of scientific thought. His latest, The Stories Old Towns Tell, describes the reconstruction of historic quarters in European cities, examining how they are shaped to tell particular stories about history and identity. It shows how old towns can promote belonging over exclusion, and empathy over indifference.
Kohn applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Stories Old Towns Tell and reported the following:
There’s a key word on page 99: ‘szaber’. It means ‘loot’, but in devastated post-war Poland, it meant much more than that. ‘Szaber’ was the appropriation of any object, from a spoon to a townhouse, that was not in its owner’s possession. Since people had almost nothing left of their own, it was the source of almost everything.Visit Marek Kohn's website.
After the war, the previously German city of Breslau became the Polish city of Wrocław and the capital of the szaber economy. Germans sold their possessions in marketplaces as they awaited deportation; incoming Poles took their homes and whatever they left behind. (I made a short video about this at the site of one of these markets.) ‘Szabrownik’ traders flocked to the city – but the biggest player in the szaber economy was the new Polish communist regime. Page 99 describes how architectural items such as stone portals and window frames were sent from Wrocław for use in the showpiece reconstruction of Warsaw’s Old Town. Elsewhere in the region, historic buildings were sabotaged so that their masonry could be trafficked.
It’s a strong example of what The Stories Old Towns Tell is all about. The underlying theme is that of how the regime, which made itself nationalist as well as communist, used heritage to tell exclusively Polish stories about history and identity. Warsaw’s eighteenth-century buildings represented the last flowering of Polish culture before the country was partitioned off the map by neighbouring powers. Wrocław’s buildings of the same age were regarded as relics of Prussian rule. So as far as the new authorities were concerned, in Warsaw the eighteenth century was Polish and good, but in Wrocław it was German and bad. Underneath, the regime insisted, Wrocław was an originally and truly Polish city. The Catholic church agreed wholeheartedly. ‘Even the stones speak Polish,’ the saying went.
After the end of communism, however, people started to question the official story, and to explore their city’s German history. Today, Wrocław’s historic centre feels open, cosmopolitan and welcoming; European rather than narrowly national. It’s one example of what can happen when Old Towns are enriched by allowing them to tell more than one story at a time. By encouraging respectful and appreciative attitudes towards communities of the past, they help to promote harmonious relations between communities of the present. They help to make a city’s people feel that the city’s history is theirs, even if the people’s ancestors weren’t part of it. And they are strengthened in their role as special spaces where people from near and far gather freely and convivially, among strangers but at ease with them: urban islands in which Europe is as it is supposed to be.
The Page 99 Test: Trust.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
