Professor Ralf Dahrendorf

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a German politician who became an English academic. Throughout his life he's been determined to break down barriers in the interests of greater humanity and freedom.

Presenter0:40

The Germany of his youth was that of the Third Reich, but he, like his family, was fiercely anti Nazi, and suffered imprisonment for his views.

Presenter0:48

In his late thirties he enjoyed a brief but turbulent career in German politics, first as a Minister for Foreign Affairs under Willy Brandt, and then as a European Commissioner in Brussels.

Presenter0:58

His forties, however, found him as director of the London School of Economics. Today his academic career in Britain continues with the post of warden of Saint Anthony's College, Oxford. Now a British citizen, he has won sympathy from his students for his openness, and admiration from a far wider circle for his wisdom, clarity, and stern defence of libertarian principles. He is Ralph

Presenter1:23

Sir Ralph, you in fact became a British citizen a couple of years ago, I think. Does that mean you renounced your German citizenship?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf1:29

It's actually possible to have dual nationality, but to all intents and purposes I am a British citizen and nothing else. Yes, this time I decided that I was here to stay and wanted to wanted to take part in public debate without feeling that I'm an outsider.

Presenter1:47

But which are you really? I mean, are you German? Are you English?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf1:49

Oh, I'm really a

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf1:51

An inveterate crosser of boundaries and will be forever. And so I suppose the simple way to put it is to say that I'm a European.

Presenter1:59

That's a very fashionable concept.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf2:01

I know that's why I'm using it.

Presenter2:03

But does it really matter, Duke?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf2:05

It doesn't matter an awful lot. I think crossing boundaries is in itself important. It opens your eyes to lots of things.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf2:13

And while at times it can be a bit depressing because you aren't anywhere in particular, most of the time it's rather fun.

Presenter2:20

Well, now, how does the solitude of a desert island appeal to you? Is uh could you bear it? Would you welcome it?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf2:26

Welcome is going rather far, especially if one is in an Oxford College where one is in company and pleasant company all the time. But I think on the whole I could bear it, yes.

Presenter2:37

And what's the first piece of music that you've put on your grammar phone?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf2:39

Well the first piece of music which I put on my gramophone is Brecht Mahagoni, sung by Lotte Lenia Surabaya Johnny.

Presenter2:49

And why do you want that?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf2:51

It reminds me of a whole lot of things. I heard Mahogany first soon after the war, in Berlin actually. I have an obvious link to a writer like Bert Brecht. And as our listeners will soon realise, my musical choices are not exactly classical.

Presenter3:14

Does that worry you?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf3:15

Not me, but my wife.

Presenter3:17

What what does she say about it?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf3:17

What does she say about it? She is a great music lover and undoubtedly this is one point where she perhaps the only one at one point where she would like me to be a little different, but then I'm not.

Presenter3:30

So the music we hear today is the music of of the real Ralph Dahrendorf, huh?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf3:34

The music we hear today is not in any sense phony. This is music which I actually listen to, have listened to, which has played a part in my life, yes.

Presenter3:43

Sura baya jauni

Presenter3:48

Varum bistu zoro suni main got undihlib di so

Speaker 34:00

Surabaya Jani warum binih nitfro.

Presenter4:07

Oh, do hast kind herods journey.

Presenter4:11

Lotta Lenya singing Surabhai Johnny

Presenter4:14

Tell me about your origins, Sir Ralph. Your father was a a member of the German Parliament when you were born in nineteen twenty nine, but that hardly tells the whole story of him.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf4:23

My father was a politician and I was thus born into a political family, but not only was I born into a political family, I was of course born into a family which was kicked about by the political events in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. My father was a social democratic member of the Weimar Parliament.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf4:44

Thus one of those who voted against Hitler's enabling law in May 1933, arrested after that, had to start from scratch, moved away from Hamburg, where everybody knew him and where I was born, moved to Berlin, where it was a little easier to disappear from sight at least for a few years.

Presenter5:05

But you were very small then, wouldn't it? You would have been about, what, four?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf5:08

I was tiny. I was four when we went to Berlin. I remember the move, but naturally not much else. I went to school in Berlin. But then my father was in the resistance movement and was arrested once, released again. And then after the 20th of July 1944, he was put on trial and was actually one of the first not to be sentenced to death, but to seven years' prison.

Presenter5:34

But did did they believe then that he had something to do with the plot against Hitler, the plot to murder Hitler?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf5:38

Well, he did, because he was supposed to be in charge of a large district in the north of Germany. They had actually sent out cables to various parts of Germany saying take all orders from so-and-so and in Hamburg and Schleswig-Kolstein it was supposed to be my father, so there was no doubt about his involvement. And indeed, I grew up with the children of others, most of whom were killed after the 20th of July. So we were living in the company of resistance people.

Presenter6:14

So when your father was taken away in 1944, you were fifteen.

Presenter6:18

Presumably you didn't expect to see him again?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf6:20

That's perfectly true. And there was great surprise all over when he was put on trial on the 20th of October 1944. And some of the charges against him weren't actually mentioned in the trial. And the presiding judge, the horrible Nazi judge Freisler, said that people could only be sentenced for crimes and quotes which were brought up during the trial. So since some of them weren't mentioned and he was in the end only sentenced for knowledge of a high treasonable offence.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf6:52

He uh got away with the seven years.

Presenter6:55

And can you recall the moment when you realized, at whatever age, how very vulnerable your father had been during all this time?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf7:03

That was when I was 13, 14, yes indeed. And indeed, I was first challenged within the organization, the Hitler Youth Organization for the 10 to 14 year olds, of which everybody was a member, and so was I, in 1943, when one of the leaders in the hierarchy called me in and said, you are a social democrat, a term I had never heard. I had never heard because there was no particular reason why one should hear it in Nazi Germany.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf7:35

And from that moment onwards, I suppose it was pretty clear what was going on around me and where I stood.

Presenter7:43

Shall we have your next record?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf7:44

Well, my next record is quite closely related to this part of our conversation. It's a German labor movement song, a which was sung by not only by my father and his friends, but it was sung above all

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf7:58

On a memorable Christmas Day in the concentration camp in which I was in 1944 by the German former trade union and Socialist Party functionaries who were in that prison. Indeed, we spent the whole of Christmas Day singing working class labor movement songs. This is one I remember.

Presenter8:34

What you got to feel

Presenter8:39

On the hell of the beauty of the faith

Presenter8:43

Here's the close.

Presenter9:03

Van Wer Schweiten Zeit and Zeit, sung by German workers and recorded in the late nineteen twenties, and Memories for Sir Ralph Dahrendorf of Christmas nineteen forty four in a concentration camp. Why had you been sent there?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf9:15

Because we'd started an organization at school which was distributing fly sheets and anti-Nazi texts which really revealed, insofar as we knew about it, the crimes of the SS and of the Nazis in general. And on one occasion, this friend of mine who was arrested with me sent a letter to me which was intercepted naturally because my father was in prison. And that's how they got hold of us. And from then on, things took their course.

Presenter9:50

Weren't you put into solitary confinement?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf9:51

I was put into solitary confinement at first.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf9:54

and after a period in solitary confinement and slightly disagreeable interrogations, we were marched to a nearby camp, which is now in Poland.

Presenter10:06

You smile slightly now when you recall it, but you must have been terrified.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf10:09

But you must

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf10:10

Well, uh of course it was terrifying, but uh you know, one must remember I was fifteen, my friend was sixteen.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf10:17

We really were quite young and of course when you are that age I suppose you aren't particularly frightened because you just do things. You do the things which um which you believe in without thinking of all the ramifications. I think it was probably much tougher it was certainly much tougher for my mother than it was for me.

Presenter10:35

Did you get much to eat?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf10:36

Very little. It was a very cold winter in that eastern part of Germany and there was a little soup at five or five thirty in the morning and then a bit of bread and something in the late afternoon. If we hadn't been helped by the people with whom we sang these old songs, I'm not sure we would have survived.

Presenter11:04

So you were there for what about two or three months?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf11:06

For three months? Yes, it was only about two months. Then, on the day on which actually the German army retreated to the river Oder, one of the SS traps.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf11:15

literally kicked us out of out of the camp. He gave us a little bit of paper which said this boy must never attend secondary school in Germany again, which was a classic case of cruelty, bureaucracy and other German virtues mixed into. And we we just got away across the river and and home.

Presenter11:39

I I don't want to overdramatize, but one presumes that even though it was only two months, uh it presumably it's two months of your life which have influenced the rest of it, really.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf11:47

They have influenced the rest of it. You know, it makes a difference whether you have a sort of gut feeling about liberty or whether liberty is an intellectual sense of what may be right for intellectual reasons. And for me, liberty has always remained almost a response to, if not claustrophobia, then solitary confinement and prison and camp existence and the cruelty which I've seen with my own eyes. Yes, yes, it was quite important.

Presenter12:16

Record number three.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf12:17

Well, number three, of course, is in

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf12:20

substance very close to what we've been talking about because it's about Auschwitz, but it's sung by Joan Bass, who uh who is a great campaigning

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf12:30

artist and uh I like her a lot and uh listen to many of her songs.

Speaker 312:36

Here by my window in Germany A morning bird flies close to me On his wing I see a yellow star The lights are on in the factory Frost is hung on the linden tree And I remember where we are

Presenter13:06

Joan Byers singing for Sasha.

Presenter13:09

April nineteen forty-five, and Berlin was liberated and your father was set free from prison. What sort of liberators were the Russians? What was your experience?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf13:19

The very first lot was friendly, these were front line soldiers, but they didn't last more than one or two hours. And then

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf13:29

The Russians started looting and raping and it was a pretty rough experience, the liberation of Berlin in 1945. However, I went immediately to offer my services in building up a new administration in that district of Berlin. And the first job I had was the deputy head of the food services for a borough of Berlin, which meant that I had to determine how much we only had basic foodstuffs like barrels of vegetable oil, a bit of meat, flour, where they had to go in this borough where the distribution points were. And then I actually had to order Russian soldiers to take them in their trucks to these places.

Presenter14:19

misses Uni are now aged sixteen.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf14:21

That was me, aged 16, along with the chap who was in charge was a communist who was a photographer by training. So the two of us actually were responsible for keeping Berliners alive, if not well fed. It was a turbulent, fascinating time. It was partly depressing, obviously, but it was above all, for me and for our family, a time of great hopes.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf14:47

which were then to be disappointed by the Russians, of course.

Presenter14:50

What about the Americans as liberators? What was your experience there?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf14:55

The f

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf14:56

My watch was not stolen by a Russian who were quite renowned for taking everybody's watches, but by an American soldier.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf15:06

But that was undoubtedly an isolated incident.

Presenter15:10

and the British as liberators.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf15:13

That's a great experience.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf15:16

My father was then the vice-chairman of the East German Social Democrats.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf15:21

And he refused to go along with the forced merger of the Social Democrats and the Communists into the Socialist Unity Party.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf15:29

The late Socialist Unity Party, as one can fortunately say now, the party which has fortunately disappeared.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf15:35

after the ninth of november, nineteen eighty nine.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf15:38

On the day on which the crucial vote was taken in the committee of the East German Social Democrats, and he voted against, he came home, rang his American and British friends, and they came within minutes and said, You are not safe here. We have to fly you out.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf15:53

And so the next morning my father and I were flown out of Berlin from Gatu in a Dakota to Hanover and then taken to uh the Control Commission for Germany, where we encountered the young officer who was in charge of political parties in the Control Commission, a gentleman by the name of Noel Annan.

Presenter16:12

Is this where you think then your regard for Britain and the British began?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf16:17

It must have done. Perhaps it started even earlier. My mother was very pro-English without ever having been there, and always said you must go to England, you must go to England. Anyway, in forty eighth in January I went.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf16:28

And uh and I think got hooked.

Presenter16:31

It's very easy to see from everything that you've said so far that uh politics were inevitably going to be a part of your life. What about scholarship? Who or what stimulated your interest in things academic?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf16:44

I actually felt very strongly that scholarship was what I wanted to do and as a student

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf16:52

For the most part I did classics, Greek and Latin and um and philosophy.

Presenter16:57

You wanted to be a classic scholar at once.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf16:58

I wanted to be a classic scholar or rather

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf17:01

I was particularly intrigued by classical scholarship, did a number of smaller bits of work identifying manuscripts which hadn't been placed properly, medieval manuscripts of Latin texts. But then in the end it was my teacher in philosophy, Josef Koenig, who persuaded me to write my dissertation in that subject.

Presenter17:25

Record number four.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf17:27

Perhaps I should start by saying everything we've talked about shows that I'm a person of words and not of music. I discovered music in the form of jazz. And I discovered it when I was a student in Hamburg in the late 40s and early 50s. And there were certain classical bits which I loved and continue to like very much indeed. Clarinet is an instrument I like. Sidney Besche and the Bass and Street Blues epitomises really what I liked about jazz.

Presenter18:45

Basin Street Blues played by Sidney Becher.

Presenter18:48

You became, Ralph Darndorff, a doctor of philosophy at twenty two. You got two more doctorates, one from the LSE in fact, and then became a professor at the age of twenty nine. What stirred you then from the academic life ten years after that, and attracted you into politics?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf19:04

My interest in politics has always been an interest

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf19:08

In constitutional politics, that is, in uh the critical situations in which the question of liberty itself is at stake. I'm not particularly interested in normal everyday politics. In personal power.

Presenter19:19

in personal power.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf19:20

Uh Well, personal power only interests me if it is relevant to uh these basic and constitutional issues. Otherwise it doesn't.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf19:29

And so in the mid sixties there was a time in Germany where the question of how a change of government can be brought about was rather important. I published a lot in newspapers, made speeches and then in 1967 an accident, that is the unfortunate death of a sitting member, brought the German Liberal Party to approach me and ask me whether I was prepared to stand for the land parliament of the region of Germany in which I was teaching, the southwest, Baden-Württemberg, in the spring of 1968. So I started, I think I could say, two years of campaigning on behalf of the small Liberal Party, which then in October 1969 formed a government with Billy Brandt and his Social Democrats to bring about the change which I was about.

Presenter20:21

So within a year of being elected to your regional um parliament, as you say, you were then in the federal.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf20:26

Elected to the federal parliament, yes.

Presenter20:27

in the federal parliament and within a year of that you were gone.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf20:31

Well

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf20:32

I'm glad I said what I said about constitutional and normal politics. I remember the day on which I was appointed as a Minister of State in the Foreign Office by the President of the Republic, where I met

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf20:43

A colleague was actually the manufacturer Rosenthal.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf20:47

Who was in the economic ministry and he looked at me and he said, Well, the two of us should really go home now because we've achieved what we wanted. We wanted a change of government, but we don't particularly want to be in these governments in everyday politics. So it was all an anti-climax. Absolutely right. It was a great anticlimax. And I'm bound to say I was pleased when

Presenter20:59

So it was all an anti-climate?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf21:07

In June 1970, the opportunity came along to expand my international activities and go to Brussels.

Presenter21:14

Some people said you were kicked upstairs when you were sent to Brussels.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf21:17

I think that's probably not true. I think if I had wanted to, I could have stayed there.

Presenter21:22

But you then set about stirring it up there, didn't you, Rich?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf21:22

But you then set about

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf21:25

Here's a

Presenter21:26

He wrote two anonymous articles uh in a German newspaper in Diezeit criticising the European Commission and and calling it a farce.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf21:34

If you I see you know all about me.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf21:39

Yes, this was quite a dramatic story. Uh it wasn't done, really.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf21:43

to publish these articles decrying the common agricultural policy, calling the Commission a bit of a farce and even more the European Parliament.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf21:52

So a motion of censure was moved in the European Parliament.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf21:56

Which was slightly difficult because it the motion of censure in the European Parliament cannot be directed against an individual Commissioner. It's got to be against the whole Commission. So it was predictable that it would be withdrawn at the end of the day.

Speaker 222:05

Withdraw

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf22:07

And there was a marvellous hour in the European Parliament where every single parliamentary group

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf22:13

attacked me, ex with the exception of the Italian Communists, who had a spokesman by the name of D'Angelo Santi.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf22:22

the sacred angels, and he defended me. So it wasn't my best hour, perhaps.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf22:28

But curiously

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf22:30

Then the motion was withdrawn, and, believe it or not,

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf22:34

One after the other of the speakers of that hour came up to me and said, basically, of course, you're right, and we've got to do something about it.

Presenter22:42

So four years as a Commissioner, and then came the call from the LSE, which we'll hear about in a minute, but let's have your next record first. What's that?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf22:49

One of the uh groups which I always liked in my

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf22:54

jazz days and they continue to the present day, I have the record at home, is Stefan Grappelli, the jazz violinist and the gypsy guitarist Jungle Reinhardt. And I think we're going to hear night and day.

Presenter23:17

Okay.

Presenter24:04

Django Reinhardt and Stefan Grippelli and Night and Day.

Presenter24:08

The London School of Economics in the mid seventies was considered the the home, the the cradle of student unrest and demonstration, but

Presenter24:15

You somehow didn't seem to mind that too much, did you?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf24:19

Well, first of all, when I came in nineteen seventy four,

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf24:23

The worst was over, of course. The most lively period at Odyssey had been in'sixty seven, sixty eight,'sixty nine,'seventy perhaps.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf24:31

But I inherited, I think, more the divisions which were left behind, and some memory of the late sixties, than uh that particular climate itself.

Presenter24:43

But you applauded uh the lack of complacency in the

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf24:46

I certainly applauded the lack of complacency. I'm not one of those who would ever argue that the LSE should be quiet. Of course I was upset when the school got into the news for something that was happening, occupation of my office or some huge demonstration or whatever. At the same time, I would hate it if the school was not in the news for this sort of thing. It is a seismograph of the earthquakes of society. And since there are earthquakes all the time, you may as well look at the seismograph and try and make sense of what goes on. So I say this.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf25:20

With a degree of sympathy for my successors who have to cope with their own problems, I am now in the safe haven of Oxford.

Presenter25:29

But do you think that that students through the eighties, through the last decade, became rather too complacent?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf25:36

Complaisant is one way of putting it, but the other way I suppose would be to say

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf25:42

That the eighties in general, and certainly in universities.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf25:47

have been a decade in which there was tremendous emphasis on individual success, on individuals making their way through academia and then out of it and into the city or into business or into the professions not usually into academia. I am told at Oxford by the careers officer of the university that in in the last two years

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf26:09

There's been quite a significant change in students' orientation and the characteristic feature now

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf26:16

Is that people who've taken their first degrees hang on, stay around? And of course, if you talk about LSE, but the same would be true for other universities. What this means is that there is great pressure on the graduate side of universities. There is undergraduates, once they've finished their degrees, don't go away, but stay on to take at least a master's and perhaps try to do a doctorate. These are quite rapid and quite fundamental changes, which undoubtedly will have their effect on all of us.

Presenter26:47

Record number six.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf26:49

Record number six is George Gershwin and Summer Time.

Speaker 327:04

All of us.

Presenter27:25

Harolyn Blackwell singing Summer Time from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess with the London Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle.

Presenter27:32

So you took Sir Ralph to the British way of life back in the seventies. You you said at the time you found us much more relaxed than the Germans.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf27:40

I was softening.

Presenter27:41

But you also observed many times in the seventies what you called our um British solidarity. You said that we liked being alike. We liked

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf27:47

And yes we

Presenter27:49

queuing and being kind to each other and having tea breaks and

Presenter27:53

We were quite lazy, you said.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf27:57

Well, and very clubbable, and in many ways, extremely agreeable. The problem is.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf28:03

And I suppose that's true for every country.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf28:06

You know, countries and people and individuals, I suppose, have the strength of their weaknesses and the weaknesses of their strengths. You can't have it always. So if you like to be with others and don't particularly want to stand out and emphasize what's different about you, if you enjoy company, has tea breaks indeed, or drink in the pub, or whatever.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf28:28

Um productivity in business is not likely to be terribly high.

Presenter28:32

You wrote in nineteen seventy eight there is a fundamental liberty in Britain which is not easily found elsewhere. Is that still true, Phil?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf28:42

Yes, it is still true.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf28:44

And at the same time

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf28:46

I'm saying now what I wouldn't necessarily have said what I wouldn't have said fifteen years ago, and that is that it would now be desirable to have our liberties entrenched in a Bill of Rights.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf28:59

Which perhaps was not so necessary in the past, in which one could rely. I mean, when refugees came from Germany in the 1930s, they came from a country which had a marvellous constitution, and all sorts of things were guaranteed, to a country which had no constitution, at least no written constitution. And yet they came from a country in which they were persecuted to a country in which they felt safe. That's the old British liberty which lived in all institutions and was never threatened. I'm afraid I'm no longer entirely certain that we can make the same statement without adding something about the need to have it put on paper that there are certain rights which are justiciable, where we can go to court to fight for them and make sure that they are not violated by governments and public administration as well as by private agencies. So there is a certain change, perhaps inevitable.

Presenter29:59

Some more music.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf30:01

Well now we get uh for a jazz pan, of course, to the classical man, Satchmal Louis Armstrong, who clearly belongs in the discs which I take along, and I've chosen Blueberry Hill.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf30:20

I found my thrill.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf30:25

On blueberry hill.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf30:30

Ah blueberry.

Presenter30:31

Unreal

Presenter30:35

When I found you

Presenter30:41

The moon stood still

Presenter30:45

On Blueberry Hill and Lingam On Dill

Presenter30:55

My dreams came true.

Presenter30:58

Louis Armstrong and Blueberry Hill.

Presenter31:01

Paint me finely, if you will, Sir Ralph Darndorff, a picture of you on the desert island. What are you going to do?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf31:09

I suppose much of the time I'm bound to be sitting and staring at uh the sea and um thinking about things and then um missing my typewriter and a bit of paper in order to put it on paper even if there is no one ever to read it.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf31:30

Now the answer will tell you immediately that my mind wouldn't turn to the practical things of life as quickly as perhaps it should, but in due course it would, naturally, in due course on the island would be pretty soon.

Presenter31:45

We can't end without my asking you, as a man of Europe, about the events of Europe over the past couple of years Poland, Czechoslovakia, Roumania, and of course Berlin and the end of the wall. Did you believe that you would live to see all that?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf32:01

Uh no, is the honest answer. I believed that these regimes would collapse.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf32:08

But I didn't act in everyday life as if I really believed it. That is I assumed, like most others, that we would have to come to terms with these horrible regimes over a fairly long period of time. But when it happened, it was one of the most wonderful times of my life, and I'll never forget it. It was the great liberating time.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf32:33

And the uh the euphoria, the delight, the sheer pleasure.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf32:38

From

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf32:39

Mazowiecki being elected and sitting a lonely and slightly sad man in the Polish same through the Berlin Wall, the breaching of the Berlin Wall, to Wáclaw Havel, the unlikely president, going up to the castle in Prague. Just marvellous.

Presenter33:00

Your last record.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf33:02

Well, my last record is a confession, actually. My last record is um above all an instrument, the bagpipe.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf33:10

Melancholy instrument, northern instrument, total music as I see it. I don't think I've often confessed even my wife, who knows me very well, will be surprised.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf33:21

to hear that I have chosen this as my last record, The Pipers Lament.

Presenter34:18

The Pipers Lament, I can't really believe you play that in Ottawa.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf34:21

I don't play it.

Presenter34:23

You didn't.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf34:23

The f

Presenter34:24

Now, which of those records is the one that's more important to you than any of the others? Which one of the eight?

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf34:30

More important is a big word, but uh I would probably take the Louis Armstrong.

Presenter34:31

I'm sorry.

Presenter34:34

The Blueberry Hill.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf34:36

Yeah.

Presenter34:36

And a book you have to choose. You've got the Bible and you've got the complete works of Shakespeare waiting for you.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf34:41

It's got to be poetry, which one can read time and again, and it's got to be a bit mysterious. So it's subphos poetry, the fragments of it, and some of them complete.

Presenter34:51

And your luxury.

Professor Ralf Dahrendorf34:53

I'm sort of torn between playing cards, patience cards to be exact, and dice, but I think it'll be dice so that I can test my luck and even the luck of a ship coming over the horizon and collecting me.

Presenter35:06

Sir Ralph Downdorff, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 235:17

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.