Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Memory is a Loaded Gun
An Epilogue
243
Hannes Swoboda
and Camiel Hamans
Coming to Gdansk is coming to terms with the past. That is why the
Socialist Group in the European Parliament decided to organise
the last of its meetings in a series of seminars on the use and abuse
of history in politics in Gdansk.
Gdansk is the place of Oskar Matzerath, the little drummer in
Günter Grass’ novel The Tin Drum and at the same time the place
of that other Nobelprize winner Lech Wałęsa and the Lenin Shipyards,
but also the place where the 18 th century physicist
Fahrenheit, still better known in the Anglo-Saxon world than on the
European continent, was born and the place where in the Hanseatic
times merchants from Lübeck, Hamburg, Bruges, London and even
Bergen, Norway, met to buy amber and their yearly supplies of rye,
wheat and timber, which was brought to the harbour city from so far
remote as the Ukraine. The empty vessels were being loaded with
red bricks as ballast on their way from the Low Countries to the
East Sea and that explains why the whole of Gdansk has been built
with brick stones.
Gdansk, called Danswijck in Dutch texts from the 17 th century, feels
in its centre like Amsterdam and Brussels at the same time. Architects
such as the Flemish and Dutch engineers Anthony van
Obberghen, Cornelis van der Bosch and Tylman van Gameren
shaped an international atmosphere of elegant renaissance city
towers, Hollandish canalside houses and Brabantine market
squares with huge and rich guildhalls.
But all this beauty is a reconstructed artefact just as the memory of
the Castle of the Teutonic Knights who once ruled over what they
used to call Danzig. The end of the Second World War saw Gdansk
completely ruined; 90% of the buildings was bombed, demolished
and literally fallen into pieces. And from these pieces a new Gdansk
was reconstructed in the following twenty years. This was done by