The past year has seen the death of three extraordinary European thinkers who engaged deeply with the public life of their time. Their combined publications on history, philosophy, sociology and politics would fill several bookshelves. At critical moments - in 1956, in 1968, in 1989 - their political engagement helped to make European history. Each of them had the kind of mind that it was sheer joy to observe in action, but also a rich, life-affirming personality. But I find a larger significance in their passing.
With them, there goes the last cohort of Europeans who were formed by the horrors of the Second World War and its Central European aftermath. They understood in their bones why we need a Europe of liberty under law, for, as teenagers and young men, they witnessed the opposite. Now we children of luckier times have to sustain that Europe without the kind of elemental drive that comes from personal experience.
Not that they talked much or willingly about their childhood encounters with evil. Quite the reverse. So there are some things we will never know. Yet, in the last years of their lives, in autobiographical fragments and snatches of conversation, they did bequeath us glimpses of the Gehenna from which today's Europe was born.
The one who lived through the worst has left the least testimony. Only in brief passages, and in rare conversations, did Bronislaw Geremek - the medieval historian turned Solidarity adviser and Polish foreign minister who died in a car crash last summer - speak at all about witnessing life and death as a child in the Warsaw ghetto. “I closed that box and turned the key,” he once said.
In a long autobiographical conversation published in Polish a couple of years ago, Leszek Kolakowski - philosopher, historian of ideas, analyst and co-dismantler of communism who died in Oxford last week - recalled his experience of the war in occupied Poland. How he was sent to work making wooden toys at 15. How, since the German occupiers had closed down the schools, he educated himself by reading in a half-plundered library. (He knew everything about A, D and E from the encyclopedia, he joked, but nothing beginning with B and C because local farmers had taken those volumes for firewood.) How he saw the merry-go-round that continued to play on Krasinski Square in Warsaw while the ghetto burned nearby and “in the air there fluttered charred scraps of clothing.” How his father was killed by the Germans in Warsaw in 1943.
Oddly enough, it's the reticent Ralf Dahrendorf - the German-British social thinker, politician and educator who died last month - who's left the more extensive testament from Europe's Gehenna years. His father, a social democratic politician, was arrested for involvement in the July 20, 1944, bomb plot against Hitler and barely escaped with his life. As a 15-year-old, Ralf got involved in a schoolboys' anti-Nazi movement and was detained by the Gestapo. (The conspirators wrote messages to each other in Latin, but the Gestapo found a simple solution: They arrested the Latin teacher.)
He later recalled how 10 days of solitary confinement awoke in him that “almost claustrophobic yearning for freedom, that gut-resistance to being closed in, whether by the personal power of individuals or by the anonymous power of organizations,” which would be the foundation of his lifelong passion for freedom.
Each of these three boys could so easily have been killed, thrown on the pyre of Europe's crazed self-destruction. Each went on to live a full life, and to create work of enduring value. Each contributed, with brilliance, clarity, courage and humour, to the free Europe we live in today.
Not that the three thought the same about the European Union. Far from it. Bronek Geremek was a true enthusiast for European integration. I will never forget what he told me in a corridor of Poland's parliament: “You know, for me, Europe is a kind of Platonic essence.” He believed in both the ideal and the reality. He ended his life as a member of the European Parliament.
Ralf Dahrendorf was what in Britain is called a “pro-European,” and had been a European commissioner, but in the latter years of his life became quite critical of the way the EU was developing. His Europe was always a Europe of freedom, and he measured the EU by that yardstick.
Leszek Kolakowski was skeptical of what he saw as the homogenizing tendencies of the EU project - he feared for national identity and cultural diversity. One might attribute this skepticism to his nearly 40 years of residence in the British Isles, except I don't think Britain ever influenced him in any serious way. But he did believe passionately that Central Europe, banished behind the Iron Curtain, should rejoin the larger family of free Europe, and he worked toward that end, both by his intellectual dismantling of communism and by his strategic thinking about how to get out of it.
So when we speak of Europe, it is not the Brussels institutions we're talking about. It is the totality, across still diverse European nations, of a legal, political and economic system, an ethos, a commitment, that put individual human dignity and freedom first, last and in the centre. That is the Europe all three fought for.
My conclusion is simple: As we can no longer rely on personal memory, or even on the force of personal encounters with this last of the wartime generations, so we need more and better history to be taught in our schools. History brought home with human stories. A good teacher might start with Bronek, Leszek and Ralf.
Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University.
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