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

is even better known as a brand name of good beer. His mother’s
family, coming from Bohemia, consisted of famous brewers.
Gdansk, a city where three major ethnic groups used to live together
peacefully for ages, Poles, Germans and Kashubians
(Günter Grass is one of them) – a small group of Pomeranians
speaking their own West Slavic language – was not only a place
where foreigners were accepted because of commercial reasons,
the names of a few streets still show where the Scots had their
own quarter; Gdansk really showed the climate and the atmosphere
of a metropolis. Commercial activities, intellectual life, and freedom
went hand in hand. Jews felt at home, just as Swedes, some of
them decedents of people who once had occupied Poland, Italians
who imported their pasta to become pierogi in the Polish cuisine
and Mennonites from Westphalia and the Low Countries who
started to reclaim and impolder the wetlands around Danswijck.
From the second half of the 16 th century until the first part of the
19 th century, Danzig was a protestant city but the authorities had no
problem giving back a Franciscan church and monastery which had
served as accommodation of the local Academy to the Roman
Catholic church when in the beginning of the 19 th century the number
of Polish speaking Roman Catholics started to raise again.
Gdansk is the birthplace of the great German pessimist Arthur
Schopenhauer, who considered women as inferior. Maybe that was
the reason why he stayed a bachelor until the end of his days.
Nevertheless, he experienced the good influence of women on
mankind regularly, albeit in secret. Just as his ideas about equal
rights appeared to be nonsense, social democracy tries to prove
that his pessimistic ideas on the organisation of mankind are
incorrect as well.
Starting from Gdansk, is one of the best places in this respect,
Gdansk being a symbol of war, occupation and oppression but at
the same time also of heroic protest, civil courage, respect and tolerance,
should become a symbol of honnêteté, honesty, in political
debate.
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