Thursday, August 04, 2005

Gdansk 08/03

Gdansk Wednesday Aug 3rd......700 PM.....the day has been in the 70s and alternates sunny (that Rene Magritte "umbrella" sky without the umbrellas) and moody....just right!

Today has been discovering the past, often the recent past. I took a little ferryboat to Westerplatte, the lovely green spit which guards Gdansk's harbor where the Nazis in their huge battleship Schleswig Holstein fired the first shots of the 2nd World War, September 1st, 1939.

Gdansk, lying where the mighty Vistula River which comes from the Tatras above Krakow and goes through Warsaw, empties into the Baltic. It has been a major place for a thousand years and Frederick the Great said whomever owned Danzig owned Poland. Hitler must have read his mentor. Today at Westerplatte, around the quite gruesome Socialist-realist monument to the martyred Polish defenders, there were two large German tour groups.....both noisy (endemic to groups) but particular hideous and largely pinquid. I was reminded of Japanese tourists on that boat trip I took to Pearl Harbor. The nerve! Not only were the Polish Westerplatte troops martyred, so were the workers in the city's Polish Post Office....an event so well done by that German-Kashubian (a local minor Slavic tribe) great Grunter Grass. Poland excels in martyrs.....Grass was born in Gdansk when it was the Free City of Danzig (a League of Nations invention) and even though German was his language he is revered here and he is not even dead---yet. The Poles like the Viennese do seem to prefer their heroes to be dead though a fair number of them are alas also chronic.

Aside: I also went to about a half dozen major churches today including St Mary's said to be the largest brick building in the entire world. It was ashes after the Soviet Liberation.....and the restoration as commented before is beyond brilliant. I wonder though about the role of the church. I noticed in Quebec that the almighty church has essentially become a tool of just weddings and funerals after the Anglicanization threat passed. Now that the Polish Pope is dead (and the mightily unsympathetic...and Bavarian to boot....Benedict rules), now that Communism is gone, I wonder if slowly the Church here will become just baptism, weddings and funerals.
It seemed to be me possible. Where once in Polish churches at almost any time of day there were throngs praying, today the crowds were sparse and remarkably prolish looking. If Rome loses the Polish spirit there will be a gap as big as Texas.

See, being in a city full of thoughts sure turns the juices on more than such vapid pits as Singapore and Dubai.

When the sun shines, the city shines with an efullugence which makes the spots jump around in the eyes! Gdansk/Danzig was never very large. When it was the League of Nations Free City it barely had 400,000 people, and yet its historical role is mammoth - and not just the 20th century years. The Gdansk merchant class were as rich as pompous as the Spanish court in the 15th and 16th century, building great mansions and guildhalls, the renaissance rooms being lovingly restored and stuffed with the oddest things. Neptune of course was huge and the fountains/bricabrac/furniture with Neptunian themes abound.

Red was the color of choice in things, perhaps because winter up here is no doubt extremely monochrome. The city had huge minorities then: there are two sections of town called "Old" and "New" Scotland, a large and rather patrician Jewish community which the Nazis of course obliterated and even the odd Arab and Chinaman: Such was the city's trade. The inventor idiot-savant Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer here (and gave the United States of America a way of telling the weather which separates us from every single other bit of the known world, a situation not likely to change with our present yahoo government). Schopenhauer was born here but his allegiance oddly was more to Poland than to Prussia which irritated Potsdam to the quick. I am a little chary of too much Malthus talk about place vs personality (how in god's name to explain the Zulus?) but some things seem for sure. Danzig/Gdansk produced rebels/heretics by the score. Look at Lech Walesa as the most recent example. He who is unfortunately alive and not martyred, he who was chucked out much as Churchill was. It's in the soil? It's in the air? One thing is for damned sure, the light here is wrenchingly beautiful when the sun does shine.

OK that's Gdansk for the moment. All is not bliss. The more highly restored areas arerantically popular with Polish tourists as ugly as any...street martkitchstands-and people do wander around rather distressingly eating ice cream cones and carrying balloons. There is enough amber to turn the world a hepatitis-yellow and much is sure to be fake. (The test: rub a kleenex on a piece of it...if light paper then adheres magnet-fashion, it is real)....there are no antiques though: too many wars, rapes, expulsions. The Soviets tried to move as many of the Poles out of their "liberated" city of Vilnius (Wilno) as possible and leave it to the Lithuanians. Many of these people ended here. One hopes in this century that these horrible sweeps of people might stop...I thought they had with Hitler and Stalin...but then came Bosnia and then came Rwanda. The Poles though have no one much in their borders to hate and I am sure it rather bewilders them.

-FRED

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