Poland's recent past

One of the many things taught me by my dear Viennese friend Trude Winik (1909-1998), who lost her father in the First World War and her mother, brother and sister to the camps in the Second, was that the past is always present so long as the person who experienced it lives on. In Trude's case it was a guilt which haunted her every day, that she survived when the rest of her family didn't. Now a gripping family history, Matthew Zajac's The Tailor of Inverness, and a film about life two decades or so after the end of World War Two, Ida by that superb filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski who had already given us two very different and equally fine British movies, Last Resort and My Summer of Love, remind us that the past lives on in the next generation too.

It was serendipity that I came across The Tailor of Inverness among the books sold alongside the box office in Inverness's Eden Court Theatre the day before we watched the DVD of Ida - in turn, the day before it won the Best Foreign Language Film category in the Oscars (not that one cares for any ceremony which omits Mike Leigh's masterpiece Mr Turner from the main categories - I rant about that in my DVD review for The Arts Desk).The blurb made it sound interesting, but more especially I liked the idea of supporting a local publisher, Sandstone Press. More in the next post of why I was up there last weekend.

I don't know how much I can say about book and film without giving crucial information away. Both are thrillers in the sense of revealing surprise informaton - and Ida has a gut-wrenching twist about two-thirds of the way through for which I was completely unprepared, so you should be too. Both remind us that few folk escaped from the maelstrom of the war in central Europe uncompromised, let along unscarred. Zajac Senior came to Britain in 1948, married an Englishwoman and settled in Inverness where he made a success as a tailor after early vicissitudes.

Son Matthew (pictured on the cover of the book and above, by Murdo MacLeod, playing his father) speaks simply but rapturously of summers with his uncle in Lesna, south west Poland, a place of natural plenty. The kindness of relatives and friends is an overwhelming constant throughout, and helps him weather the revelations when they come. Suffice it to say that as an accomplished actor with his own theatre group, he made an Edinburgh Fringe First winning play about his journey of discovery which toured to the places he visited, Poland and Ukraine, among others. He writes:

It seemed right to me to take the story back to its origins, but I was nervous about how it would be received [well, as it turned out]. I was conscious that it could be viewed as a presumptuous act, for a foreigner to have the gall to tell Poles and Ukrainians their own story. But my previous trips to Ukraine in particular had told me that this was a story which had rarely been expressed on a public platform. The shock of the war and subsequent 45-year Soviet stasis retained their grip. The fear of speaking out which was endemic to the old Stalinist culture meant that many people, particularly in the older generations, still had a policeman in their head.

These are the same preoccupations of Ida. Framed as the kind of 1960s Polish art film the director remembered from his youth, in the square format then common, every scene is composed with an aching beauty, and there's a special affection for the bands of that time (the love-interest saxophonist is very handsome, too). Like any great film from the European masters, it has remarkable performances - in this case the contrasts and symmetries played out by Agata Trzebushowska's ambivalent Ida and the magnetic Agata Kulesza as Wanda, communist functionary with a painful secret.

Also as in any great film, the music is kept to a minimum; the actresses and the cinematography carry it all. I don't think I want to write any more: just see it.

Samarkand on the Elbe

Where's this? The clue is in the title: not in central Asia or the middle east, to which I so often long to return after years of untroubled wanderings there, but in Dresden. On the 'wrong' side of the tracks to the Altstadt, with the railway line running just past it, is this magnificent folly created on the earnings from smoke, the Yenidze Tobacco Factory. I well remember passing this neo-orientalist fantasy on our train journey from Berlin to Prague back in 1990.

 The Yenidze was lucky to survive the bombs as, of course, the city's other great dome, that of the Frauenkirche, did not. Designed by architect Martin Hammitzsch and built between 1907 and 1909, the factory took its title from the place where the Jewish entrepreneur Hugo Zietz established a tobacco business for import to Germany; Ottoman Yenidze in Thrace is now Greek Genisea in another part of the world redolent of a personally significant train journey, our InterRail travel to Istanbul.

Wiki, the only source of any detail, tells me the edifice  'has 600 windows of various styles; the dome is 20m high'. Detail is impressive, as in this gateway to what are now the office quarters, converted in the 1996 restoration.

I read that there was a cafe and restaurant just under the dome, so - following the night of our reason for being here, the Semperoper performance of Der Rosenkavalier - off we went after our morning's exhaustive visit to the treasures of the Neues Grünes Gewölbe and eventually discovered the narrow passageway at the north end leading to the lift up to the Kuppelrestaurant's beer garden at the north end.

The terrace beneath the stained glass dome was as we imagined it, the service by a spirited young east German waiter delightful (aided by 'wanderer' John, who's very chatty with any new acquaintance he warms to) and the food a good deal better than we'd expected in such a setting. You can't go far wrong, though, with seasonal white asparagus, and the salmon and potatoes accompanying it were fine.Good views, too, over the old town, .

the hills and the river as far as the sandstone quarries. Though nothing can surpass the splendour of the dome; I'd like to have seen it lit up at night.

Not inappropriately, we made our way back to the palace museums to look at the gilded, bejewelled weaponry and the gorgeous tents of the Turkish wars. The heat then drove us back to our splendid bargain of an apartment just off the Neumarkt. I don't think many readers will be unaware of the colossal civic gesture involved in the resurrection of the Frauenkirche, which began life in 1736 as a people's protest to the Catholic conversion, with attendant Hofkirche, of Augustus I (an expedience owed to his Polish regnancy).

More generally known is that it was flattened in 1945, leaving only two walls standing. That was how it stood until 1993, rubble like so much else in Dresden due to the painful lack of funds in East Germany, and so that's how I saw it on my first visit in 1990. This image from 1973 comes from the Deutsche Fotothek.

After the reunification there was a colossal drive towards what seemed like an impossible reconstruction, supported by fellow organisations in Britain, America, France and Switzerland. 3539 of the original building blocks were used to send the Frauenkirche reaching skywards again

accounting for 45 per cent of the material used. The darker colour of the old sandstone makes them stand out (Dresden's blackening sandstone is due not to pollution but to the high proportion of iron). Though the interior is hideous - panels painted in what looks like Italian bathroom style of the 1990s - and packed with tour groups throughout the day, that's not the point: the gesture is as heroic as the rebuilding of Warsaw's old town, and literally crowned by reforged bonds between the city and its destroyers in the shape of the orb and cross.

They were constructed in 18th century style, with help from London's Grant Macdonald Silversmiths,  by Alan Smith. His father had been part of  the 'Bomber' Harris' squadron which flattened and incinerated a great city. The thought of that restitution certainly brings tears to the eyes: we can move on, we can go some way to repairing the sins of the past.

And so the vast square in front of the Frauenkirche easily absorbs the thousands of daytrippers - much reduced, I was told, in the week following the floods - and the souvenir stands. The facades aren't exactly like the ones in Bellotto's famous view, but will do. The angle from which I took this photo is at least taken from the same building, and the same staircase, featured from a distance on the same side in Bellotto's panorama.

One remnant of the DDR era remains as an oddity in the Neumarkt, the Kulturpalast still used as the Dresden Philharmonic's concert hall - Marek Janowski resigned when plans for a new hall came to nothing - and on one side only they've left the rather splendid mural as a reminder of the ideals that soured.

I dug out my 1990 pictures and saw that there was more decoration on the south side, not to mention the Lenin group in the Altmarkt, now gone along with the Inter Hotel behind the Kulturpalast. The Altmarkt remains a sterile space.

How things have changes, too, around the Residenzschloss and the Hausmann Tower. 1990:

2013:

Pristine now, too, is the Augustusstrasse, though again clogged with halting tour groups. Buskers of superior quality to your usual boring statues liven up the scene beneath the 102-metre 'Procession of Princes' , painted in the 1870s by Wilhelm Walter. Its original stucco was covered over in 2006 with 25,000 Meissen tiles. Wasted effort? The jury's out on that one, but grand it is. Anyway, we enjoyed the man with permanently windswept tie and toy dog on a lead who spun around every couple of minutes

and a top-notch brass trio from St Petersburg intoning Verdi's Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves among other anniversary hits.

Back, then, to our packed touristic day. We took a late afternoon siesta and met up with John for an evening stroll in the balmy summer weather. The old town spires and putti were silhouetted in the sunset

and along the Elbe on the Neustadt side students and young people were all out peacefully chatting, drinking and smoking.

Here's more or less the famous view by Bellotto, as unspoilt as the Thames above Richmond and a good deal grander (a picture frame actually marks the spot).

And so along to the lovely grounds, open to all, of the Japanese Palace, where I enjoyed a chat with a delightful old Dresden lady very proud of her city and the nearby palaces, with views across to the Yenidze. A blissful evening, a real midsummer night's dream of peace and reconciliation in a once-troubled city.

Kith unkind

Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, winner of the Prix Goncourt in France where it was first published as Les Bienveillantes, is the most disturbing book I've ever read. A big, important work, certainly, but I'm not sure if I would bandy the words 'great' or 'masterpiece'. Powerful, undoubtedly: I realised from an early stage that it wasn't for bedtime reading, which is why I took to turning the light off on stuff about royal gardens and Baltic islands, and when I recently neared the end, I found myself twice overshooting tube stops in my absorption.


The title is all important: Aeschylus's Eumenides are a presence practically throughout, in their earlier guise as Furies, to Nazi SD officer Aue - more of an Orestes, it's to transpire, than we could possibly imagine in the early stages (can't go further without spoiling the tension inherent in the narrative). He's there at many of the worst atrocities known to the Second World War, from Babi Yar through Stalingrad to the death camps and the fall of Berlin. Which is plausible, as is the violence, and the way it piles up and springs again just when you thought you'd reached a more lyrical stretch (the titles of Bach/French suites to each section - Toccata, Allemandes I & II, Sarabande, Menuet (en Rondeaux, Air), Gigue - are more ironic than apt).


I had two problems throughout. One is the knowledge that Littell Junior (his father, I think it is, writes the most wonderful post-Cold-War thrillers) researched for over a decade. It may well be that the monotonous listing of all the Nazi stratifications is deliberate, for numbing effect; but I was less convinced by the way that characters often speak like dense newspaper articles, as if all the research simply had to be crammed in, just as it seems to be in bad biodramas like Ronald Harwood's. And since the facts are wrong about Richard Strauss, the only area where I can claim any detailed knowledge, how much is dodgy elsewhere (a question I also found myself asking about Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance)?

Is faction different from true imaginative creation? Jim Crace, after all, is the most evocative writer I know, yet he doggedly disdains research. And when Littell goes in for stream-of-consciousness writing, as in the ghastly Air sequence, I'm not entirely convinced (it may just be the translation, of course).


As, indeed, I'm not by what the author wants us to think of the most mixed-up character in literature. Clearly Aue's prefatory statement - 'I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!' - doth protest too much. Yes, maybe most of us would have been complicit in one way or another in 1930s and 1940s Germany. But not after the manner of this character. The novel might as well be subtitled A Psychopath's Progress, or even Dubious Memoirs of a Fantasist. I'm presuming we must take the later murders as part of that brainsickness, too? Is it a good thing that we're left uncertain? At any rate, having to consider the final pages as even possible truth seems like a step too far. It was all quite bad enough without the extra patina of whimsy.

You can see that I'm confused, and perhaps that's the idea. I didn't once think, yes, I'd have done that, or, yes, I can see how an arts-loving man could behave like that. Because of course at the heart of Aue's narrative is an almost - though, tantalisingly, not quite - total lack of empathy for his fellow man. The voices of conscience surface very briefly in the form of his twin sister and the sad, decent woman who looks after him during one of his breakdowns. But inevitably you wish someone had succeeded in putting a bullet through the protagonist's head long before he could go on to commit still worse crimes of his own. Curiously, there are fabulously evocative descriptions of Lemberg/Lviv/Lvov and Pyatigorsk which made me want to go and see those places, so the book's not without its beauties, Still, it's a case of Schrecklich, aber nicht unglaublich. Ending now on Shalom Goldberg's image of Babi Yar.