Complete compendium of 2018 travelogues: Porto, Gdansk and Munich.

Diana and I are exceedingly fortunate to have been able to visit Europe three times in 2018. We're very well matched as travel partners, and it's a pure joy. For years I refused to take a phone with me when traveling, but eventually relented, and since 2016 we've been "facebooking" our trips.

Your comments are much appreciated by both of us, and because so many of you have told me that you enjoy the photos, I've taken to arranging them at the blog in the form of travelogues.

Following are the links to our 2018 trips; Munich and Gdansk are in the form of links to "search by label," so just click and scroll. Porto was arranged earlier with all links in one place. Each trip also was accompanied by a prelude of articles of historical and topical interest pertaining to our destination.

I hope you enjoy all these articles, and thanks for reading.

Munich, Germany (and a side trip to Bamberg)
Bavarian Christmas Interlude 2018
Prelude: Munich Tales 2018

Gdansk, Poland
Gdansk Pilgrimage 2018
Prelude: Eight Days of Gdansk

I did it a bit differently last spring.

Porto, Portugal (and a side trip to Madeira)

Your courtesy compendium of links to the "Portugal Trip 2018" and "Focus on Portugal 2018" series.

Eight Days of Gdansk, November 6: The Lenin Shipyards yield to Młode Miasto, or "Young City Gdansk."

Jeffersonville has something in common with Gdansk. Both cities have extensive tracts of waterside property once devoted to building boats.

The former Jeffboat, meet the former Lenin Shipyards.

There's an obvious difference in scale as well as historical experience. The shipyards in Gdansk occupied a huge expanse of ground, while Jeffboat's footprint is long and narrow.

Clark County has no alumni with quite the pedigree of Lech Wałęsa, although the latter never refereed NFL games, as former Jeffersonville mayor Dale Orem did.

In both instances, there is considerable redevelopment potential.

The word shipyard is synonymous with Gdansk, due in the main to the social and political phenomenon that was Solidarity, the trade union movement which exploded out of the shipyard amid the strikes of 1980. Since then, the name Gdansk for many has conjured up images of masses of striking workers led by a small man with a bushy moustache, while in the background hulked the giant cranes of the shipyard – the Lenin Shipyard. Well it appears that this shipyard is about to change forever and in doing so reflect changes, more than anywhere else in Gdansk, that it helped bring about over 30 years earlier.

In the spring of 2013 plans were presented to the public showing the future of a large swath of the Gdansk Shipyard. These plans, as we will see later, propose to revitalise this historic area and to re-connect it to the main city of Gdansk a short distance away along the Motlawa river. The new development is to be called Mlode Miasto (Young City) and while this name might look like the result of months of work by a high-powered PR agency’s image team, it in fact in recognition of the first organised settlement of the area over 600 years ago.

Although work connected to ship building and maintenance continues in many parts of the shipyard area today, the bulk of what was once the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk has slowly been rotting away since the fall of communism. The collapse of the system which Solidarity helped to bring about, saw demand for ships that were built here to collapse as well. The yard today stands largely empty and as work begins on the initial projects relating to the creation of Young City Gdansk, there is an opportunity to take a look at what is left of this historic area.

As for the high-powered PR agency, this might be the one. The quality of the mock-ups exceeds those typically produced by New Albany's redevelopment commission.

Młode Miasto or Young City Gdansk has always had a significant role in the development of the City. Since the first official mentioning in historical chronicles in 1380 it has been recognized as a new and attractive settlement area for future generations. More than 600 years of different purposes for this land will have a continuation now. With such a rich past the identity of the new neighbourhood should be built around it.

In closing, stay tuned for the inevitable photographs of this and other experiences in Gdansk.

Eight Days of Gdansk, November 5: Meet the Kashubians.

Let's return for a moment to The Tin Drum, the famous novel by Günter Grass, set in Danzig (now Gdansk). The protagonist is Oskar, who frequently references his Kashubian blood.

... Oskar represents Danzig, which is and is not a German city, just as Oskar is and is not German. Anna Koljaiczek, his Kashubian grandmother, puts this into perspective, as she proclaims in East Prussian German vernacular: "and when someone is a Kashubian, then that's not sufficient, neither for the Germans nor for the Polacks. They always want it just so" (547). Oskar, who is either half or fully Kashubian, is nevertheless considered German since both his official father and stepmother are German. Emotionally, however, Oskar is more Kashubian than German. His narration is replete with nostalgic references for his Kashubian grandparents, mother, and uncle/potential father. Although the Kashubes are ethnically and linguistically closely related to the Poles, they had lived under German/Prussian rule for centuries which caused many of them to become substantially Germanized. Oskar, just like Danzig, is a product of the very diverse and even tumultuous ethnic influences and often violent history of the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea.

Here's a bit of background.

The Kashubians are a true ethnic minority, distinct from the Poles in both language and culture. Originally western Slavs with ethnic links to the Poles, the Kashubians are believed to have settled in the area around 1,500 years ago, although the first records date from the 13th century when the Pomeranian Dukes included ‘Duke of Kashubia’ among their illustrious titles. Estimates as to just how many Kashubians and people of Kashubian descent live in Poland today vary wildly. In Poland’s 2011 census 232,547 people declared themselves to be Kashubian but just 16,377 declared Kashubian to be their sole nationality. Similarly while 108,100 people said they spoke Kashubian at home, only 13,800 declared Kashubian to be their native tongue. In both cases of language and nationality, Kashubians would also consider themselves Polish and speak Polish.

But more importantly, there is Kashubian cuisine.

Kashubian cuisine is relatively simple but makes great use of a wealth of natural ingredients all found within the Kashubian region, which is blessed with a sea coastline and a plethora of lakes, rivers, forests, meadows and orchards. Food has traditionally been prepared to make use of whatever is in season and its simplicity reflects the need for tasty, healthy, filling dishes of a hard-working people ...

... The ingredients used are all found locally and it’s still typical, though less so than 10 or 20 years ago, to find cellars and garages filled with jars of pickles, marinades, compots and even nalewki which make use of fruit and vegetables grown throughout the year. Unsurprisingly, fish is a staple part of the typical Kashubian dish with such a variety available from the Baltic Sea, the Bay of Gdansk and the rivers and lakes of this picturesque region. A wide selection of fish is prepared in a variety of ways – cooked fresh using a variety of methods; salted in barrels and or pickled with oil or vinegar. You can find wonderful fish soups; pickled herring, whitebait covered in breadcrumbs and pan fried, smoked trout and lots of salmon among the many fish dishes available. Fish is not the only thing to be made into soup and other common soups include zurek, a sour rye soup, cabbage soup and even soup made from or containing fruit.

In a region divided by numerous working farms, farmyard animals also feature heavily. Pork, veal, chicken, duck and goose are common main components of a Kashubian dish, served with a wide choice of vegetables.

The potato (bùlwa in the Kashubian language as opposed to ziemniak in Polish) is a staple and still regularly referred to as kartoffel reflecting the German influence in the region. In fact, as noted elsewhere, the Kashubian people have been influenced by both Poles and Germans over the centuries, but have nonetheless maintained their own identity. That is true also of the cuisine, which is often similar to traditional cuisine but with a local twist. It is not unusual to find slices of sweet fruit used as decoration on an otherwise staple dish of meat, potatoes, vegetables and sauce. A quintessential Kashubian dish is potatoes covered in buttermilk and a sprinkle of sugar.

The Kashubians leave nothing to waste and use a variety of methods to cook or preserve the food at their disposal. Pigs are turned into joints and cutlets, sausages and offal. Meat and fish are both smoked to give wonderful tasting versions of common foods. Smalec or lard is another common sight and served with hunks of fresh, home-baked bread.

A final staple component of Kashubian cuisine are cereals – barley, rye, buckwheat and of course wheat are added to soups, pigs blood, sausages or boiled and served as an accompaniment.

Eight Days of Gdansk, November 4: Grodziskie, Baltic Porter and a little bit about beer in Poland.

The first beer I ever drank in Poland was a lager in 1987 at a mysterious joint in Warsaw, located purely by accident, which defied all efforts to find a second time.

It was hot and humid, in the middle of the afternoon. I remember cutting through a neighborhood to get to the hotel, but at some point I heard male voices -- and more importantly, the clink of glasses touching.

It was a pub of some sort. All I could fathom with any degree of certainty was that there was a building shaded by street trees, filled with men dressed mostly in work clothing, though a few wore suits – and they all were throwing back golden-colored draft beers in gorgeous fat mugs.

I was more thirsty than intimidated, and it was clear that Poles liked Americans. Entering the front door, I saw a serving counter and walked straight to it. No English was spoken, but a transaction was negotiated … once, and then a second time. I’d like to report that something novel and revealing came of it.

Nothing did, but at the same time, no one hassled me. I drank my beers in peace just like everyone else, and quickly found the hotel.

Actually I was missing out on more than just this neighborhood watering hole's street address, although this fact wasn't apparent at the time. What I was missing was Grodziskie: "The Polish Smoked Wheat Beer That Nearly Went Extinct."

A 1914 description in ‘Bierbrauerei’ by M. Krandauer, posted by Ron Pattinson, gives a pretty good overall idea of the brewing process and what could be expected in a Grätzer of the time.

“3. Grätzer Bier, a rough, bitter beer, brewed from 100% wheat malt with intense smoke and hop flavor. The green malt undergoes smoking during virtually the whole drying process, is highly dried and has a strong aroma in addition to the smoked flavour. An infusion mash is employed. Hopping rate: for 1 Zentner of malt, 3 kg hops. Gravity just 7o [Balling]. Fermentation is carried out in tuns at a temperature of 15 to 20oC. Since the beer in the tun, as a result of the expulsion of great quantities protein and resin, doesn’t break, it is mixed with isinglass and pumped into barrels. After two or three days it is completely clear and ready to be filled into delivery casks or bottles with the addition of 2 to 5% Krausen.”

(Note: Zentner is equal to 50kg or about 110 pounds)

The mere sight of the words "oak-smoked" conjures a visit from Pavlov's mutt. Back in 2012, the brew team at NABC took a stab at it.

Grätzer/Grodziskie ... oak-smoked wheat session ale, coming soon to NABC.

David Pierce, NABC's Director of Brewing Operations clues us into a new NABC small batch brew:

Ben Minton will be brewing another new historical re-creation session beer this week. We recently acquired a small quantity of oak (eiche) smoked wheat malt for this beer. The beer will be 100% wheat, something we've never done here, and it will be a very hard beer to brew. If you see Ben pulling out his hair, this is why.

Here is an overview of the style.

Grätzer/Grodziskie ... Grätzer is actually indigenous to Poland, where it was known as grodziskie. Grätz was the German name for the town Grodzisk, which was, for a little over a hundred years, part of Prussia. But the beer style both pre- and post-dated Prussia, and was in fact still brewed in Poland until the 1990s. Grodzisk was a major center of brewing, and at the end of the 18th Century, boasted 53 brewers.

One of the famous local products in that old-school Beervana was a beer made entirely of smoked wheat malt.

Indigenous Grodziskie consumed on Polish soil remains a bucket list item for me, but it's not the only "legacy" style with connections to Poland. Baltic Porter was the reason for my third visit to Poland in 2002 (I transited the country in 1989 during a train trip from Moscow to East Berlin, but didn't stop over).

I included Krakow on the 2002 group trip itinerary to Eastern Europe so we could tour the Zwiec brewery, source of a fine (and elusive) example of Baltic Porter, which is a nebulous style touching on several brewing traditions.

Sometimes Baltic Porter is an appellation of seaside origin, but not always. In Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson’s World Guide to Beer, he mentions a “Porter” still being brewed in the 1970s in the town of Martin, Slovakia -- quite far away from the Baltic Sea.

Conversely, the New Albanian Brewing Company’s first batch of Solidarity Baltic Porter was brewed in 2005 within walking distance of water, albeit the Ohio River.

The Beer Judge Certification Program description for Baltic Porter indicates that top-fermented English-style Porters and strong Stouts may well have been the original impetus for dark beers brewed in places like Poland, Estonia and Finland, but German lager brewing techniques supplanted ale-making long ago.

My theory always was that those brewers kept the same basic recipe for Porter but switched to lager yeast and cool fermentation. Alcohol contents crept up, and these days some examples of Baltic Porter seem closer to Doppelbock, while others lean toward Imperial Stouts.

To me they're all delicious, even if a tad different.

In praise of Baltic porters’ naughty comfort, by Joe Stange (Draft Magazine)

This great style is underrated everywhere ... except maybe Poland.

On Polish bottles, next to the alcoholic strength, there is a second number at least as important to local drinkers: the percentage of sugar extract before fermentation, or degrees Plato. Like starting gravity—an awfully nerdy thing to put on a beer label—it’s a measure of wort density. American drinkers might wonder why that would be useful, since the alcoholic strength is right there next to it, and isn’t that the most important thing? But to Polish drinkers, that extract is a measure of richness, an indicator of boldness and body. If you want a big beer, you look for a big extract number; the rich and bitter Pinta Imperator Baltycki, for example, has an extract of 24.7 degrees (that’s a gravity of about 1.104, for you homebrewers).

See? Lush.

The story about beer writer Michael Jackson inventing the category called “Baltic porter” is true, as far as it goes. He wrote that the classification “grew out of a series of articles I wrote in 1990, after a visit to Estonia.”

In my mind at this precise instant, I can imagine trays of smoked eel and pickled herring being paired with either of these polar opposites, Grodziskie or Baltic Porter.

For a late autumn/early winter week in Gdansk, I want them all.

Eight Days of Gdansk, November 3: Food, dining and the institution of the Polish "milk bar."

The first sentence below encapsulates one of those basic truths that tend to be forgotten in the current era of plentiful food and a global economy.

Geographical and political factors had a strong influence on Polish cuisine. The country is located in a climatic zone with cool and barren winters. From that reason in traditional Polish meals vegetables, fruits and fish which can be easily preserved and stored for 3–4 months period played the great role (pea, the broad bean, kohlrabi, or the turnip). The food was preserved above all with readily available fossil salt and usually with drying, pickling or slight fermentation. After implementation of cooling and tinned technologies in the 20th century salting, drying and pickling were kept in the Polish cuisine by the account of historic habits and from the will of keeping traditional tastes – impossible to obtain with those new, technological ways.

Other geographical facet – large areas of forests – had to influence Polish diet and recipes. Sylvan fruits (wild strawberries, blueberries, currants, raspberries, wild black raspberries and others) have always been popular and so they are today. The Polish cuisine has an interesting wild mushrooms table d'hôte. It seems to be unique since wild, edible mushrooms are completely undervalued in Western Europe. On the other hand the game constituted a delicacy for the Polish gentry from always. Today however, the tradition of hunts seems to be in the disappearance.

Poland repeatedly in history lost the access it the Baltic Sea because of wars. For this reason the Polish cuisine is dominated by freshwater fishes. Amongst saltwater fishes once herring enjoyed the greatest popularity. Today – beside herring – fish like codfish, dory pollack, sprat and sole play the special role on the Polish table.

This provides an ideal segue into our destination of the moment.

The multicultural cuisine of coastal Gdańsk (Link to Poland)

The multicultural cuisine of coastal Gdańsk has always been based on fish. Herring, Baltic salmon, sprats, eel, sturgeons and above all cod, turbot and various kinds of flounder types of fish have appeared on tables, served in thousands of ways.

Recipes were based mainly on Kashubian, German and Jewish cuisine and consumption was always accompanied by alcohol – beer, wine and spirits.

While I didn't spend a great deal of time in Poland during my 1980s-era travels, I knew what a "milk bar" was then -- and now.

Each of the communist countries had their own variation of the workers' cafeteria, and I ate in many of them while in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and even once in Bulgaria. 

Nostalgia in a Polish Milk Bar, by Rick Steves

 ... Sometimes my nostalgia for the old times confounds my Polish hosts. In Kraków, my friend Kasia, wanted to treat me to a fine dinner and asked where I'd like to eat. I said a "milk bar." Kasia said her mother would never forgive her if I took her American friend to one of these bleak government-subsidized workers' diners. I begged, promising I'd never tell, and Kasia agreed.

For me, eating at a bar mleczny (milk bar) is an essential Polish sightseeing experience. These super-cheap cafeterias, which you'll see all over the country, are a dirt-cheap way to get a meal...and, with the right attitude, a fun cultural adventure.

In the communist era, the government subsidized the food at milk bars. The idea: to allow lowly workers to afford a meal out. The tradition continues, and today Poland still foots the bill for most of your milk-bar meal. Prices remain astoundingly low — my bill usually comes to about $3 — and, while communist-era fare was less than lively, today's milk-bar cuisine is more tasty.

Milk bars offer many of Poland's traditional favorites. Common items are delicious soups, a variety of cabbage-based salads, fried pork chops, pierogi (ravioli with various fillings), and pancakes. At the milk bar, you'll likely see glasses of watery juice and — of course — milk, but most milk bars also stock bottles of water and Coke. Try a Polish pastry, especially the classic paczki, a glazed jelly doughnut typically filled with a wild-rose jam.

Returning to the Baltic coast, Bar Mleczny Neptun in Gdańsk gets pride of place in this story.

Gdańsk remains pristine and pure to its roots; right in the middle of its most popular tourist street, Ulica Długa, is a cheap and cheerful Polish Milk Bar. This is Bar Mleczny Neptun, a real gem of a place, if you are able to find it. Get excited about delicious pierogi, soup, salad and meat dishes served from 7:30 am in an old two-story building.

If we have the opportunity ...

Eight Days of Gdansk, November 2: Marcin Gortat on Polish basketball, and prospects for a game in Tricity.

A native of Łódź in Poland, Marcin Gortat currently plays for the Los Angeles Clippers. This is Gortat's 13th season in the NBA, and in this essay from 2016, he tells his own basketball story and describes the sport's progress in Poland.

How We Play Basketball in Poland, by Marcin Gortat (The Players' Tribune)

... The state of basketball in Poland right now is … well, it’s not great.

Understand, in Poland we don’t have four or five guys making it to the NBA every year like in France or Spain. I’m the fourth Polish guy to ever make it to the NBA, and given the state of our national-team program, there probably won’t be another one for a long time.

That’s because we don’t really have a program to teach the game to young kids. I’ve been doing my best to help, with youth camps and an initiative that sends promising young players to America to play AAU ball, and then brings them back to Poland to play for the national team. But it will be a few more years until the first group of players completes the program.

It wasn’t always this way. We used to be better. Poland used to love basketball. In the ’60s and ’70s our national team played in almost every Olympics, and we were competitive. But since 1984, the year I was born, Poland hasn’t qualified once for the Games.

There was even a time when NBA games were on TV in Poland. After watching Michael Jordan, Grant Hill and Shaq, kids would want to go outside and play street ball. But when basketball left public TV due to something called the Broadcasting Act of 1992, that’s when everything started to really fall apart.

Gortat surely is the best male basketball player from Poland. The finest female player might have been the late Margo Dydek, who was 7' 2" and played in the WNBA prior to her untimely death in 2011.

The Confidentials enjoy their off-season travel, and this has meant the occasional opportunity to watch basketball games in Europe, first in Bamberg and most recently in Porto, Portugal in February.

The Polish cities of Gdansk, Sopot and Gdynia are known collectively as Tricity (Trójmiasto), with a combined metropolitan population well north of 1,000,000.

Sopot lies between Gdansk and Gdynia.

Tricity supports two teams in the Polish Basketball League, which has existed in various forms since the late 1940s: Asseco Gdynia and Trefl Sopot. Ironically, the primary indoor arena in Tricity is located within the boundaries of Sopot, which lies between Gdansk and Gdynia; holding 15,000 spectators, the home of Trefl Sopot is the largest arena in the league even though Sopot itself has a population of only 40,000.

Perusing the schedules in advance of our departure, I see there are three possibilities for seeing a game, with two dates for Asseco Gdynia and one for Trefl Sopot.

We'll do at least one of them, and I'll tell you about it once we're back home. If there is beer and kielbasa, that's even better.

Eight Days of Gdansk, November 1: World War II and Gdansk.

World War II began the moment the treaty was signed at Versailles, presumably ending the Great War, but actually priming the pump for an even more disastrous continuation of the conflict two decades later.

I'll continue to make the argument that in retrospect, future historians will see World War I as beginning with the first Balkan War in 1912 -- perhap even the Forst Moroccan Crisis in 1905 -- and in terms of cause and effect, continuing through the post-war settlement, global depression and rise of fascist dictatorships, into World War II, then the Cold War, the Berlin Wall's fall and communism's collapse, up to the Yugoslav civil war in the 1990s.

It will be renamed the 80 Year War, or some such.

With apologies to the dead in Manchuria, our western-centric textbooks inform us that the German invasion of Poland was the specific trigger for WWII because France and the United Kingdom honored their treaties.

Seeing as the victorious WWI allies had detached Danzig/Gdansk from both Germany and reconstituted Poland, the city became an inevitable flash point, first incited through propaganda and then with bullets.

For Poles, the Battle of Westerplatte and the defense of the Polish post office are "cherished stories of heroism." Günter Grass's fictionalized account of the German attack on his hometown's post office is a central episode in The Tin Drum.

The Defense of the Polish Post, by Nick Hodge (Local-Life)

 ... The Free City of Danzig had two post offices: one municipal and one Polish run. The Polish post office was considered an extraterritorial property of Poland, meaning it was exempt from local law in much the same way embassies or UN buildings are. As such, it became a sort of Polish headquarters within the Free City. As the situation between Poland and Germany worsened, the Polish military made the rather paltry effort of securing the post office by sending reserves sublieutenant Konrad Guderski to the post in April, 1939 to organize and train a security unit composed of official post office employees and civilian volunteers. In mid-August, as hostilities were beginning to seem imminent, 10 more employees were sent from Gdynia and Budgoszcz, bringing the staff of the Polish post office to somewhere near 100 people. On September 1, 1939, however, there were exactly 57 people in the building: Konrad Guderski (the only non-civilian), 42 local Polish employees, the 10 employees from Gdynia and Budgoszcz, and the building keeper, his wife and ten-year-old daughter who all lived in the building.

At 04:00, Germans cut the power from the building and at 04:45, in sync with the Schleswig-Holstein's shelling of the small Polish garrison on Westerplatte, they began their assault on the Polish post office in Danzig. Armed with a small cache of mostly pistols, some machine guns and hand-grenades, the Polish defenders were able to repel the first German attack of the front of the building (though the Germans did enter the front door of the building briefly). At 11:00, the Germans were reinforced with 75mm artillery guns, but despite the extra firepower, the second German attack - through a wall in the side of the building - was also repulsed. Konrad Guderski, the Polish commander (if he can be called that), was killed during this second exchange.

At 15:00 the Germans called a ceasefire, demanding a Polish surrender. As the Polish post office employees - refusing surrender - holed up inside the building, the Germans received additional reinforcements to the tune of a 105mm artillery gun and a unit of combat engineers who spent the two-hour ceasefire diligently (and efficiently, of course) digging a trench under the building and equipping it with a 600kg explosive device. At 17:00, the device was detonated and the side wall of the building collapsed allowing the Germans to capture the entire building except for the basement. With the Poles holed up in the basement refusing surrender, at 18:00 the Germans brought automatic pumps, gas tanks and flamethrowers into the building [the squeamish should perhaps skip this passage...] and proceeded to flood the basement with burning gasoline. Five Poles burned to death before the rest evacuated the basement. The first two Poles to exit the building - waving white flags - were shot. The rest of the Polish defenders were allowed to surrender.

Sixteen Poles injured in the battle were sent to the city's hospital where six of them died (five from burn wounds, including the building-keeper's ten-year-old daughter). Though six people had managed to escape the building, two were captured the following day and sent with the other 28 survivors to Victoriaschule, a prison where they were interrogated and tortured along with many other Polish inhabitants of Danzig. All 38 survivors were put on trial, denied a defense lawyer and sentenced to death. They were executed by firing squad on October 5th.

Poland quickly was steamrolled by Nazi Germany in unexpected concert with the Soviet Union, which seized Polish territories in the east. Six years later much of the country was devastated, its Jewish population wiped out by the killing fields of the Holocaust, and its territory occupied by the Red Army. After border adjustments and ethnic cleansing, Poland reappeared as an ethnically and religiously homogeneous state, a fact ironically contributing to its ultimate success in resisting the imposition of communism.

Now, thirty years after Solidarity led Poland into the post-communist era, the country is controlled by a xenophobic and populist movement, in itself hardly unusual in the current age; for a certain segment of the Polish population, much of the story I've told so far in this post isn't history at all. Rather, it is disputed history, hence the current example of the Museum of the Second World War recently opened in Gdansk.

Poland vs. History, by Timothy Snyder (New York Review of Books)

In early 2017, Poland was supposed to unveil what is perhaps the most ambitious museum devoted to World War II in any country. A striking cantilevered tower of glass and red cement is now rising above the completed subterranean chamber that will hold the museum’s 37,000 objects. The largest of these—an American tank, a Soviet tank, and a German railway car—had to be installed with the help of cranes during construction. In its exhibitions, the Museum of the Second World War promised to tell the story of the 1930s and 1940s in an entirely new way. Unlike other museums devoted to history’s most devastating war, which tend to begin and end with national history, the Gdańsk museum has set out to show the perspectives of societies around the world, through a sprawling collection gathered over the last eight years, and through themes that bring seemingly disparate experiences together. It is hard to think of a more fitting place for such a museum than Poland, whose citizens experienced the worst of the war.

Yet the current Polish government, led by the conservative Law and Justice party, now seems determined to cancel the museum, on the grounds that it does not express “the Polish point of view.” It is hard to interpret this phrase, which in practice seems to mean the suppression of both Polish experience and the history of the war in general. The new government’s gambit has been to replace the nearly completed global museum with an obscure (and as yet entirely non-existent) local one, and then to claim that nothing has really changed. The substitute museum would chronicle the Battle of Westerplatte, where Polish forces resisted the German surprise attack on the Baltic coast for seven days in September 1939. Heroic though it was, substituting this campaign for the entirety of World War II means eliminating the record of how Poles fought for their country and their fellow citizens over the succeeding five-and-a-half years. Such a move also means throwing away a historic opportunity to redefine the world’s understanding of the war.

It seems a "global" history of the war wouldn't have been Polish enough.

Amid Holocaust law, Poland gives its Second World War museum a nationalist rebrand, by Liam Hoare (The JC)

... A spokesman for the museum said any changes are designed to “complete the message” of the main exhibition by “showing the heroes who dedicated their lives to defending their homeland.”

The Polish point of view “is not represented enough” and “needs to be balanced to show the actual victims and aggressors” in the war, he said.

The fate of Gdansk’s museum is a microcosm of a broader struggle across Europe between those who would come to terms with the past and those who ignore or revise it ...

The museum's web site has more information. I'm planning on a visit, and will provide a report at some point in the future.

Eight Days of Gdansk, October 31: Gdansk, Danzig, The Tin Drum and Günter Grass.

The Tin Drum is a novel about one man's choice of fishing lures.

Well, not really, although reading Günter Grass's masterpiece might well reshape an omnivore's list of dining preferences. Food aside, for some observers The Tin Drum represents a post-war literary peak.

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass – the greatest novel of the 20th century, by Eileen Battersby (The Irish Times)

The Tin Drum combines history, horror story, burlesque cartoon and satiric fable with vibrant, subversive imagery. Stylistically it is light years removed from the stately narratives of Thomas Mann

Sanctuary, at least for some people, may best be found in an insane asylum. From his white-enamelled metal hospital bed, under the watchful, if bewildered eye of Bruno, his nurse, Oskar Matzerath sets out with the help of a family photograph album to tell not only his story but also that of his country.

Oskar, very much his own man despite his chosen lack of growth, elects to move between the first-person and third-person voice. Drumming is his way of detaching from his family and the events unfolding around him. He pulverises each new drum, replacements lasting mere days; such is the frenzy of the story unfolding; so oppressive is the reality he is intent on escaping.

When he says in the opening pages of this angry, swaggering and earthy tour de force: “I’d like to have the bed rails raised even higher to keep anyone from coming too close,” it is not that unexpected. Here is a postwar novel born of that war’s legacy. The Tin Drum broke all the rules and invented a few more. The polemic is there but, considering the boisterousness of the narrative, at times it is not that obvious. But not always; Oskar and his father stand outside the burning synagogue: “….civilians and men in uniforms were piling up books, sacral objects, and strange pieces of cloth”.

And ...

The Tin Drum summarised the 20th century in three words, Darragh McManus (The Guardian)

Fifty years on, Günter Grass's seminal work remains the defining novel of the 20th century, wrenching art and hope from ugliness and horror

Whether it's the greatest is open to debate, but one could argue that Günter Grass's The Tin Drum is the great novel of the 20th century. By that I mean it most completely defines the era in all its glories and catastrophes – the moods, atmospheres, manias, streams, currents, histories and under-histories.

First published 50 years ago this week (on 6 October 1959), it is, technically, an incredible piece of art, a melange of bildungsroman, memoir, allegory, grotesquerie and pure reverie. On a superficial level it tells the story of Oskar Matzerath: incarcerated maniac, self-created dwarf, paranoiac, possessor of supernatural gifts, vindictive genius, fallen angel, miniature/a> tyrant, obsessive beater of the titular drum. Oskar is all of these things and none of them; the ultimate unreliable narrator.

The book charts his progress, and that of the independent port city of Danzig/Gdansk, and greater Germany, and the world as a whole. It is odd, profound, sprawling, poetic, often unnerving. But more than this, never have I read something that so exquisitely and lucidly captures the dazed, eerie strangeness of our misfortunate times ...

Given the Eurocentric nature of my interests, it's mystifying to me that I hadn't read the novel previously. My friend Jon suggested it as an appropriate segue to visiting Gdansk, given that the former Danzig is the foundation for a trilogy of novels written by Grass -- beginning with The Tin Drum.

As usual, Jon was right. The novel is unsettling and completely necessary. The author's life is instructive, too. Grass died just three years ago, and he left behind a powerful and also cluttered legacy, primarily because he omitted an important thing or two from his personal narrative. The corrections began in 2007.

Gunter Grass admitted that in 1944 he had been drafted into the 10th SS tank division Frundsberg and that the aircraft auxiliary episode was one that had lasted only while he was a schoolboy. Naturally his involvement in an organisation infamous for its associations with deaths heads and murder caused a bit of a rumpus in Poland, a country regarded as the primary killing field of the Nazi machine. Local hero, Lech Wałęsa, called on Grass to surrender his honorary citizenship of Gdańsk, while some accused him of trying to hype up the publication of his autobiography, Peeling the Onion. While the belated revelation drew widespread shock and accusations of hypocrisy, following many years where he had criticised Germans for not taking full responsibility for their war-time actions, many high profile names such as the local Archbishop Michalik and novelist John Irving, sprang to his defence. Speaking of the guilt he had carried all his life, Grass claimed to never have fired a shot, adding that once he saw the brutality of war he even tried to infect himself with jaundice in an attempt to escape his military duty. He went as far as to write an open letter of explanation to the people of Gdansk and this appeared to have done the trick with the local mayor Pawel Adamowicz refusing to rescind Grass’ honorary citizenship while even the normally stubborn Wałęsa applauded Grass for coming clean and withdrew his previous objections.

Grass's explanation in his own words is worth reading.

How I Spent the War, by Gunter Grass (The New Yorker)

In 1943, when I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Danzig, I volunteered for active duty. When? Why? Since I do not know the exact date and cannot recall the by then unstable climate of the war, or list its hot spots from the Arctic to the Caucasus, all I can do for now is string together the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision to enlist. No mitigating epithets allowed. What I did cannot be put down to youthful folly. No pressure from above. Nor did I feel the need to assuage a sense of guilt, at, say, doubting the Führer’s infallibility, with my zeal to volunteer.

Günter Grass was born into a stateless "free city" of Danzig stemming from the post-WWI reordering of maps, witnessed the rise of Nazism, participated in WWII, saw rise and fall of communism in Poland, and died only six months shy of Polish parliamentary elections in 2015 which brought the populist Law and Justice party to power.

His novel is incredible, my reading of it lamentably belated, and I'll leave it at that.

Eight Days of Gdansk, Halloween Add-on: "All You Need to Know about Dziady."

Photo credit.

There's an imported tradition as well as an indigenous one.

Do Polish people celebrate Halloween?, by Ewelina Nurczyk (Careers in Poland)

A frequent question with a not so straightforward an answer anymore. Is Halloween a holiday celebrated in Poland? What attitude do Poles have towards it? If not Halloween, then what? Find out by reading further on.

Western tradition

As a rule, Halloween is not a Polish tradition and it is only remotely connected to other pagan rituals of different Slavic nations. Yes, they all focused around death, but Halloween as we know it originated among Celtic tribes and now is considered a solely Anglo-Saxon holiday. Were it not for globalization, Poles would still be more likely to celebrate their own ancient holidays. What would these be?

If not Halloween, then what?

Dziady would be the Polish answer to Halloween, although this ancient Slavic feast is far from being popular in any modern sense. Its traces can be found in Romantic Polish literature, when one of Poland’s greatest poets, Adam Mickiewicz, described an ancient feast for the dead, taking place in a secluded chapel on a cemetery. This depiction does send shivers down one’s spine, definitely more than dress-up parties in Northern America nowadays!

However, there are certain parallels.

The Polish Halloween: All You Need to Know about Dziady (Culture.PL)

... Real-life Dziady celebrations were usually a little different to what we find in Mickiewicz’s book -they were centred around feasts held nearby the graves of ancestors. This ritual was strongly linked to a conviction that during seasonal changes, especially autumn at the turn of October and November, the spirits of the dead returned to the world of the living from the afterworld, making it possible to interact with one’s ancestors.

Feasting at burial grounds was seen as a form of spending time with those long-gone and honouring them. It included leaving food, often bread and honey, on their graves as gifts for their souls. The historian Karol Szajnocha gives a description of a medieval Dziady celebration in his book Jadwiga and Jagiełło:

Each settlement went to its cemetery, each family to its grave. There they poured sacrificial blood into a cold fire, on bark-woven seats they put bowls with food, on branches near the graves new clothes for the dead were hung… [editor’s translation from Polish]

The historian also mentions that the cemetery ritual started with resting and a great potluck feast. Other forms of Dziady celebrations included burning fires for the spirits to get warm by, a custom that is echoed by today’s lighting of candles on All Saint’s Day. Some fires were however burnt to keep spirits away, malicious ones that belonged to people who died in a way seen as wrong, such as due to murder.

An important element of the tradition of Dziady are Karaboshka masks. Such a mask, made of clay or wood, was worn to impersonate the deceased during the custom of leading spirits back to the afterworld. Interestingly, some scholars argue that the ancient Karaboshka is actually the original inspiration for the now common Jack-O’-Lantern. Regardless of whether that is the case, it’s worth noticing that the familiar pumpkin and the Slavic mask are both associated with a space between life and death, something that again links Halloween and Dziady.

After all, the Jack-O’-Lantern is part of the story of Stingy Jack whose soul cannot find its way neither to Heaven nor Hell and is forever stranded on Earth. Interestingly, helping troubled spirits find peace is a central theme in the second part of Mickiewicz’s Dziady, the drama quoted at the start of this article. Unlike in the great author’s work though, Dziady was actually celebrated in Christian churches in some places in Poland, but without the participation of people. This involved leaving a priest’s missal and stole in an empty church where, according to belief, the soul of a deceased clergyman would take them up and lead a midnight Mass for visiting souls.

Eight Days of Gdansk, October 30: Gdańsk raises the flag (again) against a wave of populism sweeping Poland.

I've wanted to visit Gdansk for a very long time, since at least the mid-1980s when Solidarity faced off against the Polish communist regime. For various reasons, I never made it to Gdansk until now.

When it comes to the lengthy history of a place like Gdansk, it can be exhausting just reading the Wikipedia article. However, we need to begin somewhere.

Gdańsk (formerly Danzig) is a Polish city on the Baltic coast. It is the capital of the Pomeranian Voivodeship and the capital of Kashubia, Poland's principal seaport and the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.

The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay (of the Baltic Sea), in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the Tricity (Trójmiasto), with a population approaching 1.4 million. Gdańsk itself has a population of 460,427 (December 2012), making it the largest city in the Pomerania region of Northern Poland.

During the coming week, as we're on the ground, there'll be pre-written daily posts highlighting a few interesting aspects of Gdansk.

As an introduction, a pertinent question: Does the emergence of the reactionary, xenophobic and authoritarian Law and Justice party in Poland imply an opposite and equal reaction -- or, something like a Solidarity Mach II, with the city of Gdansk again leading the resistance?

The answer goes beyond the merely academic. After all, this troubled planet is the real world, not the Disney variety.

Free City of Gdańsk – How Poland’s window to the world rises against populism, by Wojciech Ciesla (Investigate-Europe)

Gdańsk, Poland’s window to the world and cradle of the Solidarity democracy movement, raises the flag again against a wave of populism sweeping the country.

In an icy chill, residents of Gdańsk, never before connected to any movement, are protesting outside a local court against a new law of the Law and Justice party (PiS) that seeks to subordinate the judiciary and local elections to government authority. Around 400 people have gathered in the cold. They carry lit candles, their symbol of defiance. Across Poland tens of thousands more have taken to the streets to protest against a wholesale power grab by the governing PiS.

Two years of democratic backsliding have already passed in Poland under the leadership of the PiS. Step by step the party has stripped the judiciary of its independence. The latest law has provoked protests in more than 40 cities. In Gdańsk the few hundred protestors risk easy identification by the police, who, according to Roman Daszczyński, journalist and editor-in-chief of the www.gdansk.pl portal, record the protest from beginning to end. People are well aware of this but still come out despite the fear among those who work in state-controlled enterprises or institutions of reprisals. Gdańsk city is controlled by the liberal Civic Platform, but the voivodship, the next level up of regional administration which employs thousands of people, is controlled by Law and Justice. It’s much easier to find anonymity among the tens of thousands of people protesting in Warsaw, says Daszczyński.

A familiar figure emerges

From within the crowd, candles flickering in the cold breeze, a corpulent figure with a familiar grey walrus mustache steps out on to the stairs. Lech Wałęsa, the legendary Gdańsk shipyard electrician who in 1980 led the march to freedom of a 38 million-strong nation. Wałęsa, the first President of independent Poland after 1990 and still a resident of Gdańsk, stands with the protesters.

“You have probably noticed that things are going badly with Poland,” he says. “PiS are destroying everything we have gained so far. We are fighting it with the whole world behind us. I had thought I would be able to take a rest. I’ve already worked a bit in my life. But from what I see we have to wake up and get back to work. I do not agree with the destruction of Poland. We must do everything to reject this group from power as soon as possible!” says Wałęsa to huge applause ...

Eight Days of Gdansk: Prelude to a pilgrimage of Solidarity.

Back in March, an old obsession gripped me all over again: "It seems to me that if possible, the Confidentials should visit Gdansk soon."

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Damn it, I want to go to Gdansk and visit the European Solidarity Centre.

Photo credit: In Your Pocket.

So, I was reading an article about the industrial architecture of the Communist-era steel mills in Kraków, Poland.

Kraków’s Lenin Steelworks: a rare view of a socialist realist gem, by Julia Szyndzielorz (The Guardian)

The interior of the plant in Kraków’s utopian socialist new town is preserved in all its 1950s glory, a fascinating window on Soviet-era design

 ... Above the shelter, the former steelworks was one of communist Poland’s most important industrial plants: a 600-hectare site that employed almost 40,000 people. Also known as Kombinat, the plant, which remains important to Polish industry, is the heart of Nowa Huta, a district of Kraków built around it in the early 1950s in stark contrast to the rest of the historic city. Designed as a utopian socialist new town, Nowa Huta was the largest urban spatial development in postwar Poland – and the abundance of parks makes it one of Kraków’s greenest districts.

Tourists come here to see the results of the utopian urban planning of the 50s: massive Stalinist apartment buildings, schools, theatres, wide streets and hospitals, which have been preserved by the city. Several milk bars, with interiors unchanged since socialism, still serve pierogi, Polish dumplings filled with cottage cheese and onion, meat or plums, or simply with sugar and butter. Other options on the menu include beans with sausage, or chicken legs with potatoes, served by fast yet rather unfriendly staff.

What tourists didn’t get access to were the interiors of the steel mill – until the present owner, Arcelor Mittal, moved out of its office buildings three years ago and Rawelin started running tours.

In 2002, four of us caught a train from Kraków’s city center and strolled around the custom-built town of Nowa Huta, which was fascinating; then we had a few beers -- but I digress.

After reading the article about the steelworks, I clicked over to tourism-related pieces about Poland, soon landing on an essay about Gdansk. Hence this post, because I had no idea there was such a thing as the European Solidarity Center.

European Solidarity Centre (Wikipedia)

The European Solidarity Centre (Polish: Europejskie Centrum Solidarności) is a museum and library in Gdańsk, Poland, devoted to the history of Solidarity, the Polish trade union and civil resistance movement, and other opposition movements of Communist Eastern Europe. It opened on 31 August 2014.

My bucket list just added a Polish destination. In fact, I spent very little time in Poland during the 1980s, and this always has been a matter of significant regret. The former Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk was the incubator for Solidarity, the Polish trade union movement.

It's about pilgrimage.

After all, I named a Baltic Porter after Solidarity.

European Solidarity Centre (Europejskie Centrum Solidarności) (In Your Pocket)

The huge construction you can see next to the entrance to the Gdansk Shipyards is the impressive European Solidarity Centre which opened on August 30, 2014, the 34th anniversary of the signing of the August Accords. The 5-storey building, which has been designed to give the impression of walls cracking and tilting and is covered in rust-coloured sheet metal reminiscent of a ship’s hull, has been a project many years in the making ...

... There are a number of aims to the centre. First and foremost it is designed to be a symbol of the victory of the Solidarity movement and the way that victory was achieved peacefully thanks to the power of people uniting in solidarity with each other. It is both definitions of this word that the centre’s organisers want to pay tribute to and to develop further. The proclamation issued by the joint-signatories in 2005 stated that they wanted the European Solidarity Centre to “become the world’s centre for the ideas of freedom, democracy and solidarity to be fostered”.

The building is centred around a permanent exhibition dedicated to the history of Solidarity and the opposition, which led to the democratic transformation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. But the exhibition forms just a part of the European Solidarity Centre’s daily function. The building features a library, reading rooms and archives which are completely accessible to researchers and any interested reader alike. The conference rooms and other spaces, such as the winter garden on the ground floor, host debates and concerts serving projects of both the ESC and outside associations aimed at working towards the common good.

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And so we will.

During the coming days I'll be posting about Gdansk, formerly known as Danzig. It is an understatement of epic dimensions to say that it's a place bubbling over with sheer history -- and that's right down the center of the plate for me. Upon our return, photos will be "back-posted."

Enjoy the mid-term election, dear readers. We voted last week. Cheers!

"Lech Walesa: The Shipyard," a film by Errol Morris.

The Road to Gdansk, a primer on Polish history and the first flowering of Solidarity.