Geremek (photo from The Polonia Portal)
On Bastille Day, The New York Times ran an obit of Bronislaw Geremek, killed in an automobile accident in western Poland at the age of 76. The headline included the phrase “Helped End Communist Control of Poland,” and it is certainly true that he was a key member of the generation that led Poland from communism to western democracy, a work of art still in progress. Geremek was one of the leaders of the Round Table process that negotiated free elections in 1989, and later served as the Polish foreign minister. Still later he was a member of the European Parliament. His was an effective, important, public life.
But Geremek was earlier and better known as perhaps the most distinguished Polish medieval historian of his day. He was one of the early writers of social history, in the Annales tradition, focusing on society’s rejects — one of his early books concerned “marginal” Parisians in the 14th century, and another, later, book was on The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris. These works were at the same time masterpieces of historical scholarship and essays on human pity. Geremek was very much the European man of letters in the old style, a style that survived the hardships of life under communism. But he was a man of broad and unrelenting human sympathy.
I met Geremek for the first time when I went to Warsaw with my ACLS colleague Irena Grudzinska Gross to organize a conference on the role of constitutionalism in postcommunist Poland — one of a series in the formerly communist nations of Eastern Europe. Irena arranged a lunch for the three of us in a lovely restaurant in the rebuilt old city of Warsaw. I had known Geremek only from reading a few of his books, and at that point I knew nothing of his public role. A more gracious, charming, intelligent and fascinating person I have never met. I hated it when the luncheon was over, but luckily there were a few more meetings with him in the next few years. Geremek chaired our Polish constitutionalism conference, and proved an astute judge of the nature of constitutionalism in the Poland of that day. I was deeply moved and influenced by him. He began his remarks at the conference by stressing the role of education in fostering constitutionalism, saying that “if constitutionalism is a social problem, then it becomes the object of citizens’ education.” He argued that Poles had to approach constitutionalism “not only as a document of the law, a ‘legal act’, but also as something to be taught in a true citizens’ society.” These are still words worth attending to in our own country.
Geremek was profoundly a democratic citizen. He was also the sort of figure more common in Europe than in the United States, a member of both the “intellectual class” and the “political class.” He put his learning in the service of his country, and he served it well, better than most of his countrymen recognized. For me, he is the epitome of the engaged scholar-citizen. I admired Bronislaw Geremek profoundly, and I grieve for him. Both scholarship and the public service are poorer for his loss.
