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

---

The First ‘Love Island’ (1838)

                                 

          

George Sand,
painted by
August Charpentier (1838)

Fryderyk Chopin, c. 1849, by Bisson

         

         

       











               On British television, the reality dating show and pop-culture phenomenon ‘Love Island’ is nearing its finale this weekend. With over 6 million viewers, the programme places 20-somethings on the Balearic Island of Mallorca, in a converted farmhouse-villa decked out with neon signs and gaudy summer accessories. Yet perhaps few of the contestants or viewers know that tourism on Mallorca was kick-started almost two centuries ago by an earlier pair of celebrity, star-crossed lovers, in a remote lodging just a few miles away from the ITV villa.

            In 1838, the ‘most famous woman in France’, the avant-garde, aristocratic, cross-dressing, best-selling novelist George Sand (Amantine Dupin) travelled to Mallorca with the Polish composer, pianist and political refugee Fryderyk Chopin. She was 34, a divorced mother of two, he 28. Sand claimed they were seeking solitude, where she could write and Chopin compose; they were likely also fleeing from the scandal their love affair had caused in Paris. Mallorca in the 1830s was heavily agricultural, with limited infrastructure for foreign visitors – the couple could not find a functioning hotel in Palma, and ended up renting a cell in an abandoned monastery, in the mountain village of Valldemossa. The lovers’ Mallorcan tryst was bitter-sweet. Chopin’s letters praised the natural beauty, calm and ‘poetic feeling’ of the island. Sand, however, grew disillusioned, and angry at the locals who disapproved of the unmarried lovers. She later vented her feelings in her famously acerbic
memoire A Winter in Mallorca.  

            Sand’s book put Mallorca on the literary map. She joked that she had ‘discovered’ the island, and predicted that once international travel connections improved ‘Mallorca would soon prove a formidable rival to the Alps’, a new destination for the North European traveller. That prophecy was realised with the opening of an international airport at Palma in 1960, and the advent of mass tourism. Today, ‘Love Island’ producers distil Mallorca into its essential modern tourist image – turquoise waters, limestone coves, endless sunshine, endless swimming pools. Yet, as the 2019 contestants chat, court and argue on our screens, this social-media television spectacle still evokes the unquiet ghosts of Mallorca’s original, nineteenth-century ‘Love Island’ couple.

            In their villa, the current ‘Love Island’ contestants are cut off from the outside world, kept well away from the locals. They can only imagine what is being written and tweeted about them in the outside world, or what fame or infamy will greet them on their return. They come to find love, or fame, or the £50K cash prize. Chopin and Sand, too, in their damp monastery sought total privacy, but wondered what the Paris papers were saying. And they too found that that a Mallorcan hideaway holiday had an ambiguous effect on their relationship. Chopin was in 1838 already ill with bronchitis or tuberculosis, and his love affair with Sand would break down in terrible, very public recriminations a few years later. The Polish pianist died in Paris in 1849; Sand did not attend his funeral. The Mallorcan interlude had proved productive for both their careers: Sand wrote her novel Spiridion in the monastery, and Chopin composed a number of pieces at Valldemossa. But the romantic happily-ever-after which the most gossiped-about couple of 19^th-century Europe had sought in the Balearic sun had proved, ultimately, far more elusive.

History on the March...

Pilgrimage of Grace banner, 1536

       

           Last weekend, along with a million other people, I attended the Peoples’ Vote March in central London. We arrived in Park Lane, super-luxury hotels looming over us, and stood for over two hours in a tightly packed crowd. The two-mile column of humanity ahead of us was so dense, that there was no room to actually march. We eventually shuffled through London, hemmed in by hundreds of people on all sides for 5 whole hours.

Photo by @JesseJJWS

            As well as the in-the-present-moment sense of insurrectionary urgency which infused the march, the day was full of curious historic echoes, like a magic lantern show. The tallest flags, on enormous home-made flagpoles, were from the regions. High above the crowd, there fluttered Yorkshire white Roses, Lancashire red roses, the yellow Dorset cross, and the black flag of Cornwall - all held proudly aloft by protestors who had travelled by coach to London, setting out in the early hours of the morning. The Cornish flags marching on Parliament put me in mind of their most famous antecedent, the Cornish rebellion of 1497 against Henry VII, in which armed Cornish miners made it all the way to London, and the Battle of Blackheath. The roses from northern England, meanwhile, in their own distant way evoked the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace, that great early modern rising of the north, which marched under its own banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, with matching badges for the Pilgrims: begging Henry VIII to reconsider his legal breach with Rome, and save the English monasteries.

            As this great anti-Brexit carnival shuffle-marched past Green Park, a man stood on the metal railings, blowing kisses and calling out to the crowd like a preacher: ‘All you need is love! I love you all! You are looooved!’. Someone in my party said: ‘Do you think that’s how the Levellers started?’, imagining the most radical sects of the English Civil War originating as yelling mystics on the edge of a 17C political crowd. On the march, people were talking excitedly about the on-line petition to Parliament to revoke Article 50: as fellow historians have pointed out, petitions are not trivial gestures, but a tradition deeply embedded in British political culture. When James VI & I processed from Scotland to take up his new English crown in 1603, he was met outside London by a delegation of Puritan ministers who handed him the Millenary Petition, which they claimed had 1,000 clerical signatories.

Past the Ritz, and down Saint James, into London’s club-land. In the window of a cigar boutique, three tanned men smoked insouciantly, watching the noisy crowd pass by. On a balcony on Pall Mall, a family sipped champagne, as a million shouting, singing people filed past. Approaching Trafalgar Square, we spotted signs in the crowd in Polish: a bilingual placard saying ‘The Duchy of Cieszyn rejects Brexit’ – Central European regionalism here – and, more bracingly, an unfurled red-white ‘Solidarność’ banner, bringing Poland's anti-Communist resistance symbol par excellence to Britain’s anti-Brexit march. And, of course, in the crowd demanding a second referendum, there were hundreds and hundreds of blue-yellow EU flags: worn as capes, as face-paints, as antennae on children’s heads, wrapped around dogs, serving as blankets for protesters in wheelchairs. Here, a flag – the 19C medium of national identity par excellence – was repurposed for a very 21C anti-nationalist, transnational message.

This is the trouble with historians: they see deep layers of meaning, century upon century, wherever they look, as if deep time were all around them. Most commentators referred to the march as ‘historic’, by which they meant that it would be remembered, shape events, feature in future textbooks. But historian-marchers keep one eye behind them too: the People’s Vote March was also historic, because it drew together, in a carnival of protest, so many rich threads from the past of both these islands and of their European neighbours.

Three Days in Budapest

Isabella (1519-1559), Queen of Hungary, attributed to workshop of Lucas Cranach

        This month, I attended a conference in Budapest, to mark the 500^th anniversary of the birth of Isabella (1519-59), a Polish-Italian princess and Queen of Hungary. In spite of the tsunami of books and novels on Renaissance queens in recent years, Isabella’s dramatic life is still surprisingly little-known outside Hungary itself. Raised at the Cracow court at the height of the Polish Renaissance, Isabella travelled south in 1539 to marry King John of Hungary: only to find herself, just 18 months later, widowed, with a new-born son, and an Ottoman army led by Sultan Suleiman I surrounding her capital of Buda. Via many twists and turns, she came to rule the new principality of Transylvania for her son, as the Sultan’s vassal.

 

            Isabella was a highly international 16^th-century figure, continually crossing borders, and this conference, organised by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, also involved much border crossing, with speakers from Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Finland and the UK. Isabella has fallen between the cracks of different national scholarships, but an international conference like this can start to put the pieces back together. Attending the conference programme put together by Dr. Terez Oborni and Dr. Agnes Mate was like watching a new biography of Isabella write itself in real time – as chapter after chapter of her life unfolded before us, reconstructed by experts from sources and archives all over Europe. In the ornate halls of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences headquarters, a 19C academic palace on the banks of the Danube, we spent two days conjuring up Isabella’s Hungary, where great geopolitical and cultural forces clashed in the mid-16C – surrounded by paintings of medieval castles, and listening to a performance of 16C Central European music on period instruments by the Musica Historia group.

It was hard, during this wonderful conference, not to notice also the modern-day political forces at work around us. The conference coincided with an international dispute over a new poster-campaign by the Hungarian government: the posters in question, showing George Soros with Jean-Claude Juncker, were prominent all over Budapest during our stay. The conference also took place during a serious crisis for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, our hosts – the Hungarian government is poised to close or take direct control of its network of excellent research institutes, a move which has drawn international protest, including from the UK’s British Academy, as an assault on the fundamental principle of academic freedom. Staff of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have appealed for international support. Hungarian historian colleagues and friends now find themselves on the front line of this dispute, their research projects, jobs and careers suddenly uncertain. Historians are a tellingly early focus for populist regimes – as we see in clashes over the Poland’s Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, the Polish Jewish Museum (Polin) in Warsaw, and now in Hungary.

In the 30 years since 1989, we have made real progress in integrating the rich history of Central Europe into our wider histories of Europe, after decades of intellectual separation in the Cold War. Scholars working in Budapest have been key to this – both those at the Central European University (also now under sustained and grave governmental attack), and at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who have written reams of excellent work, opening up their country’s past to international audiences. Back in Oxford tutorials, my students sat grim-faced as I explained how historians were under government pressure in Hungary, certain areas of teaching banned, and that we should seize in both hands the intellectual freedoms we have. EU expansion, migration and the Brexit crisis have, I hope, by now given the lie to Chamberlains’ infamous words of British indifference to Central Europe in 1939:  we can no longer say that this is ‘a faraway country of [whose people] we know nothing’. As Isabella, the half-Italian queen of Hungary shows, the history of Central Europe is the history of Western Europe, in the Renaissance, 20C, and today alike.

Between Two Novembers

This weekend, the world will face the bracing 100^th anniversary of 11^th November 1918 – a date with very a different meaning in the two traditions in which I grew up, British and Polish. In the UK, on their winter coats people are wearing not just red paper poppies, but elaborate enamelled flowers engraved with the dates 1918-2018. For the British, November 1918 is Armistice, a solemn national occasion of mourning and memory, in a military key. For Poland and its international diasporas, however, the 11^th November 1918 is celebration – Independence, the day on which the European empires which had partitioned and gobbled up the old Polish kingdom, and ruled it for 129 years, fell away, leaving the way open for Poles to take up arms and create their country anew (or a remembered version of it).

            This 100^th anniversary comes at a time when both these countries are debating their identities, and pasts, out aloud before the eyes of the world. In Britain, some look forward to a sharp break with the EU and a rekindled imperial trading future, while others wait for a UK-style en marche progressive wave to sweep those visions, and Brexit itself, clean away. In Poland, meanwhile, the ruling nationalist Law & Justice party, the liberal mayor of Warsaw, and ultra-far-right groups are caught in a three-way struggle over the annual Independence Day march, in a proxy fight for the meaning of the day.

       

     As a historian and British citizen, I’ve always been caught between, and within, these two national conversations, but the tensions of British-Polishness (or Polish Britishness, if you will), are in November 2018 more pronounced than ever. The rise in anti-East European xenophobia seen in the UK during and since the 2016 referendum has, and has not, caught me by surprise. In the 1990s, during an internship at the Foreign Office, a succession of top civil servants commented on my surname with disapproval, declaring: ‘we can’t have foreigners working here, can we?’ In the 2000s, habituating the riverside children’s playgrounds of Reading, I could see local parents and grandparents visibly stiffen when I spoke Polish in that public setting; and visibly relax when I took care to intersperse it with a few sentences in my impeccably middle-class English, as I have learnt to do ever since, on streets, trains and buses. After the Referendum, guests at Oxford high tables and shop workers alike felt free to announce that I was not British, à propos nothing at all. English white-on-white xenophobia is not universal, but it is a persistent daily undercurrent, encountered along the whole social spectrum - upper class, middle class and working class fellow citizens alike, in metropolises, provincial towns and rural pubs.

            And in Poland itself, people are equally quick to judge the name-accent-passport combination of their diaspora kin, in archives, hotel receptions, restaurants, conferences. Poles in these varied social situations quickly feel the need to tell the diaspora who they really are: ‘so you are not Polish’, ‘so you are Polish’, ‘so you are foreign’. This urgent need to categorise reflects a deeper set of anxieties about what, and who, ‘Polish’ is, 100 years on from independence. Whoever ends up marching, and in the name of what, in the streets of Warsaw on Sunday, the very equation ‘1918-2018’ is, historically speaking, a potentially uncomfortable sleight of hand. It tacitly equates the Poland created in 1918 by the Versailles Peace Treaty with the Poland created in 1945 by the WWII Allies. Yet, in their borders and peoples, these two countries were very different places. The Poland born on 11^th November 1918 had a highly mixed population: the 1921 census found that 30% of its citizens were Ukrainian/Ruthenian, Jewish, German or from other minorities. The Poland of 2018 is one of the most ethnically and religiously homogenous states in Europe. The celebratory slogan ‘1918-2018’ does not seem to make much room for that absent 30%.

            So, for the British-Polish and Polish-British, this will be a strange weekend, watching stately processions to the cenotaph in London, and the noisy and possibly violent Independence march in Warsaw – red poppies, red and white flags. Many histories, communities and lives do not fit the clear national stories which these 1918 commemorations try to unite their respective societies around. Yet, in the wider run of European and global history, those who cross boundaries, inhabit margins, or live in zones of overlap make up a large part of the world’s story. Perhaps one day the solemn Polish and British Novembers will also find a way to make their peace with that.

Royal Wedding as Microcosm...

=

Two years ago, serendipitously, the Bodleian Library offered the Jagiellonians Project (which I lead) a spring 2018 slot for an exhibition about a Renaissance royal wedding. As the Bodleian staff, my co-curator Katarzyna Kosior and I hurried to write captions, secure an object loan, design flyers and pick 9 objects to mark the 500^th anniversary of the 1518 wedding of King Sigismund I of Poland and the Italian princess Bona Sforza, the media grew steadily more excited about preparations for the British royal celebrations. As we held a conference on Renaissance Royal Weddings, from Paris to Constantinople, the imminent Windsor wedding moved higher and higher up the news agenda. And the parallels between 16C and contemporary royal nuptials are rich.

The British royal wedding this weekend boasted impeccably 21^stcentury features: the digital clock on Windsor Council’s website, A-list celebrity culture, the tens of thousands of tweets generated. But, like royal weddings across time and space, the event was at heart a symbolic performance. It was thus in the Renaissance, when princes put on treasury-draining, eye-poppingly spectacular festivities for their nuptials. It was thus in imperial nineteenth-century Britain, when the royals invented a new traditional-looking pageantry to awe onlookers. Historians know that royal weddings perform identity because they are a chance for princes, and their subjects, to stage who think they are - or who they might like to be.

When the bride is a foreigner, from a distant land, this effect is heightened. Meghan Markle is the first foreign bride for a senior British royal since, whisper it, the abdicated Edward VIII took the American socialite Wallis Simpson as his wife. Historically, a royal marriage to an overseas bride was proof of a country’s essential cosmopolitanism – its diplomatic connections, its international power, and also of the prince’s good cultural taste and broad horizons. When, 500 years ago this spring, King Sigismund married Bona Sforza in Cracow, he was reinforcing his own reputation as a leading enthusiast for the Italian Renaissance and all its heady glamour. Prince Harry too was showing us a more global, forward-looking British monarchy, open to the future.

       

But a prince’s foreign spouse has also consistently been a touchstone for anxieties about national identity and belonging, galvanising local anger. In 1554, for example, the English noble Thomas Wyatt led a rebel army to London, to prevent Mary I from taking a foreigner, Philip II of Spain, as her husband. In Poland, the teenage Bona Sforza immediately became the subject of obscene verses, lambasted for bringing with her Italian ‘sodomites, patricides and epicureans’ who stole jobs from honest Poles. Meghan Markle, even before the wedding, became the target of hate mail. At a country house outside Reading this weekend, I heard visitors (racism alert) grumbling out loud, as they tucked into their picnic, about the inclusion of a Gospel choir in the royal wedding service because this ‘wasn’t British music’.

Foreign brides for princes have, for centuries, highlighted and even inflamed tensions between a country’s local and cosmopolitan identities. Royal weddings thus show us a society in microcosm. Royal nuptials hold up a mirror in which historians catch a glimpse of past identity crises; and in which we can today catch a bracing glimpse of Britain, with all its fissures, in 2018.

Poland, the UK and the Brexit Vote

A great Polish Anglophile: King Stanislaw August Poniatowski

     

       In 2008, Richard Unger edited a volume entitled Britain & Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795. In light of the UK’s vote for Brexit, it is worth going back to books like these, to ask where Polish-British relations have come from and where they might be heading. There are many narrative threads within the Brexit vote, but this is certainly one of them.

This is a story of intensifying contact, convergence and progressive entanglement between two European polities, one thousand miles apart. Throughout the Middle Ages and sixteenth century, contacts between these isles and the Polish kingdom were ongoing, albeit in a piecemeal, low-key way. Readers of Unger’s collection can pick up interesting morsels: the long shoes fashionable in England in the 1360s were called ‘crakows’, in the 1590s Cracow boasted its own Scottish pub. The monarchs of England and Poland exchanged infrequent, polite letters, mostly on crusading (and were often unclear even of one other’s names). It was in the 18C that mutual interest between the two countries picked up: the last king of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski, and his court were Anglophiles, with a strong interest in British literary and political culture. In 19C London, exiles from partitioned Poland were a high-profile cause celebre to many. In 1939, it was of course Hitler’s invasion of Poland which triggered the United Kingdom’s declaration of war; famously, Polish citizens played a role in the Allied war effort at RAF Northolt, Bletchley Park, Monte Cassino. It was as a result of this conflict that the first large-ish Polish diaspora settled in the UK, numbering some 200,000 people. The end of the Cold War, and Poland’s much celebrated joining of the EU in 2004, saw Polish citizens coming to the UK in astonishingly high numbers, attracted in part by the presence of an established Polish community in the country. Tabloid papers began to run stories alleging Polish vagrants roasted swans in English parks. And now we have this: a Brexit vote in June 2016, in which Leave campaigners voiced open displeasure about the presence of Polish shops on their streets, of Polish-speaking children in the school playground. Post June 23^rd, there are repeated reports of verbal abuse of Poles, and a nasty graffiti attack on the long-standing Polish Cultural Centre in west London – a place for international film, artists and theatre. A notable WWII alliance has given way to rancour and fear.

Polish shop, Oxford, 2013

But Poland is not just the Polish delicatessens on streets up and down the United Kingdom. Poland ‘over there’ is a NATO member, an EU ally, its nationalist Law & Order (PiS) ruling party currently engaged in its serious own stand-off with the EU over the rule of law. In meeting as a group of 6 self-styled ‘EU founder members’ the day after the Brexit vote, the EU west European states caused anger and dismay in Poland. Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of PiS, has quickly urged the EU to consider again a 2 speed Europe, with a new European treaty; Polish liberals fear Brexit might galvanise PiS towards a ‘Polexit’, allowing it to rule in populist style without sanction from Brussels. So the Polish government, and fraught Polish domestic politics, will play an important role in any forthcoming EU-UK negotiations on Brexit. The EU institutions in Brussels have a problem to the north with their British Brexit neighbour, and a problem to the east with openly nationalist regimes such as those of PiS (and Orban in Hungary).

Poland and Britain interacted for centuries in their very different forms: as medieval monarchies, early modern composite states, dynastic unions, and modern nation states. Now, with their very populations entangled in the 21C, Poland and the UK are interacting within a new globalised world and interconnected Europe, still speaking loudly of inviolable ‘sovereignty’, yet both in a strong mutual embrace they cannot easily escape. The Brexit vote is a British earthquake, but it is also a highly significant event in Central European history and politics. Poles, both in Lincolnshire and in the Belvedere Palace in Warsaw, are today actively shaping the UK’s history; just as the UK is shaping theirs. We shall see, to our relief or to our cost, whether in this decade the oscillating centripetal or centrifugal forces in European history will win out. 

Polish Cracower shoes - the height of 14C London fashion...
(From http://bit.ly/29o3x5E)

Strangers in London

       

The Dutch Church, Austin Friars (photo by NN)

Academics are increasingly encouraged to engage the public in their research - via ‘impact’ initiatives or through active collaboration with non-scholars in what is termed ‘knowledge exchange’. It was therefore refreshing to participate in an academic conference on the Reformation which was entirely conceived, curated and organised by the Dutch Church in the City of London (and not by early modern historians). Last week, the conference ‘John a Lasco: I am A Stranger’ heard speakers from the United States, UK and the Netherlands. Johannes a Lasco (or Jan Łaski the Younger, 1499-1560), was the most significant Reformation figure produced by Poland: nephew of a powerful Polish archbishop, furnished with the best possible foreign education, Johannes a Lasco went on to play a leading role in Protestant communities northern Germany, England and his native Poland. Here in England, it was to Johannes a Lasco that Edward VI entrusted leadership of the ‘Strangers Church’ in 1550 – a place where London’s foreign refugees and immigrants could worship together.

            It was marvellous to hear papers about Lasco and the Strangers’ Church in the very place where that church once stood. Originally part of the enormous Austin (Augustinian) Friars monastery, the building was given to the Strangers, destroyed in the Blitz, and rebuilt by the Dutch community in London. It is an inspiring, beautiful and resonant space. Thomas Cromwell’s great mansion was built just across the road (as readers of Wolf Hall will know). The speakers delivered their lectures before an enormous stained glass window showing John a Lasco, bearded and in green robes, and the two children connected with this church, the boy-king Edward VI of England, and Princess Irene of the Netherlands who laid the foundation stone of the new building in 1950.

            We heard from Michael Springer about Lasco’s magnum opus, the Forma ac Ratio, an extended ‘how to’ guide on running a Calvinist congregation, from Andrew Spicer about the foreign residents of London in the 1550s, from David Gehring about a parallel life to that of Lasco, the Elizabethan Robert Beale. Silke Muylaert spoke on how the Stranger Church in London reacted when the Netherlands erupted in religious revolt, bringing traumatised and impassioned refugees to their corner of London. The Dutch Church had however also organised this conference to pose broader and contemporary questions about refugees, immigrants and toleration. We therefore heard how in 16C eastern Germany, or 17C Prague, or 16C Poland, very different religious communities could coexist in curious, unexpected and usually precarious ways. This conference was most timely, in light of the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, and the UK’s own referendum debate about identity and migration. It was sobering to hear that in late 16C London, the government had conducted a full census of foreign residents, quizzing them in depth about their reasons for coming to England; that other Londoners complained about immigrants driving up 16C house prices and taking jobs; that the Elizabethan government deeply feared that refugees from a savage European war would bring religious and political radicalism to these shores (Andrew Spicer, Michael Springer).

It is always a pleasant surprise when research on 16C Europe speaks so directly to communities in the UK today. A Lasco was in London only three years, forced to flee by ship along with his congregation of ‘Strangers’ in 1553, when the Catholic queen Mary I ascended the throne. The Dutch Church is soon to unveil a new plaque commemorating Johannes a Lasco and his time in London: it will mark how a unique life, and a unique building, connect England, Poland and the Netherlands and their respective histories. The plaque will also be a prompt to reflect on the different experiences which foreigners, immigrants and refugees have had in our capital city (welcome, warm coexistence, expulsion) over the centuries, as the United Kingdom again finds and articulates its place in the world.

Faustus: Magic & the Medieval City

This term, Oxford will see a new student production of Christopher Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus'. As part of their public & educational outreach, the students have commissioned blogs from academics on themes related to the play. This blog first appeared on the Doctor Faustus production website.

Collegium Maius, Krakow's Jagiellonian University

Of all the prophets, wandering scholars and conjurors produced by sixteenth century Germany – a society undergoing profound change – few have captured the imagination of later generations quite so much as Dr. Johann Faust. Marlowe’s play (1592) is based on an apparently real figure, whom we can just about glimpse in the historical sources: in decrees issued by city officials, and above all in gossip, letters and rumours circulating among educated men. This shadowy Faust, trailing from German town to German town until his reported death in an alchemical explosion in the 1540s, is described as a trickster, great sorcerer (necromancer) and blasphemer. But while Faustus may have existed on the margins of recorded history, and on the margins of acceptable society in his own day (banned from entering various German towns), his interest in magic was anything but marginal in sixteenth-century Europe.

            Poland, for example, has its own Dr. Faustus figure – celebrated for centuries in literature, art and even in the Cold War children’s songs I sang at my Polish Saturday School in London in the 1980s. He is called Pan (or Mr) Twardowski. Twardowski was rumoured to be the magician employed by King Sigismund Augustus of Poland (d. 1572) to conjure the spirit of his late wife Barbara, and this grew into a bigger story, about a Twardowski who made a pact with the devil and became the Man in the Moon (one of only two Poles to make it into space so far!). In fact, the Polish royal capital of Kraków was one of Renaissance Europe’s great hot-spots of fortune-telling and magic. The first professor of astrology at Kraków was appointed in 1459, and the predictions of the university’s astrologers were much sought thereafter, reprinted across the continent. At the Polish court, a crystal-gazing prayer book (now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford) was produced for the royal family, which explained how the monarch could summon four archangels to tell him the future. In an episode reminiscent of Faustus’ reported demise, two Kraków friars were killed in the 1460s in an alchemical experiment which went badly wrong. In fact, a Central European capital like Kraków could have such a reputation for magic, that the great Lutheran theologian Philip Melanchthon asserted that Johann Faust must have been ‘a scholar of Kraków’, where magic was openly taught.

 

Twardowski with the devil
Sketch by M E Andriolli, 1895

            Historians pay a good deal of attention to magic and astrology in medieval and Renaissance Europe, because contemporaries themselves saw it as a serious if problematic branch of knowledge. In the Renaissance period, European magic underwent a profound shift. Medieval magic (as numerous well-handled 14^th century manuscripts in the British Library well testify), employed spells derived from mainstream Christian prayers, typically with the intention of summoning spirits. A new Renaissance magic was, by contrast, focused on recovering from the ancient Greek or Jewish past new methods for seeking higher truths: by practising Kabbalah, or singing the mystical hymns of Orpheus. Figures such as Faustus and Twardowski have perhaps inspired so many stories since their own day, because they represent a kind of shadowy last gasp of that older, medieval form of magic – spells, Christian liturgy said backwards, spirits, demons, in other words traditional necromancy.

This, as Christopher Marlowe well knew, was a European tradition in which England very much participated. There was a legend of a Cambridge student who had made a pact with the devil, in order to achieve his dream of becoming professor of theology at the great Italian university of Padua - but was promptly found dead. There is a sea of scholarship on Queen Elizabeth’s I advisor John Dee (d. 1608/9), occult philosopher and astrologer. In the seventeenth century, England would produce in the words of John Maynard Keynes ‘the last of the magicians’, that passionate pursuer of ancient mystical truths, Sir Isaac Newton (d. 1727). The methods for doing magic changed, but the dream of acquiring secret knowledge lived on among the scholarly elites of early modern Europe, very long after the curtain fell on that first performance of The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus.

Talking about Jagiellonians...

Anna Jagiellon, Queen of Bohemia & Hungary (d. 1547)
Hans Maler zu Schwaz

     

We are gradually approaching the half-way mark of the 5 year Jagiellonians Project which I run, funded by the European Research Council. One of the (many pleasurable) challenges of directing a project such as this is managing its communications – striking a balance between saying too little, and saying too much. On the one hand, part of the purpose of this project is to raise the profile of the Jagiellonians as an international dynasty among historians and audiences outside Central Europe. Making full use of a project webpage, Twitter, mailing lists, quarterly newsletters and conferences in the UK and beyond is therefore an important part of our activities. At times, I have felt like a P.R. agency or professional evangelist for the Jagiellonians, even as (paradoxically) my own scholarly and personal relationship with them has become more nuanced, and perhaps more ambiguous.

On the other hand, this is also a fast-moving, collaborative research project – academics often work on a topic for some time before feeling ready to air their findings. There is a time lag (sometimes of years) between a project (or project website) launching and polished historical research hitting journals or bookshelves. All the Jagiellonian Project’s communications have to come with the tacit tag-line: ‘work in progress’, or ‘historians still at work’. Another reason for not saying too much is because this is not a solo project, but a highly collaborative one involving a team of six researchers. When writing books on my own in the past, I have been relatively relaxed about recounting the ups and downs of research online. However, it is not necessarily appropriate to give a blow-by-blow account of the internal workings, and private discussions, of a large team of scholars as we work together on a collectively authored publication.

As it turns out, a major focus of the project’s research has been communication itself – how ideas about a Jagiellonian dynasty were articulated by humanist scholars (those masters of rhetoric and persuasion) in splendid orations delivered at diplomatic summits, royal weddings, coronations, and funerals in 16C Central Europe.  When I look at our website, so well run by our project Administrator Briony Truscott, with its family lists, (forthcoming) maps, timelines and royal portraits, I wonder how far we have inadvertently slipped into the shoes of those humanist diplomats, courtiers and poets, taking on ourselves, five centuries on, the task of presenting the Jagiellonians to a wider world.

How to Vote

The Polish royal election of 1573, as imagined by Jan Matejko (d. 1893)

On UK Election Day (which on this occasion has been awaited for the unusually long span of five full years), what do our late medieval and Renaissance forbearers tell us about how to vote?

Although we think of it as a period of mighty monarchies, 15^th and 16^th Europe was in fact full of elections and voting. The hundreds of bishops in Latin Christendom, for example, were all elected by their cathedral chapters: the canons would hear a solemn Mass, gather in the chapter house and vote. If they were ‘inspired by the Holy Spirit’ (in practice meaning if the result had been negotiated or fixed in advance) the chapter would unanimously acclaim a single candidate. Alternatively, they could hold a ballot (‘per scrutinium’) or appoint a subcommittee to make the decision (‘per comprossimum’). Republics such as Florence or Venice, meanwhile, had a constant flow of elections to office, with elaborate voting procedures involving beans, silver balls, and giant urns.

The pope in Rome was of course elected, by cardinals who were locked in the Sistine Chapel, with the Botticelli frescos and their own make-shift beds, until they reached a majority verdict. Papal elections in the Renaissance were characterised by the electoral capitulation – a formal list of promises which the cardinals would make the successful candidate swear to deliver, before formally electing him. (Not being carved in stone or enshrined in legislation, pace the UK party leaders, these were always transgressed).

And even in monarchies, there were plentiful and often momentous elections. The kings of Poland, Hungary, Bohemia and Sweden were elected throughout the Renaissance period, as was the Holy Roman Emperor himself. A Polish royal election, for example, such as that of 1492, involved the 40 or so members of the royal council assembling at Piotrków castle with ample numbers of armed troops, ‘conferring’ for several weeks, and only when a successful candidate emerged as a result of those negotiations did the council proceed to a formal oral vote, in the castle Hall. Then there were fireworks, feasting in Kraków, and a lavish coronation.

What these varieties of 15C and 16C European elections have in common is a conviction that all the important issues had to be thoroughly negotiated, and agreed, by the key players before proceeding to a vote – the purpose of which was partly ceremonial, or symbolic. In that sense, the UK 2015 election campaign – which has been characterised by negotiations and posturing between possible allies, well in advance of the actual vote – has had something of a Renaissance echo to it.

Research & Anthropology

Are we talking the same language?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel (1563).

           The Jagiellonians Project which I lead has an anthropological strand: asking how anthropologists’ work on kinship, family and ritual can help us better understand this 15^th and 16^th century royal house. Just last week, I found myself talking over lunch at Somerville College with Dr. Jane Dyson, comparing notes on marriage practice in remote 21stC Himalayan villages and among Renaissance princes.

Eighteen months in, however, the project is also having to engage with anthropology in a broader, more immediate sense. The lands once ruled by the Jagiellonians today make up some 13 different countries and national scholarships on the dynasty. The project itself operates in a British environment, with an international team. This means that the project is talking to a range of audiences, and operating within and across a number of quite different academic cultures.

            Universities and scholarship may look superficially similar across the world, and we might use the same terminologies, but these often conceal important differences. ‘Project’ is one such term, which can imply different things in different places. In the UK, a research project is typically a team of scholars employed to work full-time on a topic in a co-ordinated way, recruited through open competition; in other places, ‘project’ is a network, an umbrella which should properly group together all the leading experts in a given field. ‘Conference’ in some academic cultures is an event at which you speak, and pay a fee in order to cover the organisers’ costs; elsewhere, ‘conference’ is an event to which scholars, as a mark of honour, are invited to speak, all their expenses generously paid, and fine meals lavished upon them.

‘Scholarship’ itself can mean different things, depending on where in the modern world you are. In some places, a particular mark of scholarly excellence is the successful identification of new sources: new archival documents or visual artefacts. In other places, scholarly excellence instead lies in fresh interpretations and analyses of evidence, either old or new. This important difference reflects, I think, the different functions which history plays within different cultures today. My sense is that in some places the basic shape and themes of national history (and its place in national identity) are already widely agreed upon, and research simply fleshes these trajectories out further. By contrast, in places where a canonical narrative of the past (for whatever reason) is less central to present-day national identity, revisionism and the rewriting of old stories by historians is applauded.

To openly acknowledge these differences is not to make judgements about the relative merits of different academic cultures. An international project such as the Jagiellonians therefore needs to be attuned to anthropology, willing to decode cultural difference – ready to accept that some, or indeed much, of what we do will (inadvertently) be baffling or annoying to scholars elsewhere; and that, vice versa, there are reactions which we will struggle to understand. The important thing is to start talking more frankly about our different experiences and expectations; and to keep talking.

Dolphins in the Bodleian

After a long, busy autumn term of teaching and running a research project (hence the gap in blog posts, apologies), last week I finally ventured back into the Bodleian Library, and found a new exhibition in the entrance hall. Aldus Manutius:The Struggle and the Dream marks the 500^th anniversary of the death of the pioneering Venetian Renaissance printer (c. 1450-1515), who created distinctive editions of classical texts treasured by humanist scholars across Europe, and in the process set a new standard in the printing of learned books. The exhibition is curated by my Somerville History colleague, Dr. Oren Margolis, with assistance from current Somerville History undergraduates Jennifer Allan, Anna Clark and Qaleeda Talib, whose own work on Aldus will be showcased at an event at the Bodleian in February.

At a time when academic publishing is again going through a major metamorphosis, and experiencing another technological revolution, it seems apt to reflect on the printer Aldus and his legacy. The Bodleian exhibition stresses that Aldus’ Venetian workshop gave the world the italic font: the display includes the first printed books in which it was seen. Probably few of us, when pressing Control I on our computers, know or think of the great copyright squabble which the discovery of printed italic triggered between Aldus and his punch-cutter, Francesco Griffo. The exhibition includes too a Roman denarius from 80AD, showing a dolphin and anchor, which Aldus adopted as his own device. Modern academic publishers must surely remain envious of the little surge of delight, the flash of excitement, the joy of possession, which the sight of Aldus’ dolphin logo seems to have instantly provoked in the learned 16C reader.

Aldus printed for the republic of letters, for those anywhere in Christendom who, at the turn of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, were serious about scholarly and beautiful books. So it was a particular pleasure for me to see in The Struggle and the Dream an Oxford copy of Aldus’ Erotemata, by Constantine Lascaris, a key text for those learning ancient Greek. I’ve been working for some years on Piotr Tomicki (d.1535), bishop of Kraków and a key advisor to the Polish Crown. In Kraków’s Jagiellonian Library, I have examined Tomicki’s own diligently, neatly annotated copy of Aldus’ Erotomata, which he had purchased as a student in Italy, very far from home, and kept throughout his life, even once he was a great statesman. Aldus’ volumes – whether in Venice, Kraków or Oxford - still have the ability to make people, now as in the sixteenth-century, feel they are holding in their hands very special books.

Oświęcim or Auschwitz?

Oswiecim castle

Earlier this month, I attended a conference in Poland on the Jagiellonians, a favourite national dynasty representing a lost golden age. The conference, jointly organised by the Universities of Warsaw and Katowice, was held in the medium-sized, southern town of Oświęcim – in the 15^th century, the capital of a small Upper Silesian duchy on the tempestuous border between the Kingdoms of Poland and Hungary.

The conference took place in Oświęcim because the event was generously sponsored and hosted by the town council and mayor. It took place in the newly opened Oświęcim Museum, housed in a fine little castle above a river. The local authorities greeted this gathering of historians enthusiastically. The conference is part of their wider endeavour to reshape the image of their town, because Oświęcim is better known across by the world by its German name, Auschwitz.

Coming from the UK, with its strong tradition of national Holocaust education, the very idea of softening the image of a place called Auschwitz can sit very uncomfortably indeed: this network of camps, one of them right outside my hotel, is arguably the defining traumatic memory of the modern west. This is a place which can seem irredeemably bleak, historically radioactive, drowning out everything else around it for miles and miles; with its genocidal past, quite simply the darkest spot in all of Europe.

Town square

People who live in the town, most of whom were born long after the war, perhaps in order to be able to live here at all, have a different perspective. Oświęcim is simply their town: it has medieval churches, shops, schools, Italian restaurants, bars. They wish visitors would come not just to the camp, but also get a flavour of local history by visiting the castle museum, or perhaps the town synagogue mueum. The camp itself has simply become a fact of life: the town archives, for example, are housed in one of the blocks in Auschwitz 1.

Oświęcim’s attempt to rebrand itself, with EU funding for its new museum, will seem heretical and deeply disrespectful to many outside Poland, an implied minimisation of the Holocaust. For local Poles, for the energetic mayor, it’s an attempt to ask the world to see this 21C community on its own terms, in a broader context. It comes down to one question – to whom does Oświęcim- Auschwitz belong? To the world, to the 1,100,000 people who were murdered in this small place, or to the Polish population who call this pretty but scarred town their home? Is it, and should it always be, 1944 in this pocket of Europe? Are the locals allowed to move on, or is the existence of normal life here some kind of affront in itself? As a British citizen from the Polish diaspora, I can hear what is said in both languages and narratives, and I can hear that they are not hearing each other at all. And that is why there is no agreement - in guidebooks, on maps - on what to even call this place, (Polish) Oświęcim or (German) Auschwitz.

Town sign: two identities, Oswiecim castle & Auschwitz camp

Two Men From Gdansk

Donald Tusk
Photo by Alina Zienowicz.

Johannes Dantiscus (1485-1548)

Although it may not have made much of a splash in the British or US press, the selection of Donald Tusk as the new president of the European Council last night momentarily paralysed Polish media, commentators and political elites, as they tried to take in the significance of the moment. In domestic terms, it is a shock: Tusk has been Poland’s most electorally successful prime minister since the fall of Communism, in power since 2007. In Poland, it is now unclear whether Tusk’s sudden departure for Brussels will make it harder for his Citizens’ Platform party (PO) to defeat the right-wing Truth & Justice Party (PiS) at the 2015 parliamentary elections. If the price of Tusk’s recruitment is a victory for the highly nationalist PiS, the EU might yet find its eastern policy even more complicated, and the region more volatile.

But what of the historical significance? Last night, Polish journalists and academics wrote that ‘Poland has now returned to Europe’, that Tusk’s appointment amounted to ‘the recognition of Poland’, ‘proof, that Europe does not end at the Oder river’. The choice of Tusk by the EU’s leaders is seen domestically as a vindication of Poland’s journey since 1989. The historical novelty of a Polish politician taking a key role in European politics, and presiding over traditionally West European institutions in Brussels does seem striking. Yet in the Renaissance period, under the Jagiellonian kings, the Polish monarchy did produce diplomats of international calibre. Erazm Ciołek, the son of a Kraków tavern-keeper, rose to become the Crown’s top diplomat in the years circa 1500 – his fine Latin orations before the papal curia made a tremendous impression in Rome, to the extent that the Habsburg emperors engaged Ciołek to promote their own affairs in the city. Another celebrity diplomat of the Polish Crown (born, like Tusk, in Gdańsk), Johannes Dantiscus, in the 1520s and 1530s enjoyed the respect of statesmen in Spain, the Low Countries and Germany, building an important network around himself. And, in a less happy example, in the 18C, the exiled Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński was relocated to France to rule the duchy of Lorraine.

In the past two centuries, the Polish state has been a supplicant, military target, or very junior ally of Europe’s more westerly states – Tusk’s high profile international role in the EU is a major symbolic step in a different direction, where Central European politicians might exercise real agency in wider European politics, from the centre itself. The Economist recently carried a feature asking if Poland, with her geopolitical weight and economic successes, was entering ‘a new Jagiellonian [golden] age’. Exactly what the Jagiellonian age stood for in Europe (1386-1572) remains a subject of real debate: but it seems as if, in an echo of the sixteenth century, Poland is again creating politicians of international calibre.