Building a new Poland

Elbląg and the search for the authentic

For all the beauty of the lakes and forests, the towns of northern Poland are often a little bleak and disjointed, an encouragement to put on one’s hiking boots and head out into nature if you are there at the right time of year. A typical vista will feature some well-restored red-brick Prussian buildings, including the main church and the town hall and a stretch of town wall with a gateway in it. There is likely to be a castle of some sort, either a turreted Teutonic edifice or a stately home once occupied by the Prussian aristocracy. There will be humbler older buildings too, but a lot of the centre is heavily reconstructed into plain, unadorned concrete versions of Polish or Prussian architectural forms. There are grassy open spaces between buildings in the older part of town, scars from the destruction the Soviet army wrought across the province in 1944-45. Look closely, and you will probably see burn marks and bullet holes. Most of the town will consist of low-rise concrete blocks of flats.

There may be strange reminders of the ‘German time’ in the countryside as well – weathered stone memorials, old railways disappearing amid the lakes, red brick stately homes crumbling into the earth and military remnants – above all Hitler’s ruined Wolf’s Lair complex near Kętrzyn, forbidding concrete bunkers standing like a lost Mayan city in the forest.

Hitler’s bunker at the Wolf’s Lair

Ideology made less difference than one might imagine to the way governments approached the rebuilding of the cities left devastated by war. Low-cost concrete construction, modernist styles of architecture with clean lines, opening up public spaces and wide, straight highways to facilitate the age of the motor car were all in vogue from Plymouth to Poltava. In a few areas, the old was to be reconstructed, but doing so thoroughly was costly in a period when resources were strained and there was a shortage of the skilled workers. Building places where people could live was the priority. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, knocking it all down and starting again lost favour towards the end of the 1970s, and there was more interest in conserving what was left and rebuilding in the style associated with pre-war streetscapes.

In Poland, the best-known urban restoration was the city of Warsaw, where it was decided to rebuild the old town central square and a few surrounding streets in an entirely historically authentic fashion. The deliberate Nazi destruction would be undone by painstaking Polish reconstruction in the heart of the capital. However, the Warsaw old town model could never be universal; it was too slow, too expensive, too demanding of resources and highly skilled labour. The rest of central Warsaw is a modernist grid. Like the Tsars, Stalin wanted to leave his mark on the city and gave Warsaw a splendid, sinister Gothic skyscraper in the shape of the Palace of Culture and Science. While independent Poland demolished the Orthodox Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky in the 1920s, issuing bonds so that people could contribute to the effort, post-1990 democratic Poland has kept Stalin’s dark tower. It has, though, lost its dominant place on the skyline as corporate glass and steel have run rampant.

Division between the three empires created different tendencies in building styles in each part; just looking at the German-style red brick old station in Katowice and travelling for less than ten minutes to Sosnowiec and its Russian-origin neoclassical pile of a station illustrates that. To be authentically Polish, did one have to go back to pre-partition styles? Or build on the intriguing version on modernism that the inter-war Republic had fostered? Warsaw was indisputably Polish, and to restore the buildings was to assert the survival of Poland and Polish culture in the face of its enemies, but the heritage was a lot more complicated in the ‘Recovered Territories’ which had been German, in government or culture, for centuries. A historically authentic reconstruction would make these places look like Germany, and as these had been living and evolving places, there was the question of which period to try to ‘restore’. There was a convincing attempt to rebuild old Danzig in the centre of the new Gdańsk, but even this is not quite what it seems. The ‘restoration’ kept the old look but behind the facades the buildings were simplified and sometimes bore only a loose relationship to the streetscape.  The difference between the contents of the historicist ‘old centre’ and the modern blocks of flats in the next street is less than it looks. Some areas, such as Gdańsk’s warehouse island across the river from the old centre, continued to deteriorate and genuine historic buildings were lost. In some other formerly German towns there was less effort, and even the importation of simplified versions of typically Polish architecture, gestures towards the baroque through curving gables and sgraffito decorations. In others yet, communist modernism prevailed – as its western version did in many war-damaged cities the other side of the Iron Curtain. In a small town, like Braniewo in former East Prussia near the Russian border, the centre is a jumble with an imposing restored red-brick Prussian church, a few concrete recreations of old Prussian and Polish styles, big blocks of flats and empty spaces punctuated by the remnants of German-era brick walls.

Braniewo, northern Poland

Elbing, near the Baltic between Danzig and Königsberg, was an attractive Hanseatic Prussian city, with tall half-timbered warehouses crowding the river bank and more stately but picturesque merchant houses lining the narrow streets of the old town. The bulky red brick Gothic cathedral of St Nicholas dominated the main square, its bell tolling the hours as the town lived and worked. Downriver from the centre, there were shipyards where Germany’s U-Boat fleet was built. This ensured that the town would receive devastating bombing and then fiery destruction once the Red Army arrived in February 1945. Most of the German population tried to flee westward. The town was handed over to the Communist authorities of post-war Poland as a smouldering, depopulated ruin. Elbing had sometimes been part of political entities that had allegiance to Poland, but culturally it had been overwhelmingly German for centuries until its population was nearly completely displaced in 1945. People who fled were not allowed back across the military line of control further west along the Oder, and most of the Germans who had remained and survived were expelled westwards, losing everything they could not carry and get past rapacious militias and Soviet soldiers. Its official name became Elbląg and before long bewildered Polish refugees from the small towns and fields of the former eastern borderlands arrived on cramped, squalid trains with their meagre possessions.

In the post-war years, the old city and the western side was mostly abandoned and people were housed in concrete blocks of flats east of the old centre. A new Communist Polish city developed, without many visual reminders of the German past, but a late 1960s proposal to build over the ruins of old Elbing in similar style did not proceed. In 1979 the authorities tried again, and this time it took hold and the blocks of the old city have once again filled with tall old-style buildings.

Except for a few selected buildings, the ‘Old Town’ of Elbląg is not a faithful reflection of what was there before. Different styles are jumbled together – some are replicas of red-brick Prussian town houses and warehouses, some are simplified baroque reflecting the traditions of southern and central Poland, some are unapologetic postmodern blocks with angular balconies.

‘Old’ Elbląg

It took me a while to decide what I thought about the new Elbląg.

I finally decided that I liked it. Visiting on a sunny holiday, when the streets were full of happy people, probably helped. The eclectic, simplified style allows new-old Elbląg to exist on a large scale rather than being confined to an isolated street or two near the Cathedral, or a single set-piece town square. The fact that it’s possible to wander around rather than circling the same block means that although it looked odd, Elbląg was able to recapture this aspect of old urbanism where smaller set-pieces could not.

By mixing up versions of traditional Prussian and Polish architecture with postmodernist blocks of roughly similar dimensions, using modern construction methods, Elbląg has created something new and distinctive that could only exist in modern Poland. One cannot know how future generations will feel when they walk the streets; with longer perspective, perhaps the difference between the original and the pastiche will seem less, and Elbląg’s old town will seem like a logical development on what went before, a synthesis of Polish and German pasts made in the Polish present.