Promised City Warsaw
Destroyed and rebuilt, intended and never finished, dreamt of and carried out, non-restored and non-existent, censored and true, improved and injured – Warsaw has always allowed a wide margin for dreamers. The city had to begin anew, several times. In the late 18th century, as Poland was being divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia, Warsaw lost its position as capital and its life-force evaporated; yet the industrial revolution revived it as an economic and cultural centre. When in 1918 Poland regained its independence, Warsaw was a capital again, hurriedly shedding vestiges of Russian peculiarities and vying for the rank of Central Europe’s principal metropolis. During the Second World War, it lost eighty percent of its buildings and nearly half its people (including practically all those of Jewish origin). Yet, once more, it was proclaimed the capital of Poland – a bold move at a time when its centre was still in smoking ruins and many doubted the economic sense of rebuilding it. After the year 1989 it found its place anew, as the mechanical heart of a country undergoing the shock therapy of economic transformation and modernisation, a promised land for the ambitious and talented, a city torn between old European values and an American vigour.
At times, Warsaw existed in a space more virtual than real; in the drawings of town planners sketching their visions of the future city amidst the upheaval of a World War; in the speeches of politicians; in the ideals of artists and social activists; in the sleepy thoughts of commuters taking morning trains to a city of success and plenty; in the legends of a city, ungrateful and demanding, that circulated the provinces; in the opinions of its inhabitants, ever-ready to assume the tone of critics of architecture. That incomplete and unpolished quality of Warsaw is unfailingly fascinating. The city is still full of places to which claims are endlessly laid: the empty space around the Stalinist Palace of Culture which for twenty years now has been a provocative challenge to the imaginations of politicians, architects and common citizens; the wild banks of the Vistula; hundreds of tiny fissures and faultlines around which the fabric of the city warps and contorts only to take up a new, smooth course.
Perhaps Warsaw is the most beautiful of cities; because its beauty is always promised and never consummated, like a banquet with no morning after hangover - or an everlasting election campaign with no post-election disappointment.
A long, long time ago, Wars the fisherman and his wife Sawa settled in a safe place on the riverbank high above the Vistula, which teemed with fish. In time, a city grew on the promontory which they had chose for their abode, and its appellation (‘Warsaw’) recalls their names.
Throughout the nineteenth century, impoverished gentry from the entire country would settle in Warsaw or send their sons here for education, ultimately swelling the ranks of the Polish intelligentsia and strengthening the freedom movements. It is they who made Warsaw the heart of Polish patriotism and the promise of future independence. Landless peasants arrived too, lured by the prospect of employment in the city’s swiftly developing industries. They kept coming, from every background; when in 1918 the promise of independence became reality, the well-educated abandoned their careers in other large towns or abroad, coming to Warsaw to take part in creating the institutions of the restored Polish state.
The years following the end of the Second World War witnessed a mass migration of people from villages and poverty-stricken small towns to Warsaw. Helping to rebuild the ruined capital and to uphold its existence, they expected the advancement of their civilisation as a result; to quote President Bolesław Bierut and the communist poet Adam Ważyk, “the common people were returning to the city centre”; an act of historical justice indeed. The archetypes of these “common people” were the masons, proudly and energetically building their future, as shown in Przygoda na Mariensztacie, the ultimate romantic comedy of the time, sculpting the asexual statues of muscular proletarians that still decorate edifices of the Marszałkowska Housing Estate or ground floor façades of the Palace of Culture.
Today, the capital’s population structure is a memento of that last great wave of migration: only about half its inhabitants were born here, and the percentage of those brought up in a different location than their present place of residence is high, at 53.4 percent in comparison with the national average of 42.4 percent. ¹
New pioneers from the entire country continue to arrive in the capital in search of work, and, from supermarket service zones to management boards of the Warsaw Exchange companies, they lubricate the wheels of the huge machine that is the city. The newcomers are driven not only by rational motives, but also by the myth of Warsaw as the place of great opportunities. They are pulled in by the strengthening “migration chains”: already-settled friends and relatives attract and aid the new arrivals in their attempt to find their own place within the structure of the city.
Poland is undergoing an involuntary centralisation, and Warsaw is beginning to resemble a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks in people, ideas and entire institutions. Ten years ago, only one of three opinion-forming weeklies was published in Warsaw: Polityka. Since then, the other two moved to the capital, Wprost from Poznan, and Przekrój from Cracow. In 2001, the head office of their new competitor, the Polish edition of Newsweek, was opened – in Warsaw. The capital is also home to head offices of all national daily newspapers and all national television stations. The process has gathered speed and is now difficult to guide. In other large towns, this vacuum cleaner capital is regarded with both loathing and admiration. Those towns which are developing vigorously but are sentenced to the second tier (chiefly Kraków/ Cracow and Poznań), abhor it; it is most greatly admired by those who are not doing too well themselves.
“When I am in Cracow, I know I am in Cracow, when I am in Wroclaw, I know I am in Wroclaw; when I am in Warsaw, I just know I am in a city”, is the reflection of the science fiction writer Jacek Dukaj (himself a citizen of Tarnow). “Warsaw is our City, in the sense that New York […] is the City of North America, and Hong Kong, and increasingly Shanghai as well, are the Cities of East Asia. Saying the city, we think Warsaw; saying Warsaw, we think the city. At least I do”. ²
In popular culture, Magda M., the main protagonist of a TVN soap opera, is an archetype of a contemporary Warsaw pioneer: an eager young lawyer, born in Olsztyn, educated in Warsaw. Magda and her friends – ambitious, busy, yet exquisitely groomed and blessed with free time to devote to sports – are products of a process which has aptly been named “the Warsaw treatment”; the transformation of a provincial into a city animal, exaggerated in his or her big city attitudes, who devours the promises of cosmopolitan life with a neophyte’s appetite. When a colleague from the floor below is feeling down in the dumps, Magda buys take-away sushi and invites him to lunch on the roof of their office block, with a panorama of the Warsaw City skyscrapers in the background. This even though her own favourite pick-me-ups are her mother’s pierogi from Olsztyn. Yet Warsaw functions in pop culture as a cold, anonymous and insensitive place, as well, an ungrateful city, one that does not fulfil its promises. The 2004 hit song Stacja Warszawa (Station: Warsaw) by Lady Pank evokes the image of “faces on the underground that are empty, for there’s no reason why we should get acquainted”, and is touchingly compassionate towards the dazzled, disoriented provincial.
The tabula rasa of a city in its early days attracts pioneers, creating a foundation for their dreams; upon the ruins of reality, utopias are born. This is what happened after 1918, when Poland regained its independence and Warsaw became its capital. The second new beginning, and one that is still fresh in the city’s memory, is the year 1945, after “Hitler and Stalin were through with it”, to quote a well-known song by T.Love. Warsaw, reduced to eighty percent rubble, arose like a Phoenix from the ashes (which, incidentally, is the title of a Swiss guidebook to its architecture). Many of its former inhabitants – of whom Warsaw Robinson, the pianist Władysław Szpilman and the Pigeon Lady of the Old Town are symbols – returned to the ruined city, followed by thousands of settlers from the impoverished provinces, lured by the promise of a better life in the modern capital of a just, socialist Poland.
Things that never even existed may become a part of the official discourse on the topic of the city, assuming the form of an intensified nostalgia: not for the things that no longer are, but for those that never had a chance to come into being. Stanisław Starzyński, the President of Warsaw who is mythologised as its heroic defender in September 1939, is increasingly being recalled as the patron of audacious visions of its development. Due to articles and interviews authored by Jarosław Trybuś and such documentaries as Porwanie Europy, rich with suggestive animations by the current students of the Department of Architecture in Warsaw, designs that have been covered with the dust of decades are coming back to life.
A grand formal estate with a Temple of Providence over a hundred metres in length was supposed to be built at Pole Mokotowskie; the grounds of the 1944 World Exhibition were to be recreated on the right bank of the Vistula; the city centre was to be graced with new squares and a Central Station, the construction of which was interrupted by the war. This is phantom architecture on a scale that, if not as monstrous as that of Speer’s Berlin, is no less imperial. Before the war, its drawings and plans managed to serve only as propaganda materials, but now it is returning as a point of reference for today’s designs of the Warsaw of the future. The debate on what ought to be built in place of the demolished “Supersam” store, as well as several entries in the resulting contest, referred to the pre-war design of the Polish Radio tower block that was to be built on the same plot of land. That antiquated vision served as an argument in favour of erecting a tall building here. Also, two of three awarded entries in the Temple of Providence contest bore a marked resemblance to unrealised pre-war design, even though today the Temple is to be constructed in what is quite a different part of the city.
Warsaw is probably the only European metropolis with an unregulated river running across its centre and an underground line that has both its terminals in a forest. Before the war, the town planners had already envisaged radical changes to this city of twisting streets and cramped courtyards. To urbanists and avant-garde architects, the tabula rasa of ruined Warsaw offered a historic, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to erect, from nothing, an ideal city – one that would be full of light and greenery, hygienic and egalitarian. Commenting on town plans which had been drawn while still in the underground, the outstanding architect Helena Syrkus wrote:
“The reduced building density is immediately striking – the narrow wells of courtyards are gone. Greenery, sucked out of the town in the period of capitalism, is once again the natural environment, with the edifices rising above. The sky, lawns, flowerbeds and trees are visible from every window of every building”. ³
An ideogram in the propagandist album „Sześcioletni plan odbudowy Warszawy" [Six-year plan of Warsaw´s reconstruction] features a withering flower lit by a narrow blade of light from a tiny window and a blooming plant by a large window . Today, the enormous amount of greenery in Warsaw – considering that parks, forests, fields, gardens and orchards cover over 46.9 percent of its area – is a trace of that grand ambition. Citizens carefully guard every patch of green against encroaching construction. In 2009, during just a few days, more than 16,000 people signed a petition defending a stretch of the Pole Mokotowskie park against the appetites of a building company. In the district of Ursynów, a neighbourhood initiative is blocking, so far successfully, the plan to build a church in their local park. The most popular contemporary edifice in Warsaw is the building of the New University Library, which is overgrown with lush vines and has a hectare of garden on its roof. The Copernicus Centre of Science, currently under construction nearby, will have a similar roof garden. Yet the inhabitants of Warsaw still sometimes complain that they will soon have to endure life amidst a concrete desert.
It might seem that Warsaw, as tabula rasa, ought to be free of nostalgia. However, after 1945, the myth of the old city was growing stronger concurrently with the promise of the new one. There was a strong feeling that if everything went back to what it was before 1939, things would be better. Additionally, a strong - if false - conviction was that the post-war urban planners had destroyed more than they rebuilt. Altogether, this was fertile ground for the belief that if more monuments of the past were reconstructed, all would return to its pre-war state and Warsaw would again become the “Paris of the North” it used to be. This form of cultural pessimism, together with the perennial, profoundly human longing for the earlier Golden Age, motivated the reconstruction – six decades after the war – of the old Town House (Jabłonowski Palace) and the church of St. Andrew at Teatralny Square. The church is a few metres shorter than before the war because in the 1960s a new block of flats was built where its choir used to be, but no one seems to mind. Interestingly, even thoroughly modern architecture and contemporary urban design are haunted by phantoms of unreconstructed edifices; for instance, The Metropolitan, an office block designed by Norman Foster, was planned with the potential reconstruction of the neighbouring Saski and Brühl Palaces in mind – a reconstruction which is currently postponed until 2012 at the earliest.
Another architectural tendency, if sometimes dampened by the persuasive power of money, is to maintain the “traditional height” of buildings: seven floors, just above twenty metre, which is apparently the height tenement blocks reached on the eve of the First World War. Even the Museum of Modern Art, as well as other buildings that are supposed to grow at the foot of the Palace of Culture, are meant to have that sacred “Warsaw height“. There have even been proposals to demolish post-war buildings - for example the “Centrum” shopping malls at Marszałkowska Street. ⁴
- in order to reconstruct a semblance of the pre-war city, or to build tiny Disneyland-like estates channelling yesteryear Warsaw. One of these was a curious project to create a set of assorted replicas of tenement blocks, none of which had been rebuilt after the war, from various parts of the city; they were supposed to be constructed along Aleje Jerozolimskie, close to the Palace of Culture. Fortunately, such designs as “Miasteczko Wilanów”, a freshly built, suburban housing estate with low-rise buildings recalling the style of the 1930s and with replicas of old streetlamps, are so far the only fruit of this misguided nostalgia.
The cult of modernist, post-war Warsaw, expressed in terms of veneration for architecture and design of that period, is currently gaining strength parallel to the myth of the pre-war and the what-if-there-had-been-no-war Warsaw. The capital of the People’s Republic of Poland is a mythical place; a city full of tasteful edifices, of creative individuals who despite difficult conditions conceived magnificent forms, of avant-garde art and finely designed spaces unsullied by vulgar adverts. The pro-modernist movement was consolidated circa 2005, and its symbolic moment was the attempt to save the “Supersam”, a retro-futurist commercial pavilion which once contained the first supermarket in Poland (opened in 1962) and which was scheduled for demolition. Finally the Bureau of Monument Conservation allowed the demolition to proceed and the plot owner is currently looking for capital to build a tall office block, but the media campaign and signatures collected in support of the petition demonstrate clearly that thousands remember the modernist Warsaw fondly. Increasingly frequent endeavours to save the 1950s and 1960s neon advertising signs – ones that not a long time ago would have disappeared without a trace – are a mark of the same trend. Having received a grant for the creation of an art installation, Paulina Ołowska spent it to renovate the “Volleyball Player” neon of a vanished sports shop. The Museum of Modern Art took the neon of the demolished “Skarpa” cinema into its collection, recreated the neon of the “Emilia” commercial pavilion and sponsored the cleaning of its glass façade.
In 2009, a fashionable café-club found its home in the fifty year-old building of the Warszawa Powiśle train station (its neon restored as well). Young designer Magda Łapińska began selling ceramic figurines of architectural icons of those times: the “Supersam” store and the “Skarpa” cinema, as well as the “Rotunda”, also threatened with demolition. The Centrala Architectural Group famously gave the Warszawa Powiśle train station a makeover last year, and it has also been publishing provocative designs for other buildings, like the “Rotunda” building and the Central Station.
It is tempting to interpret this wave of interest in everything modernist as the Polish version of Ostalgie. Yet it is crucial to comprehend that under socialism, the very designs which Warsaw is now reviving used to attest to intellectual and artistic ties with the other side of the Iron Curtain; they used to awaken Warsaw society’s “Westalgie”. Designed by outstanding artists, neon advertising signs created an illusion of a consumerist lifestyle; they said goodbye to Lenin long before the Berlin Wall fell. Gazing at the neon signs above Marszałkowska Street, a resident of the Socialist Warsaw may have fancied himself at the Ku’damm, for an instant; his grandchildren, gazing at the retro-futurist architecture of the 1960s, may justly feel their origins lie in the West.
The cult of modernist, post-war Warsaw, expressed in terms of veneration for architecture and design of that period, is currently gaining strength parallel to the myth of the pre-war and the what-if-there-had-been-no-war Warsaw. The capital of the People’s Republic of Poland is a mythical place; a city full of tasteful edifices, of creative individuals who despite difficult conditions conceived magnificent forms, of avant-garde art and finely designed spaces unsullied by vulgar adverts. The pro-modernist movement was consolidated circa 2005, and its symbolic moment was the attempt to save the “Supersam”, a retro-futurist commercial pavilion which once contained the first supermarket in Poland (opened in 1962) and which was scheduled for demolition. Finally the Bureau of Monument Conservation allowed the demolition to proceed and the plot owner is currently looking for capital to build a tall office block, but the media campaign and signatures collected in support of the petition demonstrate clearly that thousands remember the modernist Warsaw fondly. Increasingly frequent endeavours to save the 1950s and 1960s neon advertising signs – ones that not a long time ago would have disappeared without a trace – are a mark of the same trend. Having received a grant for the creation of an art installation, Paulina Ołowska spent it to renovate the “Volleyball Player” neon of a vanished sports shop. The Museum of Modern Art took the neon of the demolished “Skarpa” cinema into its collection, recreated the neon of the “Emilia” commercial pavilion and sponsored the cleaning of its glass façade.
In 2009, a fashionable café-club found its home in the fifty year-old building of the Warszawa Powiśle train station (its neon restored as well). Young designer Magda Łapińska began selling ceramic figurines of architectural icons of those times: the “Supersam” store and the “Skarpa” cinema, as well as the “Rotunda”, also threatened with demolition. The Centrala Architectural Group famously gave the Warszawa Powiśle train station a makeover last year, and it has also been publishing provocative designs for other buildings, like the “Rotunda” building and the Central Station.
It is tempting to interpret this wave of interest in everything modernist as the Polish version of Ostalgie. Yet it is crucial to comprehend that under socialism, the very designs which Warsaw is now reviving used to attest to intellectual and artistic ties with the other side of the Iron Curtain; they used to awaken Warsaw society’s “Westalgie”. Designed by outstanding artists, neon advertising signs created an illusion of a consumerist lifestyle; they said goodbye to Lenin long before the Berlin Wall fell. Gazing at the neon signs above Marszałkowska Street, a resident of the Socialist Warsaw may have fancied himself at the Ku’damm, for an instant; his grandchildren, gazing at the retro-futurist architecture of the 1960s, may justly feel their origins lie in the West.
Fortunately, rent is not the only promise offered by the new Warsaw. Many residents feel responsible for their city; education and civic awareness compensate for an absence of roots that goes back several generations. In Kabaty, which despite its image as a lair of anonymous yuppies is one of the richest and most well-educated new districts, a single individual has motivated his neighbours to create an illegal park. The pressure from the local media (and, let it ruefully be added, the crisis in the property market) makes the city authorities increasingly willing to rent premises that would otherwise remain vacant to non-governmental agencies or individual entrepreneurs, at preferential rates.
Due to this trend, the premises of the former Nowy Świat café, almost opposite Starbucks, are now home to the utopian-sounding Nowy Wspaniały Świat (Brave New World), a café-club of the leftist Stanisław Brzozowski Foundation. Mokotowska Street, which is gradually turning into a mecca for lovers of elegant boutiques and fine restaurants, is also, as if balancing this out, the address of the Bęc Zmiana New Culture Foundation (at No. 65) and the Association of the Creative Initiatives “ę” (at no. 55). The former houses a ground floor gallery and a Warsaw culture information point.
Grass-roots transformations often have their starting point in art initiatives, as art is not only an ornament but often also a tool for criticism and change, in the public space of Warsaw. The “Oxygenator” by Joanna Rajkowska – a fountain pond hollowed out in Grzybowski Square (invigorated that forgotten spot for some months and integrated the local community for a much longer period. Paweł Althamer is tireless in canvassing his neighbours from the Bródno estate, with whom he organised the millennium light installation “Bródno 2000”. For this, he created the Sculpture Park with a paradise garden designed according to the drawings of local children, some of whom he took to Brussels in a golden airplane, wearing gold-coloured space suits, as part of the “Wspólna sprawa” (Common Cause) project. On residents of the disreputable Praga district, he bestowed a life-size statue of Mr Guma the local hobo.
Every large city offers anonymity, and in Poland there is no larger city than Warsaw. For this reason it draws homosexuals from the entire country; this is where they have maximum freedom. Here they are able to come out of the closet far away from their biological families and the pressure of their native environment. Warsaw is the most secular centre in Poland, so pressures from the church hierarchy and conservative values are also negligible. Almost everyone here is from somewhere else and has brought to Warsaw a piece of their own culture. Some forms of behaviour or dress styles, when seen in a public space, arouse less of a reaction here than elsewhere; there are clubs where nothing comes as a surprise at all. Hence Warsaw is a pink, if not always happy, island of Polish gays; bureaucratic difficulties recently encountered by the organisers of Warsaw’s Gay Pride parade demonstrate clearly that the ideal is still elusive. It is noteworthy that the most exclusive and hermetic gay club in Warsaw, whose threshold the majority of Polish gays dream of crossing just once in their lives, is called “Utopia”. On the other hand, repression and protests from officialdom have significantly increased the popularity of, and participation in, Gay Pride parades – administrative prohibitions seem to be quite counterproductive here.
Interesting note: this is perhaps the place to recollect that although the legendary founders of Warsaw, Wars and Sawa (pronounced Sava), were a man and a woman according to tradition, Sava is an Old-Slavonic male name.
Its rapid economic development makes Warsaw increasingly attractive to immigrants. After 1989, expats from Western countries began to congregate here. Initially, almost like the colonialists of old, they used to have their own venues and meeting places, mostly English-style pubs and bars with broadcasts of sports games, where mostly single thirty-somethings could feel like they were at home yet still enjoy the charms of Slavonic beauties. Today, the expat community is gradually being integrated into the fabric of the city.
Warsaw is also a natural foothold for newcomers from neighbouring countries to the east. The term “an Ukrainian lady” is a synonym for a domestic helper, in Warsaw. Ukrainian and Byelorussian are often heard at building sites and equally often in more exclusive shopping malls visited by wealthier guests from the East desirous of purchasing luxury goods at cheaper prices than at home. Warsaw’s largest minority, the Vietnamese, already constitutes one percent of its residents – a figure that may not sound shocking, yet is considerable considering the homogeneity of Polish society. The earliest immigrants from the Far East were students and intellectuals who came to the People’s Republic of Poland and stayed, whereas “the following wave of Vietnamese immigration to Poland was mainly economic in character… They are slow to assimilate, but well organised; they have their own political organisations, associations, newspapers, schools; in the vicinity of the Stadium they have built a one-legged pagoda, a copy of a Hanoi one”. ⁶
In this case “migration chains” are at work, again. Importantly, after the closure of the Decade Stadium market, the Vietnamese community is now in search of new spaces it might fill in Warsaw. Very soon we shall see whether it is going to be integrated into the fabric of the city or whether another Little Hanoi will emerge.
A pre-war aphorism asserted that when a passenger of a Paris-Moscow train alights by mistake in Warsaw, he considers himself already arrived in Moscow; travelling the other way, he thinks he is in Paris. Yet the very need to assert that Warsaw has more in common with Paris than with Moscow is older. The largest, most elegant and most modern hotel of fin-de-siècle Warsaw was called, unavoidably, the “Europejski” (The European), usually called, plainly, “Europe”. After Poland regained its independence in 1918, the drive to cleanse Warsaw of the remnants of Russian architecture was motivated in part by this same need to align with the west. The term “Europe-isation of space” appeared in the speeches of the President of Warsaw, Stefan Starzyński, in the 1930s as much as in those of the party general secretaries in the 1950s. It was a capacious term: it could mean combating street trade or hooliganism, elimination of wooden architecture, promoting pavement washing, decorating balconies with flowers etc. In Stalinist Poland, the word “Europe” meant, in the colloquial parlance, much more than the geographical name for the continent. It was the term for a particularly elegant and worldly gesture, custom or event.
(…)
– Upon leave-taking he gave me flowers, and drove me home.
– Europe!
[…]
– Gentlemen, I propose that we create our own periodical, a periodical for Polish writers and intellectuals.
– Europe! ⁸
Thus, the periodical for Polish writers and intellectuals created in the late 1950s was christened “Europa” – but was closed by the party before the first issue saw the light of day. In the intellectual isolation of those times, various marks of prosperity, though illusory, served as an ersatz of Europe; like the multitude of neon signs decorating Warsaw in the sixties, advertising goods as evanescent as their glow. After 1989, freshly capitalist Warsaw was enchanted by the myth of a “return to Europe”. The word “euro” appeared in the names of the first chain of private supermarkets, Euro Shop, as well as other enterprises: Mini Europa delicatessen, Eurodental clinics. The Decade Stadium open-air market, overrun by traders hailing from three continents, was called – the irony of it! – Jarmark Europa, the Europe Fair. Even now, with Poland a member of the European Union, the persistent complex Warsaw has of “not being European enough” is the motor not only of a brisk trade in stylish clothing, but of many truly noble initiatives.
The Vistula has often been represented as the symbolic boundary line between Asia and Europe – a line on which many a time stood the Russian and the Soviet (read: Asian) army. Tadeusz Konwicki wrote of the district of Targówek, which is on the eastern bank of the river:
“And suddenly it seemed to me that I was going through a small, unfamiliar town in Russia of the late years of the previous century and that in a moment I shall see, approaching at a trot amidst the clatter of hooves, a mounted patrol of Kuban Cossacks.” ⁹
Even today, with its street vendors, domes of the Orthodox cathedral of St. Mary Magdalene and the monument to Russian soldiers at the main crossing, the district centre of Praga appears very Russian in character. Close by, the now almost closed gigantic open-air market in the Decade Stadium used to be a similar reminder of the East. An art project by Joanna Warsza involving walking the residents of Warsaw through the Vietnamese sector of the market armed with pointers recorded on an MP3 player, was tellingly entitled “Take a Walk on the Asian Side” . Warsaw: Western or Eastern? Neither, perhaps. Witold Gombrowicz asserted that in this place the cultures of the West and East do not meet, but rather disappear, both of them.
Pre-war Warsaw was fascinated by the energy and vigour of American cities. Even in the Stalinist period there was an America-enchanted subculture of the “bikini boys”, reminiscent of the teddy boys. It was only after 1989, however, that the “indecent proposal” ¹⁰ of American culture could be accepted without scruple. In the city landscape, the main marks of this enchantment are skyscrapers (often featured in romantic comedies and soap operas) and other fetishes which are global yet identified with the “American lifestyle”: car, coffee in a paper cup, the shopping mall. Today, Arkadia ( “the land of happiness”), Złote Tarasy or Klif shopping malls are a must-see during excursions to Warsaw.
To some, skyscrapers are a hallmark of provincial aspirations, to others, a symbol of progress and civilisational advancement. One way or another, therapeutic qualities are readily ascribed to them. According to Daniel Libeskind, designer of the high-rise apartment block Złota 44 which is over 200 miles tall, “between the destruction by the Nazis and oppression under the Soviets, this building represents a new direction for Poland, east and west… The building embraces the complex history of the site and the aspirations of Warsaw. It is a unique building shaped by Warsaw’s soul and light”. ¹¹ Thus, a forward-and-upwards escape from the difficult past? An escape from the problems of Europe into the American dream? Being American as a version of being Polish? According to opinion polls, in Poland the most popular nation is that of the Americans. During periods of economic uncertainty – that is nearly the entire twentieth century – the US dollar was the only trustworthy currency for the Poles. The region around Warsaw has a tradition of economic emigration to the USA which goes back some generations. It was from there that the image of comfortable living arrived together with letters and parcels. Yet whether America still has a future in Warsaw is now increasingly doubtful – year to year, its popularity in the polls is diminishing, and the sociologist Paweł Śpiewak reflects that “the distance between Poland and America is growing proportionally to the growth of our European awareness”.
“Is it true that Warsaw is the new Berlin?” I was recently asked somewhere in Europe. I am not sure this is the case, but the very suggestion rings sweetly in Polish ears. “Fuck the Biennale! I am going to the Berlinale!” exclaims Basil the painter, announcing his change of fortune, in the Warsaw TR Theatre’s adaptation of The Portrait of Dorian Gray. “The editor-in-chief would certainly love this place”, enthuses the Aktivist city monthly. “That is because Agata is constantly trying to prove… that Warsaw is increasingly closer to Berlin, and every time she gets to a nice new venue she opines: ‘Well, finally, Warsaw is getting closer to Berlin’”. In the case of the shop under consideration, its Berlin attributes are spacious interiors in a century-old tenement block, clothes by young designers, designer furniture, vintage goods, eco, “good coffee, music from an old record player and a very pleasant atmosphere” ¹² . A reviewer of Gazeta Stołeczna touts the loft club 1500 m2 as follows: “We really missed such a cultured space – large, raw, alternative, in Berlin style” ¹³ . The photograph features a bicycle and graffiti. Berlin is associated with bicycles, creative professions, and freedom in terms of behaviour and a liberal social code that permits the bringing of infants to parties. Convenient transport connections certainly helped to make Berlin the point of reference for Warsaw. After 1989 Berlin was energetically promoted as the capital of post-Cold War Europe, and it is with Berlin that Warsaw, for centuries suffering because of its distance from the most important European capitals, has particularly good connections; before cheap flights brought it closer to the old Europe, it was enough to board the Berlin-Warsaw Express. The DJs brought records from there, fashionistas observed new trends emanating from there, artists kept in touch with the art world of Berlin. It was even relatively easy to regularly commute between the two capitals. But even if there had been no train connection, Warsaw and Berlin have a much deeper common link: the scars from the War and the Cold War, the twin fortunes of cities damaged by totalitarian systems – cities that are flawed, forever unfinished, open and receptive to new influences.
