Postcard from Westerplatte, 2019

            This week, the world remembers 75 years since VE day, the end of the Second World War in Europe (May 8^th, 1945). That sobering anniversary – which falls in the midst of a quite different kind of global crisis – comes hot on the heels of another grim anniversary marked back in September 2019: the 80^th anniversary of the outbreak of the war. Whereas the VE day anniversary takes place under lockdown, the 1939-2019 commemorations occurred in what now seems a very different moment in history, at the end of a long, hot summer, amidst tourist crowds and international jet-setting by world leaders. The blog below was written in Gdansk in September 2019, and it is posted now as a postcard, if you will, from a recent-distant past.

Westerplatte, Poland

            In August 2019, international dignitaries flew to Warsaw to mark the 80^th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two. A parallel gathering of European city leaders, including the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, was held in the Polish city of Gdansk. They flew to Poland because the opening military clash of this war, which would leave an estimated 70 million people dead, occurred just outside the port-city, on a low-lying Baltic peninsula called Westerplatte. At around 4am on 1^st September 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on a Polish military depot at Westerplatte. Both countries had shared an uneasy presence in the Free City of Danzig since the end of World War I, under the eye of the League of Nations. The Polish forces at Westerplatte surrendered seven days later, by which time most of their country had been overrun by invading forces, and Great Britain too was at war.

            Twentieth-first century Gdansk is today a dynamic water-side hub, a popular destination for tourists and foreign investment alike, with gourmet restaurants and gleaning hotels springing up along its canals. The easiest way to see Westerplatte is to take a cruise, slightly improbably, on one of the two replica pirate ships which dominate the Gdansk summertime panorama, The Black Pearl (a nod to Hollywood) or The Lion (a nod to a local galleon wrecked in the 17^th century). Tickets are sold by bored Polish girls sitting under an umbrella on the quayside, departures are on the hour, and eager crowds push their way aboard, as a string quartet lustily plays the Pirates of the Caribbean theme tune on a pavement nearby. The passengers are mix of holidaying Polish families with toddlers, East Asian tourists, inebriated stag-groups from Germany, and earnest history aficionados. As the ship turns on its engines and pulls away with surprising speed, children explore the forecastle, parents rush for good viewing seats, and many others head straight for the giant bar in the hold.

            Czarna Perla – The Black Pearl – takes you past the fourteenth-century red-brick spires and city-gates of Gdansk/Danzig, past the striking new Museum of World War II, jutting out of the ground like a crooked red tooth, and towards the historic shipyards where Solidarity, and perhaps a new Europe, was born in the 1980s. The fully rigged, beer-stocked pirate ship continues through a flat expanse of docks, cargo ships and coal heaps, as it negotiates the last stages of the Vistula delta, a maze of waterways and marshes which eventually ooze out into the Baltic, with its sand spits and storms. The pirate ship, stag party in full swing and playing with the plastic cannons, passes the late medieval brick lighthouse-cum-fort of Wisloujscie, which for centuries guarded the entrance to Gdansk. And then, abruptly, with no sea yet in sight, it reaches Westerplatte – there is a sign, a ruined 1930s brick building, and a tiny quay with an ice-cream van. A wooded park stretches along the shore. That’s it. Nearby a rust-streaked car-ferry is moored, bound for Stockholm. Nobody much disembarks from the pirate booze-cruise, the captain booms over the sound-system that this is the very spot where World War Two began, and a live folk guitarist promptly starts playing to cheer up any melancholy passengers. And then The Black Pearl turns back towards the cafes of Gdansk.

            In September 1939, the senior officer in command of the Polish base at Westerplatte was Major Henry Sucharski. On his death-bed in Italy in 1945, Sucharski recounted his experiences to the writer Melchior Wankowicz, who novelised them in his hugely influential 1947 work Westerplatte. Accounts of the battle remain inconsistent and confused. The Polish base suffered aerial bombing, an attempted German landing, and much of the Polish artillery was soon put out of action. On 7^th September, after a long battle in the muddy mouth of the Vistula, with some 60 combatants dead, the Polish forces raised a white flag. Aided by Wankowicz’s stirring book, in post-war Poland Westerplatte fast acquired near-mythical status, as a definitive site of 20^th-century Polish heroism, resistance and martyrdom. Today, Gdansk’s brand-new World War Two Museum offers special guided boat trips to Westerplatte, ‘the site of the global and Polish tragedy of September 1939’. Roger Moorhouse’s new account of the September campaign, First to Fight:the Polish War of 1939, published in 2019, will likely bring the Westerplatte story afresh to new international readers.

            At the Gdansk commemorations in September 2019, wreaths were laid at Westerplatte, followed by a debate between European city mayors entitled ‘Solidarity and Peace: the City as a European Community’. The city’s streets were decked with striking black ‘1939-1989-2019’ flags. Separate events were organised in Warsaw – the seat of the nationalist Law & Justice party (PiS) government – and cosmopolitan Danzig, whose most famous son Lech Walesa openly campaigns against PiS, and where the murder in January 2019 of the city’s long-serving mayor Pawel Adamowicz by an assailant allegedly inspired by far-right hate speech is still a very raw memory. Adamowicz’s desk is on display, behind glass, in the splendid Renaissance state rooms of Gdansk town hall. In the austere 14^th-century gothic basilica of St. Mary’s, modern pilgrims come to seek his grave.

            In the unseasonably hot Polish September of 2019, the ruins of Westerplatte are not faced by Nazi cruisers, but by mock pirate ships. In 1509, the Swiss scholar Sebastian Brandt published his classic satire, The Ship of Fools, a book no doubt much read in the German-speaking, intellectually fertile and wonderfully wealthy Gdansk/Danzig of the early sixteenth-century. In its own way, Czarna Perla is perhaps a kind of 21^st-century Narrenschiff. Its late-summer passengers, with their ice-creams and Budweisers, half-look at Westerplatte and the black hole it signifies in our collective histories, and half look-away. Whether these global passengers are listening to the explicit historical commentary dispensed by the replica ship’s audio system, above the hub-bub of music and chatter, is an open question. For there are many histories, and many Europes, lurking in the heavily dredged and wreck-strewn waters of the Gdansk channel; and a labyrinth of possible European futures.

The Golden Lion, Gdansk

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Gesture - from Botticelli to Microsoft Teams

            

Primavera, Sandro Botticelli (1470s/80s)

            

       As Trinity term starts in Oxford, it is not only teaching which has moved online, but also the regular College and Faculty committee meetings which pepper the diaries of academics in this self-governing republic of scholars. Normally, we meet in groups of 20 in the high-ceilinged rooms of the History Faculty, in groups of 10 in Somerville’s SCR Dining Room, or in the full 40+ Governing Body assembly of college Fellows, in the basement hall of our 1970s’ Wolfson building. Instead, we now meet exclusively on screens. Microsoft Teams, the video-conferencing tool used by the University (and the UK House of Lords), currently shows only the faces of the four most recent speakers. The other digitally-present committee members are visible purely as tiny initials at the bottom of the screen. While online committee meetings work surprisingly well in many respects, the move from physical Oxford rooms to screens has revealed how much of a traditional meeting is conducted silently, via body language. Not all 40, 20 or 10 members of a committee will speak on every topic on the agenda, of course, but vigorous nods, discreet frowns, smiles, agitated shuffling of papers – even when only half-registered by others – together create a mood, a collective sense of a group reaction, over and above what is actually said (and minuted). At present, we cannot see our non-speaking colleagues’ mini-gestures, just rows of silent initials in coloured circles – even as we grapple with critical issues, such as the financial challenge which the pandemic urgently poses for Oxford colleges, or the implications of social distancing for teaching now and in the months to come. The ‘chat’ function, where committee members can post brief comments on the discussion in a side bar for all to see, is helpful, but it is still verbal communication; with emojis, but without gesture or human facial expressions.

                Historians have for decades studied the role and importance of gesture, particularly in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The theme of the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (IMC) back in 2006, for example, was ‘Emotion and Gesture’; in 2016, Piotr Węcowski of Warsaw University published on the gestures of the Jagiellonian kings of Poland in the 15C and 16C, and their grave political meaning to contemporaries. Michael Baxandall’s celebrated book, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972), argued that decoding body language in Renaissance paintings is key to understanding their meanings and composition. He pointed out, for example, that in Botticelli’s famously enigmatic Primavera, Venus’ raised hand would have been understood by (educated) contemporaries as a gesture of welcome to her spring bower. Or that the manically grinning, pointing angel seen at the foot of many Renaissance paintings is a reference to a character familiar from 15C street theatre – the festaiulo who literally pointed out which actor the viewer should be paying attention to. Late medieval preachers, meanwhile, had a repertoire of gestures, or sign language, so extensive that (some argue) a wandering Italian friar could preach through body language alone in, say, Brittany. By contrast, on Teams we communicate oblivious to most of the pointing, sighing and waving of colleagues.

 

                Having our normal professional interactions as scholars shaken up so radically by social distancing, however, can create a new space for potential historical insights and reflections. Looking at day-to-day 21C academic life, as it is turned upside down and rendered no-longer-familiar, mediated entirely through screens, might make us newly alert to elements in past cultures which we have not adequately spotted to date, and generate new research questions about society, culture and communication. Because it is not only teaching and research which are famously complementary scholarly activities; historians and anthropologists know that committee meetings, in both their traditional (tables) and novel (screens) forms, are also a crucial forum for watching, reflecting, and thinking on many levels – a surprising window, if you will, onto bigger norms and wider worlds.