Adam Michnik, Elzbieta Matynia and Irena Grudzinska-Gross in conversation in NYC

On November 10, Michnik will be joined by Matynia and Grudzinska Gross in a three-way conversation and discussion, as part of a series of events marking 25 years since the end of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, hosted by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at the New School.

An Uncanny Era brings together the correspondence between Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Both men were former political prisoners who went on to become major figures in their new democratic countries: Havel, the playwright-turned-president of the Czech Republic, and Michnik, the historian who founded the region\'s leading newspaper. An Uncanny Era gives an engagingly personal perspective on how to achieve radical social change.

In The Trouble With History, Michnik compares modern-day Poland with post-revolutionary france and challenges the virus of fundamentalism that infects emerging democracies: the belief that a group of sinless individuals armed with the correct doctrine can build a world without sin.

Both An Uncanny Era and The Trouble With History were published by Yale University Press (2014).

There will be a Q&A followed by a book signing and refreshments.

Presented by the Transregional Center for Democracy Studies at the New School for Social Research and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
 

An Uncanny Era of Post-revolution
(1989-2014)
Adam Michnik, Elzbieta Matynia and
Irena Grudzinska-Gross in conversation

Monday, November 10, 2014
6:30 pm

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall
55 West 13th St, Room I202
New York, NY 10011

Admission: Free entry