The Magic Lantern

The Magic Lantern is a 1989 work of narrative nonfiction by British historian Timothy Garton Ash. Garton Ash is a specialist in European studies with extensive experience writing about the history of Eastern Europe. The Magic Lantern is his third book on the region and followed several years of writing and reporting on Eastern European culture and politics under communism. He is currently Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. All citations refer to the 2019 edition of this text, including an additional chapter written for that edition, and preserve British spelling.

A note on language and pronunciation: This guide preserves all accent marks and diacritics for Polish, Hungarian, and Czech names. It should also be noted that the honorific pan appears in Polish and Czech—this is roughly equivalent to sir or madam and is used in formal address. The “c” in Václav, as in Václav Havel, is pronounced as “ts,” making the name sound like “Vatslav” in English. Lech Wałęsa’s surname may pose specific challenges to the Anglophone reader. Polish “w” is typically pronounced “v,” “ł” is pronounced more like “w,” and “ę” is pronounced “en.” Thus, for “Wałęsa,” “Vawensa” is the closest English approximation.

Overview

The work opens with Garton Ash recalling his travel to Poland during the 1989 parliamentary elections, the first competitive democratic elections in that country after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He finds himself giving an impromptu speech, which, he reflects, is indicative of his broader project in the work. Though Garton Ash is a trained historian with scholarly experience on Eastern Europe, this book constitutes his personal reflections on the political revolutions of 1989, which saw East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, among other nations, transition from communist one-party rule to competitive parliamentary democracies as independent nations. Garton Ash reflects that his take on events reflects the immediacy of his perspective. He focuses only on those countries he visited during 1989: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the German Democratic Republic, though communist governments fell throughout the region from 1989 to 1991. He thus lacks the historian’s traditional distance from events or use of archival material, relying primarily on his own impressions and knowledge, and freely open about his strong sympathy with the revolutionaries, rather than those who opposed them. He reflects that his relative optimism and enthusiasm for the revolutions may not be borne out by later historians but assures the reader that his impressions are honest and authentic.

Garton Ash then describes the political situation in Poland in 1988 and early 1989. Solidarity (Solidarność), the country’s major opposition movement and trade union, was leading a series of labor strikes as the country’s economic situation deteriorated. Finally, the government agreed to permit partly free elections in June 1989—the context for Garton Ash’s speech in introduction. Garton Ash notes that in both Hungary and Poland, there were tensions between the desire for an entirely new system and a restructuring of the existing one, so that he calls both “refolutions” rather than fully fledged revolutions.

Poland’s June 1989 elections were a widely celebrated event with popular enthusiasm, compared to the cynicism about previously meaningless communist elections. Solidarity swept Communist Party candidates and its competitors, and, because the new government accepted the election results, found itself in a dominant leadership position. After a series of talks and negotiations, a new government formed committed to economic modernization and a market economy, as a worsening inflationary crisis increased political pressure on the regime to accept the reality of political transition. Solidarity’s leaders were somewhat stunned by the change in their fortunes, as many had been political prisoners and dissidents. The Soviet Union’s leadership, which had historically closely monitored all the political activity of the Eastern European states, also accepted the political transition.

The work’s second case study concerns political transition in Hungary. In that country, the Communist Party itself accepted its crisis of political illegitimacy. This required an open reckoning with the country’s political history, specifically the failed revolution of 1956, whose leaders had been murdered and buried in unmarked graves following Soviet military repression of the revolt. The funeral of former Prime Minister Imre Nagy in June 1989 became a powerful symbol of the new acquiescence to free expression and a reckoning with the past. Months later, Hungary’s Communist party entered into negotiations with the opposition parties about free elections and legal reform, formally dissolved itself, and re-formed as a socialist party. The Nagy funeral, Garton Ash argues, had a similar impact in Hungary as Poland’s parliamentary elections did.

Next, Garton Ash describes the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an event of both national and international significance. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), colloquially known as East Germany, owed its existence partly to the lack of free movement between it and West Germany. Both regional and internal developments dictated the end of this stalemate: Hungary’s declaration of open borders with Austria in the summer of 1989 allowed GDR citizens to cross, and protests that began in Leipzig built a mass movement in favor of political freedom and free passage across the wall. When Soviet leaders made it clear they would not interfere or defend the regime, the GDR’s leadership acquiesced to popular demands. This soon led to calls for a single unified German state and a unified currency, with minimal sympathy for socialism in the country, despite the hopes of some East Germans who hoped to preserve the commitment to social equality while ending political repression. Garton Ash portrays the German revolution as an increasing development of national consciousness and a successful drive for self-determination.

The work’s final case study, Czechoslovakia, centers around roughly three weeks of political transition in Prague, in November and December of 1989. Following student protests, Czechoslovakia’s pro-democracy movement organized itself as the Civic Forum, with their headquarters in Prague’s Magic Lantern Theater, and playwright Václav Havel as the movement’s de facto leader. Garton Ash had a personal ticket to the theater and was the only foreign observer of the meetings. The meetings included longtime dissidents and intellectuals, workers, pro-capitalist economists, Catholics, and radical leftists, who together drafted a series of demands for a new government with non-communist leadership. Garton Ash notes the celebratory atmosphere of informal open debate in the theater, and the regular participation in press conferences between meetings, to guarantee the Forum’s message reached the public and the world. He celebrates Havel’s unique personality and dedication to his cause. The Forum openly embraced the heritage of the 1968 Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia’s failed revolution, as well as welcoming participation from the Catholic church. This brand coalition for national renewal, together with careful attention to the experiences of other Eastern European countries, helped the Forum achieve rapid success with little violence.

In the work’s original conclusion, written in 1990, Garton Ash reflects on the meaning of 1989 not only for Eastern Europe, but for the entire European continent and the world. He argues that it showed the total failure of communism as an ideology for organizing states, and the vindication of liberal democracy and market economies. He notes that the lack of respect for free expression and individual dignity under Soviet communism became increasingly untenable as standards of living declined. He suggests that the new surge of national unity in the region is not necessarily a sign of destructive nationalist conflict to come. While he admits that communist societies produced unique social cohesion and experiences, he suggests that the real consequence of 1989 will be an embrace of liberal European values, including the nascent European Community, the predecessor the European Union.

In his 2019 afterword, Garton Ash notes that the importance of protest against corruption is still highly visible in Eastern Europe, and that the rising tide of xenophobia and populism suggests he may have been too complacent about democracy’s ability to endure. Hungary under Viktor Orbán is increasingly nationalist, anti-Semitic, and supportive of one-party rule, suggesting the EU itself is no guarantee against authoritarianism. Though some of these trends of disillusionment with modernity and capitalism are visible in the UK and the United States, he posits that the pains of post-communist transition explain its rise in Eastern Europe. Ongoing corruption, where former party leaders rebuilt their lives as oligarchs, and the tendency of young people to emigrate to other EU nations, are other important contributing factors in Eastern Europe’s ongoing cultural and political transitions. Garton Ash remains cautiously optimistic that the younger generations of Europeans will continue to fight for democracy, as their parents did in 1989.