Gdynia and the Dream of a Maritime Poland(engelsbergideas.com) |
Gdynia and the Dream of a Maritime Poland(engelsbergideas.com) |
But as a Californian, the two cities feel as different as Arcata and Eureka.
Warsaw?
For the same price, one can find a full house, bordering on 300m², in the forests around Warsaw.
I would have loved to have bought into the tricity area a half-decade ago.
No you can't if you want a remotely nice house that is not in the middle of nowhere and fully car-dependent.
Both of them are just up the Baltic a bit from Gdenmark and Gdeutschland.
With that said - "poets wrote of the city’s machinery and its modernist architecture" - who in their right mind would appreciate anything concerning the architecture of (central) Gdynia? It's a bleak collection of square concrete blocks with heavy traffic snaking its way in-between the buildings... It sucks to walk in, it sucks to stay in, and generally it just sucks to be in.
As is half of my family, incidentally. In fact, the names of some of my relatives are written on the wall inside the museum pictured in the article. I lived there for 10 years. Lovely place to live.
What a great phrase.
I'm Polish, out of my 8 grandfathers: 2 come from modern day central Ukraine (Vinnytsia), 2 come from modern day Belarus (Ashmyany).
It's very hard to explain to people how weak the whole concept of nation state used to be in Eastern Europe till ww2.
From Eastern Germany to the Urals, every place you would go it was a deeply cosmopolitan mix of Germans, Jews, different Slav ethnicities and depending on the regions significant Romanians, Hungarians, Turks and some other minorities.
You would cross from one village to the other and the language would change, and in minor centers neighborhood and districts changed architecture and language. Different ethnicities also generally mapped to different professions and status. And those changes didn't really look like gradients, more like dispersed bubbles.
Ethnic tensions were always present, everybody literally hated and tolerated each other with Jews generally being the common scape goat.
My grandparents coming from modern day Ukraine vividly remember the violence and terror caused by UPA, the nazi-sympathizing Ukrainian militias. My mother's grandma could not forget till the day she lived (died in 2004) what she saw in her childhood village when Ukrainians came and started a massacre that saw her losing a brother, countless cousins, uncles and friends.
Of course, Poles have been the aggressors too, just a few decades before, when Poland attacked the Soviet Union in the 1920s and had its own share of ethnic violence against Ukrainians and Belarusians.
In any case, Eastern Europe is deeply plagued and poisoned by all of this past violence. No one is able to have a mea culpa moment, no one is able to admit their own guys were bloody murders often killing thousands of people like cattle. No one can admit their ancestors crap.
The same happens in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The Russians see in Ukrainians the accomplice of their biggest trauma (the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany).
The Ukrainians see in Russia the perpetrator of their biggest trauma (the 1920s Holodomor).
No side ever says sorry, no side ever takes responsibility, no side can move on. And Eastern Europe keeps being unhealed from its traumas and carrying this in modern age.
And a man that would rather see the world burn than step out (Putin) plays on those traumas he very well understands for his own personal lust of power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJjhNVpSQzw
The entire continent was basically in a constant state of flux (and perpetual wars) through most of its history, ending with WWII in the West, with the fall of the USSR in most of the Central and Eastern Europe, and then continuing with some regional score-settling in the Balkans.
And even this is a bit reductionist: Spain was a dictatorship until about 1975! How crazy is that. This is basically the recent past of the EU.
For the misery of Central and Eastern Europe specifically, "Bloodlands" by Snyder is a good book. And this gets me to my second point: I think you're veering too far into relativism. Yes, every country did some shitty things - that's the history of the world for ya - but the Russian Empire and the German / Austrian / Prussian Empire can be singled out as especially awful when you look at the past 300-500 years. Even just by the simplest metric of the number of people displaced and killed, it's many orders of magnitude worse than what anyone else has done. This distinction is important because the legacy of bloody imperialism continues on the Russian side today - beyond Ukraine - and it's most certainly not excused by the fact that, dunno, Poland occupied Moscow once.
And I feel that the Balkans are even more representative, although my perspective may be skewed because I live there.
When has anyone ever done that? I don't think it's an Eastern Europe problem. You can unify disparate groups under one flag for a time, but top down coercion only goes so far. Look at how well the former Ottoman territories get along today.
Germans, Britons
You probably mean great grand parents. You can only have 2 grandfathers.
That is disputed, there are sources that say that (mostly Russian based) and others that say it was the Soviets marching West to conquer Europe.
Eh, it was more complicated than that. Basically a gradual build up from 1918 advancement of Polish forces from west and Soviet from east into the territories abandoned by German armies, then "border incidents" then regular army clashes, and eventually a full blown offensive by Poland and counteroffensive by Soviets.
I guess you can interpret it as Poland invading soviet russia (no soviet union yet btw, and Poland was supporting one of the 3 Ukrainian states that existed at the time).
But yeah Poland wasn't innocent anyway. For example it did the Putin's Crimean trick on Lithuania back in interwar. That was much more clear-cut.
> In any case, Eastern Europe is deeply plagued and poisoned by all of this past violence. No one is able to have a mea culpa moment, no one is able to admit their own guys were bloody murders often killing thousands of people like cattle. No one can admit their ancestors crap.
That's just false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giedroyc_Doctrine
Poland did mea culpa after WW2. The whole thing is based on recognizing that Poland has been imperialist and did bad things and that it's in the end bad for Poland to continue trying to control these territories because it pushes us into conflict against Russia without the support of the other countries.
On the other hand admiting guilt and renouncing imperialism makes us clearly the lesser evil for the countries in between and gives us buffer zone in case Russia turns evil again (which we predicted, and which did happened).
It was the basis for Polish eastern foreign policy for last 37 years and still is (it's another question for how long it stays that way if far-right wins the next elections tho).
I highly recommend anybody interested in Eastern Europe after WW2 to read Giedroyc and Mieroszewski. They were visionaires. They predicted back in 1950s that USSR will fall and that the independent nationstates that will appear will have 2 choices - go back to chaotic ethnic wars or drop the territorial and historical disputes. And they developed the doctrine in 70s and slowly persuaded opposition in communist Poland so when Poland regained independence in 1989 - almost all the elites bought into it. It was a big bet and it worked very well for Poland.
Sadly nowadays half of Polish political scene starts to move away from that, but that's another subject. Mostly just unchecked far-right propaganda.
As a society we're nowhere near the Germans when it comes to amending our mistakes.
Most poles will blame Ukrainians for their WW2 acts, but barely recognize our own fails between ww1 and ww2.
I personally enjoy each of the cities and the Kashubia and Kociewie surroundings, it’s just each of these places has its own soul and unique culture
Poles behaved very responsibly after 1989. Let's remember Poland got independent in 1989 and Ukraine/Belarus/Lithuania in 1991. There was a window of a year or so in which Poland had already organised state and army and the eastern neighbors - didn't.
It could have gone very wrong (think - Yugoslavia like) if not for the 30 years of internal discussions about the imperialism and future reconcilliation among Polish oppositional elites.
For one example Poland accepted all the borders around it after WW2 the instant any country appeared (it was usually the first or 2nd country in the world recognizing each of these countries as they appeared). And renounced any territorial disputes. That's despite the fact before the war Vilnius and Lviv were top 5 Polish cities with huge cultural impact, and despite the fact that Poland lost 1/7th of it's territory after WW2 (even including the territory we got on the west as "compensation"). I will admit we got better land in exchange for marches and forests. But millions of people who got forcibly relocated after WW2 could be much more unreasonable about it than they were.
I agree German society is more reasonable about it than Polish society, but when it comes to elites - it was the opposite for a long time. German eastern policy was much more imperial than Polish one at least till 2021. They tended to ignore EE countries issues over appeasing Russia, treating all the problematic stuff as "russophobia" and dealing with Russia over the heads of the smaller countries (Nord Stream 1 and 2 is just one example, there were also the issues of Russia hacking Estonian elections, blocking the gas deliveries against the contract on purpose to blackmail EE countries, etc.) Germany was ignoring these for the longest time.
Also - Germans waited with recognizing Polish post-WW2 borders and only did it when they were forced to - to get unification accepted. It was surprisingly realpolitik. Similarly - to this day Germany does not provide most Slavic minorities with minority rights despite Germans enjoying German city names, street names, education in these languages, etc in German-speaking Polish regions. It's very weird when you compare the treatment of minorities in practice with the sentiments of the population and the stereotypes about the countries.
So I wouldn't single out Germany as the most reasonable politically regarding EE. Their political instincts were till the last few years to deal with Russia and ignore the small countries.
That's enough internet for today.