Intellectuals and Social Change
in Central and Eastern Europe
Edith Kurzweil: I
did not think of this conference as a victory
celebration or a look backwards , except to the extent that I invited
participants who are in a position to use their hard-gained experiences,
to assess what the future might bring and what may be done to build
institutions most likely to preserve individual freedom. As you all know,
neither I nor anyone else two-and-a-half years ago, when I started to
plan this get-together, had even an inkling of how quickly the world we
had known would change , or that some of the then-dissident writers
would be governing their respective countries. But I did know that even
those of us around
Partisall RelJiew
who had kept in touch with writers
behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain (and thus were better
informed about European history, economics, and politics than most
Americans) were at sea . We all recognized our ignorance when we be–
gan to read more and more about the disputes revolving around the
rights based on inhabitants' local histories and languages, when we
watched area specialists on the
MacNeil-Lehrer News HOllr
disagree on
nearly everything, from rights based on ethnicity and religion to territo–
rial ones, and when it seemed that conflicting rights increasingly might
lead to confrontations and to war. While organizing this conference, for
instance, I corresponded with Milovan Djilas, who, after his doctor ad–
vised him to relax and not to travel, nevertheless entered into the current
conflicts which, as you know, have been multiplying not only in
Yugoslavia but in Transylvania, Ukraine, and other places.
The events we have been observing - or ignoring - and pronounc–
ing upon from a safe distance only have reinforced my conviction that
writers alone , because they legitimately are allowed to speculate and use
their imaginations, manage to catch the nuances that social scientists are
taught to disregard and that literary theorists consider grist for their tex–
tual mills rather than objective facts.
When my dean, David Hosford, agreed with me that our students
needed to know more history and indicated that he would support any
event that might get them to read more than outdated, pious textbooks,
I began to make concrete plans. These received the enthusiastic support
from the Provost's office. Personally, this is the first time I have had to
fuse my schizophrenic professional life, to bring together my activities as
professor of sociology and as department chair with those of editing
Par-
