Q: Your research focuses on the intellectual and literary scene in France, Britain, Poland, and Germany in the initial years after World War II. What was specific to that moment?
A: It was a very contradictory moment, full of enthusiasm and hope for the future as well as grief, sadness, and uncertainty. In the period I am looking at, from 1944 to 1948, people had to work through their recent past and faced distressing questions: how did they behave during the war? How did the people they knew behave? Did they do enough to be able to look themselves in the mirror now? On the other hand, they were living under the pressure of post-war necessities: in each of the countries that I have been working on, some bits and pieces of society (sometimes even entire structures) had to be reformed or built anew. The number and immediacy of the challenges of that time is something that never ceases to amaze me, and today more than ever. Currently, we too have been experiencing an acceleration and overlap of numerous crises, or a polycrisis, as some call it.
Q: How do you think public discourse today has changed since the 1940s? And what is the place of intellectuals in it?
A: I can only repeat some observations that wiser and more experienced people have already made: To start with, today's public discourse is much more fragmented and disjointed. With the emergence of social media and algorithms that produce content according to our demographic and other, profiled, data we fall into some sort of an echo chamber. With the future AI-driven devices and services, one can only imagine that this process will intensify.
But there is another dimension of the public discourse that has changed: a complete erosion of public trust. This concerns not only intellectuals and others who try to give their audiences some food for thought. It is rather a matter of our reception, in other words, how each of us reacts to things being said publicly, whether by a politician, an expert, or a pundit. Because a lot of the public discourse has become purely performative—saying something just for the sake of saying it, without a factual basis or any consistency in the deeds that follow—most of us these days hardly trust anything that is being said. And while a critical approach is, well, critical to understanding this world in a better and deeper way, the line between being extremely critical towards 'the establishment' or 'mainstream media' and conspiracy theories is a very fine one. In this sense, the crisis of public trust is one that everyone is facing. If so, the task of everyone, be it public intellectuals or not, is to try to restore the public trust on each and every level, from the state, to media to our own personal lives.
Q: You were in Poland at the start of Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, and you directly witnessed the inflow of Ukrainian refugees. Has this experience changed your perception of the public discussion of the war in Ukraine?
A: The biggest difference I see now is a greater inclusion of Eastern European expert voices when talking about our region—something that had been very much missing for many years. It is a welcome change, and I hope one that will stay with us. Ultimately, it can also encourage those who shape debate to pay attention to specialists, academics, and activists whose local experience and knowledge is invaluable in those critical moments.