A Historian of the Present: A conversation with Timothy Garton Ash, British historian and expert on Central and Eastern Europe.

NEW EASTERN EUROPE: You not only reported, but participated in, the revolutions of 1989. How did you first travel to Central Europe?

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH: Thomas Mann is really to blame. Through reading his novels, I first became interested in German history. What came to fascinate me in German history was the question of what makes one person a dissident and another a collaborator. Then I realised that people were facing that question behind the Iron Curtain every day. I went to live in Berlin in 1978 and began travelling behind the Iron Curtain, getting to know the opposition movements. Therefore, when 1989 happened, I knew all the main actors better than most people in the West. I had been what Raymond Aron called the spectateur engagé. I just consider myself incredibly privileged to have been such a close witness of that turning-point in world history. Now, more than 20 years on, the outcome is still overwhelmingly positive. I can imagine, in another life, I might have got excited about the revolution of 1789 or 1917, for example, and having somewhat more negative reflections 20 years on....