By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 30th, 2011 
I am often accused of being an optimist. I write “accused” because I take it as a mistaken characterization. I think it suggests that I am naïve and unrealistic. And as it happens, I don’t think I am naïve or unrealistic, and don’t feel particularly optimistic. I actually have a rather dark view of the human prospect, one of the reasons I am more conservative than many of my friends and colleagues. That said, I do know why people think I am an optimist. It is because I understand my intellectual challenge to be to find the silver lining within the clouds, to try to find ways in which it may be possible (even if unlikely) to avoid the worst. Thus, my study of the politics of small things, which started with the proposition that after 9/11 “it hurts to think,” and also thus, my investigation in my new book of the possibility of “reinventing political culture,” showing that political culture is not only an inheritance that constrains possibility, but also one that provides resources for creativity and change.
In Reinventing Political Culture, I make two moves: I reinvent the concept of political culture and I study the practical project of reinventing political culture in different locations: Central Europe, the Middle East and North America. I plan to use the book to structure a deliberately considered debate early in the new year. At this year’s end, I thought I would highlight some past posts which examine the power of culture and the way I understand it pitted against the culture of power, which also exemplify the course we have taken this year at Deliberately Considered and a road we will explore next year.
First, there is the link between small things and the power of culture. In a small corner of Damascus we observed people creating an autonomous world for poetry. Clearly the present revolution there is not the result of such activity, though it did anticipate change. But I think such cultural work makes it more likely that the post authoritarian situation will be . . .
Read more: Hope against Hopelessness for the New Year
By Hana Cervinkova, December 21st, 2011 
While I cannot claim the privilege to have been one of Václav Havel’s friends, he loomed large in my life, first in my teenage years when I was coming of age in Communist Czechoslovakia and later through my extended sojourns abroad – in the United States and now in Poland. Václav Havel is profoundly irreplaceable. Together with millions of other Czechs, I owe him my freedom.
The season’s first snow was falling heavily last Sunday afternoon when I was making my way to Wrocław along winding, mountainous roads returning from my family house on the Czech side of the border. The going was very slow as the line of cars, mostly with Polish tags, headed back toward Poland after spending a weekend in the Czech mountains. My small son was sleeping in the back seat. In the quiet of the ride, I listened to Václav Havel’s voice recorded five years prior when he spoke on Czech National Radio about the place theater held in his life. Czech radio stations were responding to the news of the former President’s death with rebroadcasts of past interviews, as if they wanted to extend his presence among us.
In this moment of deep sadness when time seemed to have stopped altogether, my thoughts turned back to an important moment in my childhood. I must have been eleven when I decided to take part in a school recitation competition. To help me prepare, my mother taught me a poem by the Czech Nobel Prize laureate, Jaroslav Seifert. In the poem, Seifert commemorated the day when the first Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garyk Masaryk died. Masaryk, like Havel, died in early hours of the morning. The poem, which I still remember, is entitled, To kalné ráno – The Grey Morning. My mother read the poem out loud to me repeatedly until I knew the words by heart, stopping to take breaths before each softly sounding refrain: “Remember my child, that grey morning.” Thanks to Havel, I realize today that my mother’s choice of Seifert, . . .
Read more: What Václav Havel Meant to Me
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
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