Odds and Ends

One of the more underremarked upon occurences in recent history, it seems to me, is the mass forced expulsions and resettlements of the entire populations of regions and cities in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. This involved many millions of people, was achieved in a very brief time and in a chillingly thorough manner with apparently very little--certainly no effective--resistance or protest. I understand that the expulsions were ruthlessly conducted, that the least hint of dissent would have been dealt with by a bullet to the head on the spot; of course the ranks of young men, the most likely cohort of resistance, had been almost completely culled during the war just ended, leaving a mainly ragtag and beaten down population of old people, children, and women, whose political strength is not, as a general rule, combating the sort of brutality that was unleashed in that era. While this exodus is noted in many artworks and general interest histories, as anything of magnitude must be in our era, with the exception of the mass raping that the Soviet army engaged in in the region it has not seemed to make a very strong impression on the consciousness of modern intellectual man. When it is alluded to, it is almost as a footnote to the events of the years before it, an additional unpleasantness in an environment where personal insult can scarcely be felt any longer. Perhaps that is how it was experienced. I realize that oppression made explicit works about, or even explicit references to this subject impossible as long as it lasted, and that its effects therefore tended to become enfolded in abstractions and intellectualisms of the sort that is catnip to the official thinking classes of the West; but it is really a bigger story than that. There is unfortunately not much humor in it, which is problematic for addressing modern Western audiences in the modern art forms. Whatever real sense of tragedy, if any, the age has, it is not of an elevated nature historically speaking, and in the prosperous countries it seems impossible for it to be very serious either. There is also the circumstance that the Germans (along with the Poles) were the major sufferers in this relocation of peoples, and no one wants to appear to be, or actually be, sympathetic to them, though by insisting on this condition

Still, we are left today with the fact that Konigsberg, a major German city for centuries, home of Kant and a famous university, has been emptied of its entire German population and repopulated with Russians. The city of Memel, a part of the German nation prior to 1918, is know Klaipeda in Lithuania. The Germans have gone from here too. The Polish nation and population was shifted en masse 100 miles west from its traditional area. Lviv, which had a predominantly Polish population and was part of Poland from 1918-39 (and had been within the borders of the Hapsburg empire before that) was emptied and repopulated with Ukranians. I have read that the Poles kicked out of Lviv were largely settled in Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, which had been vacated for them by the expulsion of the formerly German population. Joseph Conrad the author was born in a city called Berdichev, now several hundred miles deep within Ukraine, and still rather difficult to find much information about though it has a population of several hundred thousand. Evidently it had at least a sizable Polish population in the mid-nineteenth century, if it was not the dominant group. All of these cities of course would have had significant Jewish populations as well in the 1500-1940 period that seems at this time to me to be the broad parameters delineating "modern" or "iconic" Europe. The magnitude of the break with long history which the destruction of these cities, the death, murder and expulsion of their peoples by 1945, the gradual dying out down to our own time of people with memory of the pre-1940 European culture--this subject, only ever partially, even minutely, seen by me at any given time, is nonetheless one of my principal obsessions, as it is. Anything I come across in my own largely inexplicable existence that can be connected to this question in some way is of great moment to me.

So far this has all been a buildup to the main point of this essay, which is a reminiscence of when I was in Wroclaw, a couple of weeks before Christmas in 1996. All the cities in that part of the world are generally gloomy in ways that are very congenial to my sensibility and temperament, but Wroclaw is the gloomiest place I have ever been to, taking gloomy in the sense that an air of melancholy and doom permeates the whole atmosphere. I would have been happy to have stayed a couple of months there, taken a term at the university. If any city demonstrates the value of maintaining physical universities as places for bright young people to congregate and hang about cafes and bars and bookshops for four or five years rather than just taking courses on computers while holding down stupid jobs, this is the one. The fact that the city would be truly frightening without the presence of the students aside, the student body at Wroclaw U seemed to me at the time to be better than average-looking; being Polish they were a, to me, refreshingly unspoiled, unentitled, impecunious group, such that in mood they were afflicted with genuine melancholy as opposed to being neurotic, which is an affliction of privilege and is generally a perversion of melancholia. The train station was truly a place fit to drop dead in, and I mean that as a compliment. It was much larger than its current needs seem to require. The few people who get off the trains there do not linger, and the only people waiting around in the concourse are of that fraternity that drains all idea of romance from travel. The station is similar to Baltimore's in all these regards. Baltimore does not have a snack bar serving pizza topped with ketchup instead of tomato sauce and playing 60s communist pop oldies on the radio however. Another curious aspect of this town is that normal men, not obviously vagrants or mentally ill, some probably with children, families, even jobs, can be seen so drunk, mainly on vodka as to be staggering and wavering about the sidewalks or actually lying passed out in the gutter. This is the sort of thing one reads about happening in America 70 or 100 years ago, but one never sees this level of public drunkenness here anymore. It is really quite shocking. The small shops selling food and cigarettes were unpretentiously poetic, even when they were ugly, had cinderblock walls painted bone or whatever. I remember buying some cigarettes and a roll in one of them and being certain these items were more substantial, more real, because in a sense more unreal, than they were in the stores I was accustomed to (this was a sensation I often had about food and other goods in that part of the world). I had borscht one afternoon for the only time in my life. I did not like it.

The place was really quite odd, but I also felt oddly comfortable in it, as if among other souls not so much lost as somehow permanently and hopelessly dislocated. The absence of extremely wealthy or edgy or consciously cool people in a city of that size, yet with a substantial number of educated people and authentic depressive types among the young, appealed strongly to my imagination. I thought I might be able at least to have what is called brain sex with them, which I take to be a strong intellectual connection with people who are also physically or socially attractive, but probably would not be responsive to you on those terms alone. Perhaps I was just in a receptive or romantically vulnerable mood at the time, as I often am that time of year when the days grow short and the sun is rarely seen anyway. It was a second-rate city, after all, with a dead past and grim prospects for any very exciting future, about which no one actually living there was terribly enthusiastic. Such are most of our real experiences.