Warsaw Tales, edited by Helen Constantine and selected and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Oxford University Press, 256 pp, £12.99, ISBN: 978-0192855565
1/4 h west of Hohenstein on one of the highest points of the battlefield, the Tannenberg National Monument, 193m (shortly before on the road restaurant Tannenbergkrug with the Tannenberg battle relief, in summer regular lectures on the course of the battle, 50 Pf.), designed by Walter and Joh. Krüger, inaugurated in 1928. Visits: In summer 8-18, in winter 9-17 hourly guided tours 50 Pf. Eight massive, 24m high towers enclose the courtyard of honour.
Grieben Travel Guide to East Prussia, 1938
To say that Warsaw is extremely important to the people of Poland would be an understatement. In Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 movie Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament), set in 1945, one of the characters states to main protagonist Maciek – upon hearing that he is from the capital – that ‘without Warsaw we are not the same’.
Warsaw as a city was for centuries a symbol of Polishness itself, and especially since 1945. With the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between Prussia, Tsarist Russia and Austria-Hungary in 1795, an independent Poland was wiped off the map for over a century. Warsaw, the capital of the commonwealth and seat of the Polish royal court since 1596, became the third largest city in the Russian empire. In the nineteenth century it was a thriving centre for merchants and civil servants, expanding out from the medieval old town thanks to urbanisation and industrialisation. In his 1911 short story ‘Apparitions’, in which a group of drunk friends have a vision of Warsaw past and present in a wine shop in the old town, Bolesław Prus paints a picture of the city at the time: ‘Summer, daybreak. The Old Town Marketplace, naturally. In the middle of the square, not particularly well-cobbled, rises a now non-existent town hall. Around it two rows of houses can be seen: one forms part of the northern, the other part of the western wall of the Marketplace. Houses with thick stone walls, painted in colours: red, green, blue, and decorated with images of saints, lions, gryphons, and warships.’
Warsaw was the starting point for the two major failed uprisings in 1830 and 1863, and it was here on November 11th, 1918 that Polish revolutionaries under the command of Józef Piłsudski captured key positions in Warsaw from German troops. Seizing the opportunity of a German defeat in World War I and the Russian revolution, an independent Poland emerged as a flourishing republic, again with Warsaw as its capital.
The construction of modern residential areas soon began, also to cope with the increasing number of inhabitants: around 800,000 people lived in the city in 1918, but by 1939 it was home to almost 1,300,000, making it the seventh biggest city in Europe, ahead of Rome or Madrid. Remaining an industrialised city, Warsaw considered itself beautiful and truly European. As Maria Kuncewicz writes in her 1938 short story “ZOO” about the Warsaw Zoological Garden that had opened in 1928: ‘When this grand abbreviation [ZOO] catches the eye, a thrilling European shiver runs down the Varsovian spine. The ZOO is bourgeois luxury, it’s culture on a Sunday, it’s caring about our brother-wolves and our sister-leopards, it’s kiddywinks wriggling on the backs of good-natured exotic creatures, and above all it’s an illusion of Berlin, of a capital steeped in the best beer, and starlit by the most fabulous electrics.’
Just a year after this story was published, the people of Berlin came to Warsaw and brought destruction. In 1939 Poland became the first country in Europe to resist the Nazis, and after its defeat in October 1939 it was divided between Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union along lines agreed in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It was fully occupied by Nazi Germany as a slave state after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, and emerged again in 1945 as a communist state after the Red Army had marched in. Six million of its people were dead and much of the country lay in ruins.
Warsaw had been at the epicentre of violence and tragedy and paid the price for it. In 1939, ten percent of its buildings were destroyed by German bombing. In 1943, the Jewish ghetto that the Nazis had created around the Muranów neighbourhood – the largest ghetto in Europe – rose in rebellion, resulting in the destruction of the area. The entire district in northern Warsaw was wiped from the surface of the earth, leaving only a field of rubble. In 1944, the heroic but equally doomed Warsaw Uprising began, with the fighters of the Polish underground Home Army resisting the Nazis for two months. Large parts of the Old Town so endearingly portrayed in Prus’ story, most of the city centre and the Powiśle and Wola districts were destroyed. German troops, on the express orders of Hitler, then razed the rest of the city with explosions and incendiary bombs as they fled from the advancing Red Army. The Russians lingered on the eastern bank of the river Vistula to let the Germans finish the destruction.
In January 1945 Warsaw was a sea of ruins. The devastation of the city was almost total, and the new communist authorities were even considering moving the capital to Łódź, which had survived the war mostly intact. According to one idea, Warsaw was to be left the way it was as a war memorial for future generations. In her 1947 short story ‘The Funeral’, Zofia Petersowa (1899/1902-1955) describes the ruins: ‘Warsaw was still piled with heaps of rubble. It was black with charred ruins and red with bricks ripped from the insides of houses. Like bones protruding from their torsos, girders, singed planks and metal bars blocked every passage, creating a tangle of wires, toppled lamp posts, shattered paving stones, roofs and trusses, pieces of internal walls, marble and stucco, broken doors and windows, the remains of bath tubs and smashed-up stoves. The streets were like fantastical fallow ground where in between the borders of the empty blackened skeletons that had once been houses, winding paths climbed and writhed, either to the height of each storey or through bomb holes. The sky showed straight through the collapsed interiors of the apartment houses, and only here and there was an abandoned stove still standing, attached to a piece of brick wall.’
During the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin and the western Allies had agreed that Poland would be given former German territories: the provinces of Pomerania and Silesia and the southern half of the province of East Prussia. The German population was forcefully expelled and the areas repopulated with Poles expelled from the Kresy regions in the east of the country, which were in turn divided between Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. Over five million Germans, many of them Protestants, were forced to move west, and over three million mostly Catholic Poles were forced to follow them, all leaving their homes behind. The losses to Warsaw’s urban architecture were estimated at around 84 per cent, with industrial infrastructure and historic monuments destroyed at 90 per cent and residential buildings at 72 per cent Yet already in 1945 there was a steady influx of people to the city, former residents as well as displaced persons from the eastern regions, still attracted by the dream and the idea of the capital. These people virtually began the reconstruction process of the city on their own. In addition, Stalin needed international recognition of a communist Poland – and this meant a Poland with its historic capital. In February 1945, the Communist National Council passed a resolution that called for Warsaw’s reconstruction and formed the Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy, the Office for the Reconstruction of the Capital (BOS).
Reconstruction of other war-destroyed cities in Europe often focused only on selected historical sites, which were then surrounded by new buildings, but thanks to the efforts of Professor Jan Zachwatowicz, head of the BOS Department of Monumental Architecture and Warsaw’s architect major Marian Spychalski, the focus of the reconstruction was on rebuilding the structure of the prewar city. This meant reconstructing whole streets, buildings and monuments from scratch – based on documentation, paintings, photography or even memory. One of the sources used to rebuild the old town were the paintings of Venetian landscape and city painter Bernardo Bellotto (1722-1780), who had lived in Warsaw for the last sixteen years of his life. In a country devastated by war and not benefiting from the US Marshall Plan that helped in the reconstruction of Western Europe and indeed Germany, the actual building material came from the rubble of the city itself, or was either donated or acquired from elsewhere in the new Poland – which in turn meant that reconstruction there had to wait. Also, all the land within Warsaw was nationalised, which on the one hand sped up the reconstruction of whole streets but on the other meant that anyone displaced by war might return and find their house no longer in their possession.
By the 1950s large parts of the Old Town and the so-called Royal Route leading to the city palace had been meticulously reconstructed thanks to 600 million repurposed bricks from Warsaw and elsewhere. There were other, more contemporary additions to the cityscape: green belts were introduced and the street grid adjusted to make transportation more efficient, and there was also the erection of the Palace of Culture and Science in 1955, a massive social realist tower presented as a ‘gift’ from the Soviet Union. For those flocking to the rebuilt capital in the 1950s and ’60s it became a symbol of hope and progress. In his 1957 short story ‘The Palace of Culture’, Kazimierz Orłoś captures the fascination with the palace of the people living in the poorer neighbourhoods of the city: ‘Horse-drawn carts go up and down the road, because everyone here has horses, now and then cars go by, and one red-and-white-bus, with the biggest cloud of dust behind it, if the weather’s dry. From here you can hardly see the city, just the church towers and the Palace of Culture. Most often we look at the Palace of Culture. The sun reflects off the golden spire, and we can even see the white stone walls. They look nice against the blue sky.’
After the experience of imposed Stalinism, lasting until Stalin’s death in 1953, and then periods of martial law, an independent Poland only emerged again in 1989 thanks to the civil resistance of the Solidarity movement that had started during a strike at the wharf in Gdańsk, the former German Danzig, in 1980. All that history, the destruction, flight, forced migration and subjugation in first one and then another totalitarian state are today clearly visible in the urban fabric of Poland. In cities like Gdańsk, Olsztynek, Wrocław or Szczecin there is still plenty of pre-1945 German architecture in use: the town hall in Olsztyn is the neo-Gothic German town hall built in 1916, as is the one in Olsztynek, and the TRAFO arts space in Szczecin sits in a former German power station. In the case of Warsaw however, some of the ruins of nationalism and empire were turned into the building material of the future.
While Warsaw was being blown to pieces in the war, the Tannenberg memorial just sat there. It was a humungous thing. The massive, octagonal red-brick monument with its eight, twenty- metre-high high towers surrounded by a large park was erected near the town of Hohenstein in the province of East Prussia of the German Reich, a town that after 1945 became Olsztynek in Poland. The memorial was built to commemorate the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914 – the only battle which produced a clear victory for Germany in the First World War, with the German commander during that battle and later president of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, becoming a German hero. The nationalist memorial was one of the most important tourist attractions in East Prussia in the 1920s and 1930s and the scene of mass gatherings of the National Socialist regime, for example in 1934 when Hindenburg’s coffin and that of his wife Gertrud (who died in 1921) were buried here against the wishes of the president – he had wanted to be interred in the family grave in Hanover. When the Red Army approached in early 1945, the German troops removed Hindenburg’s mortal remains and blew up the Tannenberg memorial. What was left of it was completely removed by Polish pioneers in 1953, its bricks and granite repurposed as building materials for Warsaw – building a Polish future from German rubble.
Despite shared origins in resisting colonial powers and emerging through a successful revolution, one thing that differentiates Ireland and Poland, Dublin and Warsaw, is the experience of the European context of destruction. The experience of total war, the complete destruction of villages, towns and cities and the flight and expulsion of millions of people does not exist on the island of Ireland. The worst ravages of the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War as well as the German bombs of World War II and the Irish bombs of the Northern Ireland conflict only ever affected a relatively small part of Dublin. Most of the dramatic changes to the cityscape of the Irish capital in the twentieth century were perpetrated by Dublin City Council and greedy investors, but not war. On this island it was always the closeness of the killer to the man he kills, to paraphrase Louis MacNeice. The massive destruction of World War II, the immense population exchanges of continental Europe after 1945 and the superhuman efforts of rebuilding on both sides of the Iron Curtain are nothing that can be read in the fabric of Dublin today. ‘Warsaw Tales’, from which all the quotations in this essay have been taken, does enable an Irish audience however to relate to that history. The book, published by the Oxford University Press and edited by Helen Constantine, presents twelve stories selected and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, long-time English translator of Olga Tokarczuk, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019 for her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and a former resident of Warsaw. It brings together key Warsaw writers past and present, some of them translated for the first time into English, among them Ludwik Hering, Hanna Krall, Olga Tokarczuk and Krysztof Varga. All celebrate the Polish capital in their writings, and as a whole the collection contributes to a greater understanding of how the history of Warsaw manifests in memory, post-memory and literature, and how it continues to inspire artists to this day. As Lloyd-Jones writes in her introduction: ‘After the war Warsaw showed how irrepressible it is – its motto is semper invicta, meaning ‘always invincible’ – and it can boast some of the world’s most spectacular reconstructions of historical buildings, a process that still continues. Since Poland became a free, democratic country again in 1989, the city has had a new burst of strength, and nowadays it feels like an energetic modern capital. Although on my first visit, in the 1980s, the impression I had was of a wounded city, today it feels vibrant, buzzing with cultural events, sporting new buildings and exciting architectural projects. It’s as if something I’d been seeing in black and white had burst into colour – just like in the final story of this collection.’
Warsaw, doomed to disappear, became an invincible city, and the history of Poland is proudly cemented into its cityscape today. Even in communism, this reconstructed city of Russian merchants and Jagiellonian royal pomp provided many people with not only a place to live, but offered a new start, even for those classes that had formerly been all but excluded from participation in urban life. Besides this shaping of social identity, it created new standards of reconstruction and preservation. In 1980 already, Warsaw’s Old Town was selected as part of the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage list, and in 2011 the archives of BOS were recognised as one of the most valuable examples of human documentary heritage and listed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Especially in Dublin, where on the one hand so much former British colonial infrastructure is still in use today and on the other much sustainable urban planning was sacrificed on the altar of consumerism and tourism, does it make sense to look to the Polish capital for an understanding of the inspiration and pride a city might provide. Reading the stories of Warsaw might be a good starting point for that.
The future of Poland made from German rubble also still stands today, at the corner of Charles-de-Gaulle Square, a roundabout in the city centre featuring the distinctive palm tree sculpture of artist Joanna Rajkowska. It is the massive modernist colossus of the Banking and Financial Center with its endless rows of windows, known locally as Dom Partii, the Party House. Designed by Wacław Kłyszewski, Jerzy Mokrzyński and Eugeniusz Wierzbicki, it opened in 1952 as the seat of the central committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. The building has a large inner courtyard surrounded by arcades and today no longer houses Marxist-Leninist ideology and political planners but consumerism and capitalism. There are luxury shops and chic cafes and restaurants on the ground floor (until 2019 there was a Ferrari car showroom here) and a number of financial companies on the upper floor. Holding it all together in the facade is the granite from the Tannenberg Memorial.
1/2/2025
Marcel Krueger would like to thank Dr John Kearns for his help with this essay.
