Historically, Poles have fought as fiercely for their architecture as for their freedoms. Poland's cities, palaces, and castles—smoking ruins at the end of World War II—are now triumphs of resurrection that rank among Europe's most splendid. Benjamin Moser tours the treasures.
In 1848, Honoré de Balzac published his last, and probably worst, novel. His physical demise would not occur for another two years, but artistic rigor mortis had already set in, and the "inventor of the nineteenth century," who had chronicled every shade of human passion in the almost one hundred volumes of "The Human Comedy," now produced
The Wrong Side of Paris, a work so schmaltzy and reactionary that it reads as if Opus Dei and Barbara Cartland are struggling over the dying writer's soul.
By that point, Balzac had been furtively trysting with a Polish noblewoman for almost two decades. Countess Ewelina Hańska had promised to marry the besotted author once her elderly husband died, but eight long years elapsed between her widowhood and Balzac's trek to the town of Berdychiv, where the couple were at last united. The marriage would not endure: The novelist expired in Paris five months after his wedding day.
Reading the book in the spa at Zamek Kliczków, a thirteenth-century castle in western Poland transformed into a luxury hotel, I understood why the exhausted writer, impoverished despite a lifetime of heroic work, might have longed for the life of a Polish landowner. How tempting to exchange the grime of Paris for summer afternoons of swimming and riding, or for winter evenings spent watching amateur productions in a Gothic Revival theater.
Written in part at Countess Hańska's estate in Wierzchownia, his final book includes a Polish theme: One of its heroines, Baroness Vanda de Mergi, is the granddaughter of a Colonel Tarlowski who had served under Napoleon. Now suffering from an exotic disease, Baroness Vanda has, for years, been unable to move without the assistance of a complicated system of levers and pulleys. (" 'They lift me into the air!' Vanda repeated wildly.")
Her torment is lessened only by luxury. "I am still happy, sir," she tells a visitor, "in the frightful misfortune which besieges me; for wealth is a great help to me in bearing my sufferings..." Vanda convalesces amid the highest-quality bric-a-brac—from paintings by Géricault to a diamond-encrusted snuffbox—although for the sake of her health, it is just as well that she can never leave her bed: If ever she parted the heavy damask curtains, she would see that it is all a sham.
Her devoted father and son are on the brink of starvation, but they realize that the fabulous dream palace is indispensable to what is left of their loved one's health. "If we had been poor," she marvels, "I would have ceased to exist eighteen years ago." Half-crazed, wildly passionate, completely divorced from reality—but mysteriously alluring and enchantingly musical—Baroness Vanda is a perfect distillation of almost every mid-nineteenth-century stereotype about Poland.
At the same time, she also points to a deeper truth, and proves that Balzac, if only inadvertently in this case, still towers above lesser writers. A more eloquent metaphor for Vanda's ancestral country is hard to conceive: Like Poland, she has been left for dead time and again; and like Poland, her eventual miraculous recovery comes in large part through the improbable means of a single-minded devotion to unaffordable architecture.
Today, a visitor can observe the most basic form of this strange national characteristic in almost every Polish town, church, and tourist office, which always boast two photographs. The first, grainy and black-and-white, shows a chunk of house, a stray chimney, or a cracked statue protruding from a sea of charred bricks in a world as stony and lifeless as the lunar surface. The second photograph shows the same apocalyptic landscape, forty or fifty years on. The barren moonscape has been magically transformed into a bustling market, a spangled Baroque cathedral, or even an entire European city, all so completely resurrected that the ruins are impossible to imagine—just as impossible, perhaps, as it would have been to imagine, in 1945, that a city could ever reemerge from that desolate mound of rubble.
It's clear enough how the devastation in the first photograph came to pass. Warsaw, for example, was bombed in 1939, when Hitler attacked Poland. Then, in 1943, after the defeat of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, a large area of the capital was leveled. The following year, the Nazis repaid the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising with orders to destroy the entire city, "house by house, block by block," my guide tells me almost a dozen times, in case I missed it—"house by house, block by block."
This story is well-known. Less so the reconstruction and what it entailed. "We had to rebuild," Marek Kwiatkowski, a courtly art historian, insists in his office in Warsaw's Łazienki Park, a vast complex of palaces, gardens, amphitheaters, fountains, and monuments where he has worked since 1948. With the pride of an elderly man looking back with satisfaction on his life's work, he gazes out the window and exclaims, "And we rebuilt it all!"
The imperative to rebuild something, in a country so devastated, was clear. But why such emphasis on historic architecture? One is glad the beautiful old buildings are there, but in the giant sea of rubble that was postwar Poland, might there not have been more pressing needs than art-historically faithful reconstruction? How did the Poles pull it off? There is much that is amazing, as well as something
unheimlich, about those perfectly reconstituted facades.
After the war, Poland was one of the poorest countries in Europe, and the Solidarity Centre Foundation, in Gdańsk—where World War II began—emphasizes the bleakness of the People's Republic of Poland, in part for the younger generations lucky not to have experienced it. It also commemorates the Solidarity movement's famous strike at the nearby Gdańsk shipyards—one of the major events contributing to the downfall of communism in Europe—whose thirtieth anniversary is being celebrated this year. The museum's curators have reconstructed the decor of life under communism: the guards barking for documents, the dreary shops empty but for the occasional brick of repellent cheese, and—in a prominent spot, right across from the museum's entrance—a Soviet-era public toilet.
This dismal facility offers its patrons a few sheets of grubby newsprint impaled upon a threateningly protruding metal hook; and in the gift shop, scratchy-looking toilet paper is piled on the counter, clearly a favorite souvenir. The museum mentions the lack of toilet paper so often that it seems to be the one humiliating grievance which sums up all the others. I ask Janusz Malinowski, an advertising executive in Warsaw, about this outsize interest, and he tells me a story I have trouble believing. "Rolls of toilet paper were sold on ropes, not wrapped in plastic," he begins. "But it was very hard to find, because there were always shortages of everything, even if you had money, and people who were fortunate enough to get a whole ropeful—six or eight—couldn't believe their luck. They'd walk home from the store with the toilet paper tied around their neck, like a necklace. They even went out of their way to walk down a busy street, just to show off."
I've heard a lot of stories about life under communism, but the notion of waltzing down the street wearing toilet paper like a diamond ring or a shiny mink coat seems too preposterous, so I check with a friend in Kraków just to be sure. An extravagant display of toilet paper not only suggested wealth, he tells me, but it reeked of friends in high places. "Because you would only know where to get that much toilet paper if someone influential tipped you off."
This was the country that set to rebuilding its churches and palaces and ancient cities. I ask Marek Kwiatkowski how this was possible. "We had to rebuild
because we were poor!" he insists with great animation, as if annoyed that I had missed such an obvious point. "England didn't have to rebuild Coventry Cathedral because it was a rich country." Warsaw was the first city in Europe to decide to rebuild, because, he says once more, "we had to."
Gdańsk may be the most successful reconstruction in the country. With its high-gabled houses, its golden fountains, and its face toward the sea, the Baltic port feels closer to Amsterdam or Stockholm than to Warsaw or Kraków—or it did, until I decided to walk over to the National Museum to see the famous Memling brought here in 1473, after pirates snatched it off the English coast.
A grimmer reality looms behind the Hanseatic charm. Just two blocks from the sushi and souvenirs on the main square, the fairy-tale sparkle gives way to dull concrete, and weedy empty lots flank the way toward the museum. After I emerge from a dank pedestrian underpass, the large museum appears, standing proud amid the crumbling proletarian apartment blocks.
It is easy to imagine what such a beautiful museum might have meant to the people living toilet-paper-less in those dingy apartments: a hope of dignity, for themselves and their nation. "My generation had only one goal: the independence of our country," Kwiatkowski tells me. But with the Red Army occupying Poland, there could be no question of political or economic independence. A degree of cultural independence was the best the Poles could hope for, and as it happened the very existence of Polish culture was controversial enough to make its manifestations far more powerful than they would have been elsewhere.
This was because something about Poland so irritated its neighbors that they went to great lengths to wipe it out. In the nineteenth century, Russians seeking justification of their conquest settled on the excuse that the Catholic Poles threatened the unity of the Orthodox Slavs. In the human taxonomy devised by the Nazis, only Jews ranked lower than the Poles: Hitler did not want to exterminate them entirely, but, unlike other occupied peoples, they were to be reduced to slavery, their culture eradicated.
The occupiers devoted a startling amount of effort to destroying all symbols of Polish culture, from statues of Chopin and Copernicus to professors at Kraków's Jagiellonian University. Thirty percent of Poland's university teachers were killed, along with twenty-one percent of its judges, forty percent of its physicians, and fifty-seven percent of its lawyers. All told, a third of Poland's population was displaced or murdered in the war.
But preserving the culture their enemies tried to annihilate was the one way the Poles could show the world that they were not a race of slaves. They could draw on a long tradition of compensating for political impotence with architectural splendor. The palace Kwiatkowski rebuilt, Łazienki, was the brainchild of Poland's final king, Stanisław II Augustus, who was progressively stripped of his authority by neighbors who saw the country, in the words of Frederick the Great, as "an artichoke, ready to be eaten leaf by leaf."
Like the ailing Baroness Vanda, King Stanisław retreated to his ideal palace. In 1793, as his monstrous former lover, Catherine the Great, was preparing to gobble up the last remains of independent Poland, the despairing king could do nothing more than resort to suggestive decoration at Łazienki: He adorned the main hall with an evocative figure of Solomon and, "more telling still," writes Adam Zamoyski in
The Last King of Poland, figures of Apollo and Hercules in the magnificent ballroom. The pair "stonily eye their respective nemeses"—two figures from Greek mythology, Daphne and Deianira, famed for humiliating their lovers. Even in an age highly sensitive to classical allusion, this was no match for the combined armies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, which, two years later, wolfed down the last bits of the artichoke, erasing Poland from the map of Europe for the next 123 years. But almost as soon as independent Poland died, another Pole swung into action, determined to keep the culture and memory of her nation alive, which she did in typical fashion.
Poland's demise caused Princess Izabela Czartoryska to mature from a dotty young millionairess whose previous whims had included, according to Zamoyski, the creation of "a gnarled old tree-trunk [containing] a boudoir, complete with silken couch," into the self-appointed guardian of the national memory. A zealous collector, she decided to keep alive the memory of a free Poland through displays of historic relics, so that in another time, in other circumstances, Poland could be reborn, its national dignity intact. She erected a Roman temple at her estate of Puławy, on the Vistula River, south of Warsaw, inscribed—lest the purpose of its collections was not clear—with the words
the past to the future. In 1795, Prussian troops had occupied Wawel Castle in Kraków, where Poland's kings are buried, and looted the crown jewels, deliberately destroying them as symbols of Polish statehood. Princess Izabela made the centerpiece of the temple the so-called Royal Casket, containing relics of the kings and queens of Poland, down to the buttons from their clothing.
A national historical museum seems harmless enough nowadays, but her collection's seditious overtones were not lost on Poland's overlords. It became a prime target for invaders in search of booty—alongside the patriotic memorabilia she had a Leonardo, a Raphael, and a Rembrandt—but the real danger was always political: In 1830, following a failed uprising, the Russian police tracked the stashed-away collections, according to Zamoyski, as "they might pursue dangerous subversives."
Hidden away by priests, gardeners, and peasants, bricked into basement walls, smuggled at night across borders guarded by Cossacks, the collection eventually made it (with some losses) to the Czartoryski family's Parisian palace, the Hôtel Lambert, where Balzac probably saw them and where they decorated the headquarters of Poland's de facto government-in-exile. By 1878, they were back in Poland, established as the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków.
They are still there today, despite some heavy losses: The Raphael was looted by the Nazis and has never been recovered; and the postwar Communist government, uncomfortable with the museum's aristocratic and anti-Russian history, deliberately humiliated its gorgeous exhibits by stuffing them into ugly gray metal cases. Almost two centuries after the museum's creation, Princess Izabela's legacy, and its promise of a free Poland, still made Poland's Russian overlords nervous.
Not much had changed since the days of King Stanisław, who could transmit a barbed political message by having a god petulantly stare at a nymph across a Baroque ceiling. Under communism, art and culture were the most powerful weapons the Poles had; and in his final book,
Travels with Herodotus, the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński recalled why even that ancient Greek historian couldn't be published in Stalinist Poland.
"All our thinking," he wrote, "our looking and reading, was governed during those years by an obsession with allusion. Each word brought another one to mind; each had a double meaning, a false bottom, a hidden significance; each contained something secretly encoded, cunningly concealed."Architecture was all the more eloquent in such an environment, and after Stalin died, in 1953, its expressive potential was unleashed.
A people under foreign occupation, whose intellectuals had been massacred and whose economy had trouble keeping up with the demand for toilet paper, had to piece together the accumulated artistic legacy of centuries—in a country nearly as large as France. To see how this was done, I went to Rydzyna, one of the many evocative small towns that dot Poland, from the mountain resort of Zakopane to the Renaissance "ideal city" of Zamość to Poland's ceramics capital of Bolesławiec, near Zamek Kliczków.
Rydzyna looks so shtetl-like that one almost expects to see Chagall's green rabbis flying through the air. It is famed for its Baroque palace—home of Stanisław Leszczyński, king of Poland and father to a queen of France. Here, as everywhere else, there are black-and-white photographs on exhibit showing its condition in 1945, after the Red Army torched it. And, like almost every other monument, it has been meticulously reconstructed, down to the thousands of plaster shells on the ceiling of the Sea Room.
The town feels lonely. It takes a vigorous imagination to see duchesses in curly white wigs and rustling taffeta strolling through the palace's overgrown gardens. Inside the palace, a poor man's idea of luxury prevails: The gilded repro-rococo chairs, the lithographs of teary, chubby-cheeked urchins, the sparkly chandeliers, the curly lace, and the shiny polyester lend it a dollhouse quality, speaking more eloquently of the deprivations of life under communism ("A piece of elephant skin!" gushes the guide) than of the splendor of the seventeenth-century aristocracy—an Iron Curtain tackiness that can cause people from luckier places to stifle a chuckle.
The palace is fascinating for reasons that have nothing to do with Stanisław Leszczyński or unwise choices of fabric. If it is a startling testament to a nation's refusal to let itself be wiped off the map, it also condenses, in a single structure, all the haunting questions that shadow the visitor to Poland. One can understand how important an illusion of wealth and security was to the oppressed Poles. But one can't help but ask what it all cost, in a country where vegetables—not to mention apartments—were not widely available.
Czesław Miłosz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1980, described as a typical Polish attitude "an attachment to an ideal Poland combined with a bitter denunciation of the reality, a loathing even, of its inhabitants." And this is the bigger question, beyond the economic, that Rydzyna Castle and thousands of places like it raise: In the frenzied reconstruction of an ideal Poland, what has been left out? The reconstruction is almost too good to be believed. The whole country, in fact, exudes an odd seamlessness.
The Polish language, spread across a giant area, has almost no dialects—a situation unique in Europe, where even different neighborhoods in the same city can have starkly different dialects. And Poland's ethnic and religious homogeneity is also unique: The population is almost entirely Polish and Catholic, although historically Poland was one of Europe's most diverse and tolerant nations. Untroubled by the Reformation, which tore apart societies across Europe, Poland became known as a Paradisus Hereticorum, and those heretics included the Jews, so welcomed in Poland that the community soon became the world's largest.
Kraków, virtually alone among the country's large historic cities, survived the war intact, but it might be the city that speaks most eloquently of the limited usefulness of architecture in remaking a shattered nation. Its neighborhood of Kazimierz—with bars named Omertà and Propaganda; with a hotel named Rubinstein, immortalizing the birthplace of Helena Rubinstein, sitting cheek-by-jowl with a synagogue restored by Ronald Lauder—can seem oddly like New York's Lower East Side.
This ironic version of the Old Country, populated by hipsters smoking recherché brands of cigarettes, has a Jewish bookstore, a Jewish museum, a Jewish cemetery, and Yiddish words painted on the storefronts. The only thing this Jewish neighborhood is missing, of course, is Jews. And although the Holocaust did not happen only in Kraków—the Jews went missing from Livorno and Rotterdam and Athens as well—this kind of painstaking reconstruction, with a gaping, irremediable hole at its center, seems particularly Polish. It's as if everything that could be reconstructed has been, even though everyone knew the main thing never could be.
he feeling that the main thing is missing intensifies as I drive from Kraków to Wrocław, which, like so many other Polish cities, was a smoking ruin in 1945. In homogeneous Poland, the trip, only a few hours by car, offers little chance for culture shock, and I come to a city much like the one I've just left. Yet that familiarity itself speaks of Poland's absences. For the two hundred years preceding 1945, Wrocław was the German city of Breslau, a city that so embodied a lost European ideal that a recent book about it is called
Microcosm: A Portrait of a Central European City.
It is a place I am particularly eager to visit, because my grandfather Franz was born here, on the banks of the Oder River, in 1899. As I walk through its enormous central square and the magnificent Baroque halls of his university (all destroyed, of course, and all perfectly reconstructed), I try to imagine what this place was like when he was a boy and Breslau was the largest German city east of Berlin.
I am not the only one. At the tourist office, maps of Breslau, complete with the old German street names, are on sale: Heritage tourism is big business here, for Jews as well as for the descendants of the more than a million Germans ethnically cleansed from this region following World War II.
A cousin who made this trip before has given me some old addresses, and I set out in search of family mementoes. I walk toward the Jewish cemetery down Ulica Komandorska—formerly Neudorfstrasse, where my great-grandmother lived in a pre-war neighborhood that (I learn in a book of old postcards of Breslau) was the city's most elegant. The reconstruction of Wrocław did not go that far: In place of a district of prosperous Germans and German Jews is a drab Polish region of huge and despairing Communist apartment blocks.
At the end of the street, entering the cemetery where my great-grandfather was buried in 1927, I am surprised at how familiar the place feels, how recent. The tombstones, all in German except for the odd residual Hebrew phrase, are in the same Art Nouveau and Moorish and neo-Romanesque styles that might be found anywhere with a Jewish community as large and prominent as Breslau's.
I hope my great-grandfather never imagined that only a few years after his burial, his descendants—luckier than many—would be scattered from Houston to La Paz; or that his own language, in his own city, would become incomprehensible to the vast majority of its inhabitants; or that the beautiful cemetery where he was buried would become a "Museum of Sepulchral Art," a vast vine-covered Palmyra of the Breslau Jews.
To exit through the cemetery's gates is to leave the German Breslau of the early twentieth century and land, somewhat dazed, in the Polish Wrocław of the early twenty-first, one's head spinning from the speed and thoroughness of the transformation: Wrocław is the fourth-largest city in Poland, although it had only a residual Polish population by the early 1900s. Today, outside the Jewish cemetery, you never feel like you could be anywhere but Poland.
The spelling might not make it obvious, but the words Wrocław and Breslau are closely related, just as Munich is München in German and Monaco in Italian. No matter what you call it, Munich and München are the same place. My oddest realization, walking out of the cemetery, was that Wrocław and Breslau, despite their identical location, are completely different cities. Breslau was one thing and Wrocław is another: Wrocław, it turns out, is the lost eastern city of Lwów, transported lock, stock, and barrel from western Ukraine to the islands of the Oder.
The main square boasts a statue of the nineteenth-century dramatist Aleksander Fredro. It replaced another, of Kaiser Wilhelm, and it wasn't intended to be here, either. The statue originally stood in Lwów, now L'viv, which became part of the Soviet Union when, in exchange for the eastern territories of Poland, Stalin sliced off swaths of eastern Germany and handed them over to the Poles.
Rebaptized Wrocław, Breslau became the second coming of Lwów. Much of the Polish population of Lwów was shipped into the abandoned, ruined city; the University of Lwów was imported into the former University of Breslau, with the faculty keeping the same positions they had back home. A similar principle operated in the city administration: Lwów's municipal officials settled into quarters recently vacated by their counterparts in what had been Breslau.
This is why there are no dialects in Poland: Its minorities were exiled or murdered; its population sliced, diced, and puréed into a smooth homogeneity, constantly and violently shifted through a landscape in which buildings became the only anchors, the only way of asserting a continuous identity. Here, historic buildings could never be merely ornamental, vaguely acknowledged landmarks. They were something to fight for.
When, a couple of months ago, two Gothic houses were destroyed by fire in the lovely small city of Toruń), where Copernicus had been born in 1473, the city's conservation officer, echoing the bravado I had heard in Marek Kwiatkowski's voice in Łazienki Park, immediately mounted the barricades. "It is certain I will defend every brick," he said in tones bursting with martial pride.
But these buildings were felled by a stray arsonist, not a Nazi division or the Red Army. As Polish lives become easier—the country was the only one in the European Union not to see its economy shrink in the recent global economic downturn—and the wear-and-tear of Poland's cities more conventional, the old-style bluster is fast becoming anachronistic. If the traveler today cannot escape amazement at the achievements of previous generations of Polish architects, he is also relieved to see that, having rebuilt its past, Poland can finally look to its future—just as Princess Izabela intended.
