Word: walesa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...former trade unionist and Polish President Lech Walesa is the city of Gdansk's most famous son, then its second-most famous progeny is probably the Nobel Laureate German writer Gunter Grass. Grass, of course, was born in Danzig, as Gdansk was known before it reverted to Poland at the end of World War II. And while Walesa became internationally renowned for leading the shipyard strike that led to the formation of the Solidarity trade union and proved to be a decisive blow in the collapse of Polish communism, Grass was honored for his passionate and clear-eyed excoriation...
...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...
Workers-rights advocate Lech Walesa won the Peace Prize in 1983 for co-founding the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union. Seven years later, he was elected President of Poland...