I met Thomas Tschirner in 1990 when he was still in high school. He and his brother were enthusiastically involved in putting out an alternative newsletter in their hometown of Wittemberg, a city about 70 miles south of Berlin in what was then East Germany. “We felt the need for an alternative medium,” he told… Continue reading Growing Up During Die Wende
During the Communist period, the governments in East-Central Europe treated religious groups with varying degrees of tolerance. The Catholic Church in Poland was too large and influential to ignore, so remained powerful even under Communism. The Albanian government, on the other hand, tried to wipe out all religious identity to such a degree that Communist… Continue reading Being Quaker in East Germany
The story starts out simply enough: “Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” What follows, in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, is absurd, a comedy of errors, except that it is not funny and the ending can’t be more tragic. Joseph K. is subjected to… Continue reading Trial Upon Trial
Romania has come a long way on LGBT issues. Homosexuality was illegal in the country up until 1996. Public manifestations of homosexuality were decriminalized only in 2000, and the last discriminatory law was repealed in 2002. The European Union applied considerable pressure during the accession process and so did the United States, which sent an… Continue reading Promoting Molecular Revolution in Romania
I was at a wedding not long ago of two dear female friends. The ceremony mixed together various religious traditions, including a Quaker meeting where people in the audience could stand up and speak spontaneously. After a number of people had already spoken, an old man made his way to the front of the space.… Continue reading Running Off to War
I thought it was a fad, and it would die out. Three years ago I read Daniel Drezner’s piece inForeign Policy about his search for an “international relations theory of zombies,” which he subsequently expanded into a full-length book. Really, this was on the order of devoting an entire university class to the lyrics of Madonna. If I just… Continue reading The Undead and Us
Germany has played an outsized role in Europe after reunification in 1990. But that role has largely been economic. There were many fears at the end of the Cold War that a reunified Germany would destabilize Europe. Margaret Thatcher kept a map of Germany’s 1937 borders in her purse to illustrate her anxieties about the… Continue reading Germany’s Post-Reunification Foreign Policy
In 1979, Pope John Paul II visited Poland. It was an official visit, the invitation extended by the Communist government. The pope—once known as Karol Wojtyla, an actor-turned-priest from a small village outside Krakow—managed to pull off the impossible. He gave speeches about economic justice that one of my Polish friends told me were more… Continue reading The Audacity of Pope
All the countries of East-Central Europe have experienced collective mood swings since 1989. Political parties have rotated in and out of power. The economic fortunes have oscillated considerably. And the level of social enthusiasm – on a spectrum from malaise to engagement – has also fluctuated a great deal. Slovakia has been perhaps the most… Continue reading Slovakia’s Pendulum Swing
One of the key contributions of the Polish opposition movement was its concept of living “as if.” At a certain point in the 1970s, dissidents like Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron proposed to create a parallel society in which people acted as if they were already living in a democratic society. They would act openly,… Continue reading Creating a Parallel Society