By Elzbieta Matynia, December 18th, 2011 
The late Christopher Hitchens had taught at the New School, and several cohorts of students in the Committee on Liberal Studies had gotten to know him well. But those of us who participated in the 2009 Democracy & Diversity Summer Institute in Poland will always remember him from Wroclaw.
The institute had just relocated from Krakow to Wroclaw, an old and booming city in western Poland (formerly Breslau, prewar Germany’s second largest city) to be closer to the challenging issues of an expanding Europe. Hitchens was working on his memoirs, published a year later as “Hitch 22,” and his visit to Wroclaw was a private journey to find out more about his Jewish great-grandmother from Kepno, a small town in Lower Silesia, not far from Wroclaw. We helped him get to Kepno accompanied by the head of the Wroclaw Jewish community, and to get access to archives there.
Hitch was more than generous in return. Long late-night intensive discussions with him were an amazing gift. We talked together about the place, the shifting borders, the shifted populations, the imprint of German Wroclaw, but also of Czech, Austrian, and Polish Wroclaw, and about the remnants of the Jewish past here, the languages and accents heard on the streets, and the social potential of borderlands in the new Europe.
We were walking through the park to Centennial Hall, an impressive modernist structure where Hitchens was to give a public talk, when the news came in from Oxford that Leszek Kolakowski, a youthful Marxist, then a critic of Communism, intellectual godfather of the Solidarity movement, and one of Europe’s most distinguished thinkers had just died.
We did not know that Christopher Hitchens had studied under Kolakowski at Oxford. He quickly changed the focus of his talk, asked for a moment of silence, and spoke about the impact of developments in Eastern Europe on his generation of British leftist students. It was a magical moment, as it was at once a eulogy for his teacher, for his ancestors from Kepno, and for his youth.
. . .
Read more: Hitchens in Wroclaw – A Remembrance
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 24th, 2011 
I am not completely satisfied with my last post. I’m afraid I wasn’t clear enough. I wanted to express my appreciation of Obama’s speech on Afghanistan, while highlighting what I see to be the limitations of his foreign policy. I wanted to show how, judged realistically, Obama’s speech on the Afghanistan drawdown was a significant advance, but also wanted to show why I think he did not go far enough. It’s about principles, not numbers.
Obama presented a vision of change in the direction of American foreign policy, although he didn’t fundamentally question the premise of America as a superpower with global responsibilities. I appreciate and support the vision, but question the premise. I also worry about the identification of defense of country and national security with military capability and response. But, I don’t expect the President of the United States to publicly challenge this identification. He is commander-in-chief and a politician who must ultimately make sense to the majority of the American people, while I can happily call myself a pragmatic pacifist, with all the contradictions that involves. The speech struck me as being successful because Obama linked short terms goals with long term ends, i.e. withdrawing from an unpopular war while diminishing the power of Al Qaeda and giving Afghans a decent chance at determining their own just future, with changing the direction of American foreign policy.
I want a change of direction more radical than the President, but I still can’t be against all wars. Although I realize that non-violent action often gets  things done more effectively and decisively than violent action, I believe that sometimes violence, including military force, is necessary. I understand, even support, the military action in Libya, but I also realize that the use of force in such situations is an indication of weakness. . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: War and Peace
By Vince Carducci, June 22nd, 2011 
I’ve been trying to figure out Christopher Hitchens for some ten years now. My first encounter with “Hitch” was in the fall of 2000 when he gave an impromptu talk on the writer’s life in the Mechanics Conference Room at the New School for Social Research in New York City. I had recently quit my longtime corporate-suit job in the Midwest and moved to Manhattan to go to grad school, and he was just coming onto the faculty as a visiting professor in my MA program in liberal studies. Hitchens spoke extemporaneously on a dizzying array of topics, from the evils of religion to the necessity of reading George Orwell to the benefits of grain spirits, punctuating important points with blasts of exhaled cigarette smoke. I was often reminded of that experience, minus the noxious tobacco fumes, while reading his memoir, Hitch-22, now out in paperback.
Indeed, Hitchens’ style in person and in print is tailor-made for the memoir form. Anyone familiar with his much-published writing, his frequent media appearances, and lectures will recognize the facility, abundant throughout the book, with which Hitchens moves from personal experience to grandiloquent pronouncement, tying things together with erudite disquisitions on literature, history, and the darker art of muckraking. A familiar tic is the construction “my dear friend [INSERT FAMOUS PERSON’S NAME]….” In that regard, most of the dramatis personae are familiar to regular Hitchens readers so there isn’t a whole lot that’s revelatory in these particular pages, except for the details, which admittedly tend to be more than interesting enough.
A couple of times in the book, Hitchens remarks on his being a late bloomer. And so it is that some have seen the core of Hitch-22 as the story of the author’s inner journey in adulthood from firebrand 1960s campus radical to geezery Tory. It’s a familiar Baby Boomer trope, of course (The Big Chill, anyone?), but one whose narrative trajectory has a longer history within modern liberal thought. (As nineteenth-century historian and statesman Francois Guizot said: “Not to be a republican [in the 1789 French Revolutionary . . .
Read more: Christopher Hitchens’s Hitch-22: Confessions of a Political Romantic
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