![]() ![]() should intellectuals get involved in politics or not? Tony Judt made that famous intervention in Past Imperfect where he attacked Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and other French intellectuals for being “fellow travelers” and Stalinist apologists after the Second World War. Shore: This idea of the engag é intelligentsia, of course, has been controversial for a long time - i.e. OR: How does what you saw in Ukraine reflect the broader ways in which intellectuals - major participants in the events on the Maidan - relate to or engage with politics? And it was impossible to turn away from that. This was the first Grenzerfahrung I had watched friends experience in real time. But these experiences had always been before my time, before I knew them. People who had been forced to make life-or-death decisions in extreme circumstances. I’ve known many people in Eastern Europe - people older than I am, many of whom are no longer alive - who had been through what in German are called Grenzerfahrungen - literally “border experiences”, be they Nazi camps or Soviet camps or Stalinist prison. It was the first real revolution since I had been coming there. And even at that distance from Kyiv, it was impossible not to notice that in all the twenty-some years I had been hanging out in Eastern Europe, the Maidan was the most extraordinary thing I had seen in real time. Here is the short version of how I became drawn in to this story: I was on leave in Vienna during the 2013-2014 academic year, at the Institute for Human Sciences. There is truth to Hegel’s idea that “the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” It’s only looking back that we can understand the implications of actions and their consequences. ![]() All the advantages historians have come from retrospect it’s the looking-back that allows you play God, to know more than any individual actor could have known in real time. Marci Shore: This is a book I never planned on writing. Octavian Report: What prompted you to write an intimate history of the Maidan? ![]()
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