Word: walesa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...European constitution. "They don't know the rules of the game," says Stephen Bastos, an analyst with the German Council on Foreign Relations. "They don't have a vision of the kind of Europe they want to promote." The twins' combativeness has also left Polish society deeply polarized. Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader, Nobel laureate and former Polish President, argues that the Kaczynskis' success reflects underlying weaknesses in Poland's democratic institutions that may eventually be addressed. "There is a time for demagogues and populists," he says, "and those types have now been found...
...Poland, where relations with Germany have rarely been cordial and where ties have deteriorated in recent years, the news was seized on by leading right-wing politicians to condemn him. Grass last year wrote Walesa and the mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamwicz, to explain why he had taken so long to admit the full details of his war record. He said it had taken him until his later years to find the right formula to discuss his decision. "It's only now, with age, that I have found a suitable way of talking about it from a wider perspective...
...when Grass confessed that, as a teenager in the closing months of World War II, he had joined the Waffen SS, Walesa was a prominent critic, demanding that the German writer be stripped of his honorary citizenship of the city. Now, a year later, Grass is being welcomed back to Gdansk with a series of performances, readings and panel discussions to mark his 80th birthday - and Walesa is among those welcoming...
...interview with TIME, Walesa explained his change of heart: Because his own father was killed while fleeing the Germans, he said, he had little tolerance for "that generation." But in figures such as Grass, "we see examples of those who are helping us pass from a hostile period to a period of peace...
...Thursday, the German author of The Tin Drum and other novels walked through the streets of the old Hanseatic League town and met with Walesa in the evening. Residents crowded the route and many appeared anxious to welcome him back . One of those greeting him was Gdansk novelist Pawel Huelle, who praised the German writer for his intellectual contributions as well as for his frequent public statements that Germany had no claim on lands lost to Poland in the war. "For all his life Grass has been against erasing memory, erasing history and putting responsibility just on history and Adolf...