A witness to history: #NonficNov

Revolutionary flag (photo: Soman).

We the People.
The Revolution of ’89, witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin & Prague
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Granta Books in association with Penguin Books, 1990.

Published in North America as The Magic Lantern (a title originally drawn from one of the chapter headings) We the People deliberately echoes the opening phrase of the US Constitution in proclaiming that the legitimacy of a government comes from – and resides in – its own citizens, but it also encapsulates precisely the claims of the revolutionaries described here in vivid detail.

Though a slim volume, it describes how the author was present at pivotal moments, ripe with significance for Europe’s postwar history as power was, almost bloodlessly, wrested from four countries in the Soviet bloc: Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, and Czechoslovakia.

More than just a witness, Timothy Garton Ash was on familiar terms with key players such as Adam Michnik in Poland and Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia. As an account chronicling events in the second half of 1989 and, in January of the next year, attempting a reasoned if premature summary, this document retains a rare immediacy, buttressed by well-informed assessments authored by a respected academic of contemporary European history.

An elemental childhood

The Ahlbergs, by Janet Ahlberg, from ‘Peepo!’

The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood
by Allan Ahlberg.
Illustrated by Janet Ahlberg, Fritz Wegner, Charlotte Voake, and Jessica Ahlberg.
Viking / Penguin Books, 2013.

As someone who, although a decade younger than Ahlberg, also has a bucketful of varied memories of the years leading up to the dreaded teens and all clamouring to be organised into a memoir, I was both entertained and enlightened by The Bucket.

In fact (to change the metaphor) Ahlberg’s little book, described as his first for adults, is a verbal quilt: fashioned from scraps and rags – some authentic, others borrowed, a few threadbare and fragile but still retaining vivid colours – it’s been sewn together in seemingly random patterns yet with adjacent pieces often entering into a kind of dialogue with each other.

Actually, ‘vivid’ is probably the best description: aided by illustrations, photographs and documents, The Bucket was for me a pleasing assault on the senses, evoking a time gone by dominated by smells, sights, tastes, sounds and experiences not so dissimilar to those I remember from my own childhood.