes pains to place developments in Eastern Europe in global perspective. Nationalism, social media, and a pervasive feeling of alienation are a common historical current, not proof of unique backwardness. Where the younger Garton Ash celebrated a common home, now the common home is full of the same family dispute, irrespective of their divergent histories. The populist turn suggests that feelings of powerlessness and loss still drive historical change—but that change is not inherently progressive.