The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague by Timothy Garton Ash, 167 pages
When the world changed in 1989, Timothy Garton Ash was there. In June, he was with Solidarity leaders in Warsaw on the night of the first free elections in Poland since World War II, then he was in Budapest to witness the funeral of Imre Nagy, the hero of the 1956 revolt against Soviet domination. In November, he walked across the space in Berlin where the Wall once stood, then sat in on strategy sessions with Vaclav Havel in the Magic Lantern Theater in Prague.
It is in the Magic Lantern that the book not only gets its name but its theme. The peaceful revolutions of 1989 were largely made by intellectuals, but, in Ash's view, were remarkably free from new ideas. The "revolutionaries" brought down their governments by holding them accountable to their own standards and the standards of their Western neighbors. With the use of naked force declared illegitimate by the national governments and (even more importantly) the Soviets, the communist system was exposed as an empty fortress. This is very much an eyewitness account of the drama as it unfolded, seen from the best seats in the house, written while the echoes were still ringing off the walls.
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