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Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023)
00:59:34
An interview with Marek Kohn
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Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges, basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Marek Khan about his book titled the Stories Old Towns A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe, published by Yale University Press in 2023, which examines a really interesting collection of cities that were really devastated by the Second World War. Obviously some of them more famous than others. We're talking, for example, about Warsaw and Frankfurt. Lots of rebuilding that had to happen because, of course, today those are places that attract loads and loads of tourists. And of course, one of the reasons they do that is because tourists get to look at these old, quaint, adorable, you know, whatever adjective you want to use, buildings that are peaceful, that are gorgeous, that are historic, why were those decisions made? Obviously, if there was devastation, if a lot of these buildings were damaged, how were those choices made about what to rebuild and how and for what purposes and what history to bring back? None of that is accidental. None of that is inevitable. And it's all quite fascinating. So, Marc, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.
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D
Well, thanks so much for your interest and thanks for that, that very enticing introduction. Yeah, this is what it's about. It's about the editing and rewriting of old towns, of actual physical places. And it's also about what you mentioned, the attractiveness of old towns, the fact that they are jewels, the fact that people do flock to them. And I flock. It's the first place that I make for in a city. Yes. I look for the brown heritage sign. Which way is the old town?
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C
So is that why you decided to write this book?
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D
Partly, yes. So I'm a Anglo Polish writer, that is, I'm British. I live in Brighton on the south coast of England, and I have a British and Polish background. And that means that all my life I've had a very strong sense of national identities, both from within and from outside. So a rather curious sense of being part of something and observing it from outside at the same time. And that has always been present in the themes of my books. For a long time, I broadened out and wrote about the implications of very scientific ideas for ideas about human nature and society. And then, well, about 10 years ago, as we all noticed, the world seemed to start changing in a very disturbing kind of way. And I felt I needed to turn around and concentrate more on what was going on and trying to do whatever I could to. To, well, not to stem the tide, but to at least engage with it and try and make it less bad than it looked like being. This hasn't gone very well, but nonetheless, the project of writing books about centred in Europe did emerge from this. And really it started specifically with Brexit, which I felt was personally really devastating emotionally. I realized I was forced to face the fact that there are a lot of people in this country who don't think I'm as British as they are. And I reoriented myself from that time and kind of the center of my worldview is now quite a long way away from where I'm sitting here in southern England. And during the Brexit campaign, I started up a pro European club locally. And as a result of that, I contacted by a pro European blogger and she had a set of questions, standard questions for her interviewees. And one of them was, what's your favorite place in Europe? And there was just like a moment's pause in my mind. I thought, it's the old town. And I didn't quite know what I meant by that, but I thought about it. I think, yes, it's those places that you find in so many cities in Europe. The old ones, the ones with the uneven street plans or sometimes grid plans, but the ones with overhanging eaves and gargoyles and cobblestones and so on and so forth. The ones that make you feel that you're transported back to a different time. And then I thought, yeah, wouldn't it be great to write about all of them? And then I thought a bit harder about that. And I realized that this was actually not about the delights of old towns. That was a starting point, but it was actually about the divisions of Europe, about fundamental questions of national identity, of how peoples and relationships between peoples are represented, and about some of the most tragic and catastrophic events of the past century. So, yeah, so we went from the magic of old turns to the tragedy of the 20th century quite rapidly. And off I went.
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C
Well, it's always interesting to understand how a book project develops. It's never one moment. There's all these multiple pieces that come together, as you very helpfully explained in this case. But the thing I'd most like to pick up on first from all of those different inspirations is the idea of the old town being somewhere you always want to go because you're being transported back in time. And of course, that's often the idea of the old town now as it's presented. But as you discuss in the book, some of these old towns, for example, Warsaws, if we go before the destruction of World War II. Yeah, okay, we're going back in time, literally. But they weren't sort of this magical old town the way that we have them now. What were these old towns in sort of the late 1800s, early 1900s? What were they actually like? Because it doesn't sound like they were super touristy and magical.
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D
Absolutely not. So to explain what happened, I think it's helpful to go a little bit further back, maybe to the early 1800s. So this is really when old towns start to become old towns with a capital O and a capital capital T, so to speak. In other words, that's around the time when cities start to really expand in a dramatic, modern kind of way, and the old historic medieval centers find themselves increasingly surrounded by newer suburbs and increasingly out of step with. With the cities as they develop. So they're not built for modern needs. In particular, they're not built for modern transport. So they become congested, they become less desirable places to live. So the prosperous burghers who would occupy the grand townhouses around the. The central market square, they would move out to the more fashionable suburbs where they had more space. In Poland, for example, they'd be moving out to places where they could build small palaces. So what happens to these central sites? Well, they decline and they fill up with people who can't afford to live anywhere else. And so they gain reputations as essentially sinks of social infection, urban infection. They're physically dilapidated. They're physically dilapidated. They're declining in status. They are seen as potential sources of actual disease because of the insanitary conditions within them and the increasing overcrowding of the tenements, which now get subdivided more and more as they crumble and get covered in mold and damp and so on. And inevitably, they're seen from the outside also as dens of iniquity, of focal points of criminality right in the heart of the city. So modern urban planners look askance at them. They come up with plans for demolishing them or radically revising them, driving huge boulevards right through them. And then something happens. Suddenly, a different section of the social elite, the cultural intelligentsia mainly, suddenly discover these places, virtues. All of a sudden they go, hang on a minute. This is part of our history, part of our heritage. It's part of our national character. Don't do this. We should improve these places, but in a way that retains their physical form but enhances them. So in the case of Warsaw, the old town, very small old town, about 10 hectares, was effectively was colonized and gentrified by the cultural intelligentsia. So they came in and they bought up houses. They had skills like architecture and design and so on, and they made it a quarter that suited well themselves, so cafes and publishing houses and so on. And also, very importantly, they made it a center of cultural resistance against imperial rule. Because at that time, before they. Before the First World War, that part of Poland was part of the Russian empire. And asserting Polish culture in this historically crucial focal site, the site at the right of the heart, the oldest part of the former Polish capital, was politically an important move and an important part of cultural resistance. Similar things happened elsewhere. For instance, in Frankfurt, friends of the old town sprang up to defy redevelopment plans. And actually, in Frankfurt, they were pretty concerned about the condition of the Inhabitants as well as the buildings. So there were soup kitchens and various forms of practical help for them. So all the way through you get this arc. Beginnings of industrialization or pre industrialization, urban expansion in the 19th century. Old towns acquire an identity as old towns, and at the same time their status plummets. They're regarded as social problems, and when they're threatened with action to address those problems, suddenly their values are discovered. And that takes us about to the Second World War.
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C
That's a really interesting sort of evolution of thinking. And it's definitely not the sort of thing we think of now in going to these, you know, quote unquote restored old towns. It's sort of like, well, restored to what exactly? Because the ideas at this point that you're talking about weren't the ones we would necessarily have now. But as you said, it does take us up to the Second World War. So how were these old towns treated by the Allies during and immediately after the war? So during, when they're trying to get control of them, and then immediately immediately after when they do have control of them, what was the Allied perspective on these old towns?
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D
The Allied perspective, particularly the aerial perspective of the Royal Air Force, was that old towns were firelighters. The commander of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, actually observed about Lubeck, the historic center of Lubeck. It was. It was built more like a firelighter than a human habitation. And for that reason, he did a trial run bombing that city and setting fire to the old town, just to see what effect it would have on a densely packed old structure full of wooden frame buildings. So to explain that a little bit more. During the blitz against Britain in 1940-41, Britain learned that the most damage from air raids was caused not by high explosive, but by fire. They calculated that pound for pound, ton for ton, incendiary bombs were five times as destructive in their potential as high explosive ones. So they set to develop a bombing campaign against Germany on the grounds that this was the most effective way that Britain had of attacking the heart of the German Reich at the time. But it was driven above all by Arthur Harris, who was convinced that the way to win the war was to destroy German cities. The RAF was squeamish about saying it was deliberately trying to kill German civilians. It talked about de housing them and about morale bombing. But the effect of what was known as area bombing, or more colloquially as carpet bombing, was to devastate cities by setting fire to them. Experiments were conducted on how best to set fire to typical German buildings, and it became Very, very clear that if you wanted to set fire to an urban area, the best thing to do would be to drop incendiaries and high explosive bombs on the middle of it. The Old Quarter, which was the most vulnerable to bombing, the most ready to burn, and the hardest area in which to extinguish fires because of the narrow lanes and the inaccessibility, the lack of firewalls between the buildings, the wooden frames and so on. So, yeah, when the RAF attacked a city like Wurzburg, for example, they made straight for the centre, marked the target, unloaded the bombs with the old town as the aiming point, and in the biggest raid killed 3,000 people. And that wasn't by any means the most devastating raid against Sherman cities in the war. One of the most striking things about this was that a lot of this bombing took place very late in the war when the RAF was running out of targets, but carried on anyway, and German defenses were much, much weaker. So proportionately the devastation was much greater. And yet within weeks, really, the war had ended, the war in Europe had ended and the reconstruction was beginning. So almost immediately, members of the Allied forces went in and started to help with reconstruction. And in Wurzburg, for example, one of the so called monuments men, a curator with an academic background, went in and did sterling work in Wurzburg, trying to save historic buildings from collapse and saving the artworks within them. So almost immediately there was this flip from trying to obliterate a city to trying to bring part of its history back to life.
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C
This was really fascinating to read about, especially, as you said, so much of the bombing was right at the end, so there's really very little time between, let's bomb all of it, because look how flammable it is to, oh, wait, now we're in charge. That's such a massive, massive change and obviously presents some pretty immediate questions about what to do with these old towns. And of course, it's not going to be the same for old towns that are in Germany versus old towns in places that Germany conquered, like Poland. Can you walk us through what some of these kinds of questions were and how perhaps the exact same question about how to rebuild could seem really obvious and straightforward in Warsaw, but really complicated in Germany.
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D
Well, the point about old towns is that they're the central symbolic districts of cities. They're concentrated reservoirs of meaning. They're somewhat talked about as crown jewels. And yes, that's the symbolic and cultural role that many of them play. So rebuilding an old town was throughout the region, throughout what I call middle Europe, Germany and Poland principally, it was a political, cultural and moral response to what had just happened. And obviously the moral dimensions were utterly different in Germany and Poland. So in Poland, the moral vectors were all too clear. Rebuilding the old town of Warsaw, which had been almost completely destroyed during the war, was an expression of national spirit. It was a rejection, a defeat. It was saying, yes, it was destroyed. We're not going to let that stand. We're not going to let that defeat stand. Rebuilding the old town was part of the final defeat of Germany, if you like. And certainly I think that's how the architects themselves saw it. In Germany, by contrast, of course, history was fatally compromised at that time. What was there to be proud of? German history had led to this, had led to the atrocities that were now being acknowledged and had led to this cataclysmic defeat. So the German planners had complicated choices to make. Polish ones had straightforward decisions. I mean, it's not to say that everywhere in Poland old towns were rebuilt as replicas. Warsaws had a particular significance and it was set at the center of the national reconstruction project because it was in the capital and because of its particular history in, in the Second World War. But in Germany, I think a very good example of the moral conundrum that was faced was in Frankfurt, Frankfurt and Main, which had been one of the largest timber framed old towns in Germany and which had been almost completely destroyed. And one of the buildings that was destroyed was the Goethe House, Goethe's birthplace. And there was big debate about whether this should be rebuilt, saying, look, if we rebuild it, then we're pretending that nothing had happened. Here, it'll be standing there, it'll look the same, and we can kid ourselves that it was never destroyed. And so we don't have to think about the reasons why it was destroyed in the event it actually was rebuilt. But this I think shows you the kinds of, of agonizing that the planners and cultural elites went through. However, what Frankfurt also shows is that planners in Germany were pretty keen to take this moral dilemma and this devastation as an opportunity to start again and to build new modern city centers. So Frankfurt is the most conspicuously modern of German cities in the sense that it's the only one with a skyscraper skyline and so on. And the center was rebuilt in a modern way that ended up actually sowing the seeds of its own demise because a brutalist building was plonked down right in the middle of it that I think even admirers of brutalist architecture struggle to defend. And one thing led to another and proposals emerged about reconstruction so the old town hall had survived more or less, or looked pretty much like it used to do. And a row of houses, replicas of, of the old style townhouses were rebuilt adjoining it. And this gave people an idea, well, why don't we do a whole new old town here? And to cut a long story short, after a lot of political debates, quite charged ones, about the politics of bringing back the past and the kinds of ideologies espoused by some of the people who are arguing for this, a whole new old town, so called, was reopened in 2018. So this shows a number of things. Firstly, it shows that certainly in that city in Germany, that people felt very let down by modern architecture, by post war architecture. It didn't feel satisfying to them. And when they look for an alternative, they look to the past, they look to a replica of the past. And this is quite a broad movement in different forms. And the other thing that it shows is that old towns aren't just things that arise over hundreds of years and then maybe have to be rebuilt at once and then are left. Old towns are always works in progress. Old towns are still being built and they're continually being built.
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C
Yeah, it goes right back to what we were saying at the beginning about kind of when were these things actually built versus what is sort of the myth that they're meant to portray in terms of how long they've been around. And the answer you've just described for us very helpfully gets us into the sort of ideological questions, the philosophical questions, even the emotional questions of this rebuilding. What about the practical and logistical aspects? Right, we're talking about like rubble here, right, Immediately after World War II. How does that work to actually physically rebuild this? I mean, where do you get supplies from? How do you pay people? Like, what did that angle look like?
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D
The first task in reconstruction was clearing the rubble in Germany. In Germany, sorry, the first task of reconstruction is to clear the site, to clear away the rubble. In Germany, this became a highly symbolic activity and it was identified above all with women. Trummefrauwen rubble women and their memory survives in black and white photos of chains, of women passing rubble from hand to hand on demolition sites. And this activity in Germany has a kind of expiatory character. These women are atoning for the sins of the Nazi era. In fact, plenty of men were involved in those activities as well. And likewise in Poland, similarly in Warsaw, in the old town, yeah, there are plenty of women who looked exactly the same, doing exactly the same kind of activity, but morally it was totally different. They were beginning the project, the collective national project of rebuilding the nation. And that was really, really important because although it wasn't the most efficient form of labor, it was the only form of labor that was practical at the time, given the shortage of machinery and skilled labor. But far more importantly, it involved the people. It looked like a collective national enterprise and therefore it became a symbol of national unity. So in Poland, brigades were organized from workplaces. People were sent away from their offices and similar places of work to put in a stint on the rubble. And the newsreels filmed them and created this image of the whole nation rebuilding its capital. And to support that effort, collections were made throughout the country when there's sorts of supposedly voluntary, but not really kinds of fundraising drives. So the whole nation was rebuilding the capital, even if it wasn't actually physically handing one piece of brick to the next person in the chain.
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C
Again, we're talking here about sort of myths and ideas of what's happening intertwined with the physicality of, as you said, the bricks being handed from one person to another. What about the sort of supplies and payment of this? How did that work? I mean, were there supplies available? Who had the money to pay for this kind of thing? Was that also sort of mythologised in Poland?
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D
Some quite curious things happened with supplies in Warsaw. There was obviously a huge need for rebuilding because the majority of buildings in the larger part of the city had been destroyed beyond repair, not as much as is usually claimed. It wasn't the 85% that is so widely touted as the figure. And Warsaw certainly was not razed to the ground. As you often read, one part of Warsaw was razed to the ground.
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C
The.
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D
Ghetto area, but that was not the whole city. Anyway, there was a vast appetite for bricks in Warsaw and a lot of them were supplied from the city that until mid-1945 was called Breslau and had now become Wroclaw. So a city that had been part of Germany was now part of Poland because Poland had been moved westwards. And the values, the cultural importance of heritage in Wroclaw and Warsaw was. Well, it wasn't paradoxical, but it was very different. And it led to the. The peculiarity that buildings of the same period in one city were deprecated and demolished in order to supply bricks for Warsaw, whereas buildings of similar age in Warsaw were restored lovingly as symbols of Poland's heyday. So what I'm talking about is the 18th century, 18th century Breslau, now Wroclaw, was identified with Germany, with the German Empire with, well, not with the German empire, sorry. The 18th century was identified with a period of German rule and so was deprecated. Any building with German associations could be knocked down and used for salvage. If you wanted to demolish a building in Wroclaw, all you had to do was find some German associations and that would help justify the action. But in Warsaw, 18th century houses represented the last flowering of Polish statehood and culture before the partitions at the end of the 18th century. And not only masonry, but actually architectural details were taken from buildings in Wrocaw and sent off to Warsaw for architectural heritage reconstruction. This project offered huge opportunities for corruption. And there were a number of brick trafficking scandals in the 1950s, despite the supposedly being socialist Poland, where that kind of thing was not supposed to happen any longer.
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C
This is really interesting to think about the kind of practicalities behind these grand ideals. As you said, though, there's this hearkening back to, well, we want it to look like this heyday, or we want it to look like this time for these kind of political reasons. What were these sort of style decisions that were being made here? How much did it vary between the different places you look at in the book? Was it kind of always about, let's pick whatever the look was when we were the most politically powerful, or how were these decisions about not just what to rebuild, but what that rebuilding should look like made?
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D
So the past is not just the past to be taken as a whole or left. The past is a collection of potential resources from which each successive historical moment takes what it thinks it needs. So in Poland, what the new regime thought it needed was to appear to be an authentic representation of the Polish nation, rather than a puppet government imposed by the Soviet Union, which is what it in fact was. The story it needed to tell was about Poland and its historic unity. So it downplayed diversity. This was not a time to talk about Poland's multi ethnic past, because Poland was in the process of, shall we say, ethnically regularizing itself. Ukrainians were either deported or assimilated. Poles were sent from former Polish territories that were now part of the Soviet Union. And the idea was to achieve as close to ethnic homogeneity as possible. This project was basically made possible by the extermination of Poland's Jewish population, or 90% of it, during the war. And life was not made comfortable for those survivors who gradually left in subsequent decades, leaving a very, very small residual population, which is now finally being represented in the narratives that at least some Polish cities tell. So the story of national unity was about asserting Polishness and erasing anything else. And you can see that very, very clearly in Wroclaw, which, having been a German city until very, very recently, had to be pollenized. One of the devices that was employed throughout the wider region in which Wroclaw is situated was Polish parapets or Polish attics. Now, these are particular kind of balustrade device that runs along roofs, along rooftops, and you can see it in the great market square of Klarkow on the Silk Hall. But these things appeared on buildings in towns where they had never previously existed as a way of saying, yeah, this place has always been Polish. Look how Polish it is. So there was this kind of fictionalizing which happened in smaller towns and bigger cities, and also a narrative kind of assertion of Polishness. So in Wroclaw, the few medieval buildings that dated from a period when it was under Polish rule, the few surviving ones, were given a degree of narrative privilege that these are the most important buildings in the city. So a combination of decoration, structural choices, and narrative, all combining in different sorts of ways, Some quite ingenious fictions. The reconstruction of a historic facade on a building that was actually built as a department store in Breslau around 1900, with an iron frame and a contemporary finish, now has a facade that matches the ancient town hall across the square from it. So these things now become part of a. An ongoing story which it all gets folded in. So this is now part of the city's history, and I think it's embraced as such.
- [36:31]
C
Really interesting to understand the stories behind these things that are, as you said, embraced today, perhaps without realizing what goes into it. I wonder, though, if we can expand our conversation a little bit. We've been talking mainly about old towns in Poland and Germany. To what extent were the challenges faced with rebuilding similar or different to what we've been discussing if we move to Lithuania?
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D
Vilnius has an old town, a rather large one, that occupies a very handsome sector of real estate right in the middle of the city. The challenges in rebuilding after the war were not primarily physical, because actually, there wasn't terribly much physical damage from the fighting that took place in the. In the Lithuanian capital. What really changed was the population, because in the 1930s, there were really very few ethnic Lithuanians in Vilnius. It was mostly Polish and Jewish. Third, Jewish population was murdered, and the Polish population was, in the jargon of the time, repatriated. So they repatriated from a place where they'd been born and where their families had lived for many years to somewhere where they had no roots. A lot of them actually went to Gdask, which had previously been a free city, largely German, free city of Danzig. And the dream of Vilnius still survives in those cities. But in Vilnius itself, you're really quite hard pushed to find any hint that there are ever Poles there. I mean, the only thing that seems to have survived there are brass, monumental marble sculptures, which clearly take a lot of effort to shift. The Jewish history is just beginning to be. To be recognized in slightly tentative, but nonetheless creative ways. So what happened in Vilnius was distinctive and perhaps rather unusual in that the Lithuanian Communist Party actually achieved a certain amount of legitimacy from the Lithuanian population by standing up for, shall we say, the Lithuanian nation and the Lithuanian language and culture and so on. So to the extent that they rewrote the city, it was about art critics and historians deciding, declaring that certain features were classically Lithuanian and distinctive. So there was a narrative about how they were Lithuanian and the architectural features were Lithuanian, not Polish, how it was the Italy of the North. It developed its own characteristic style of baroque, which is true enough, but the burden of the narrative was highly political. What's particularly interesting in Vilnius is perhaps not what happened in the immediate post war decades, but what happened after independence in the 1990s, when the. I mean, I think of Vilnius as a bit like a ring with jewels set into it. And the jewels are the royal symbolic quarter immediately at the head of it. So that's the cathedral and the high ground with the castle on it, and the Grand Duke's palace, which was built after independence. It looks like a historic building, but it doesn't actually look that much like its prototype because its prototype was demolished like 200 years ago because it fell into disuse. And there aren't really any good architectural diagrams that could have given the rebuilders an idea of how to create a replica. So they had to do an architect's impression of it. And this is now the sort of key, key vessel articulating the Lithuanian national story. And so you've got this castle complex saying, Lithuania is a very, very old nation and it's the site of key national legends, and the adjoining old town is saying, yes, and we are a truly European city of high cultural refinement. So the two work together in a powerful, synergistic way.
- [41:52]
C
Really interesting to think about the ways in which some of these questions are really similar, even if the problem is not about the physical structures, but of course it is, and it is about the people. All these things are so entangled in all of the places you've been telling us about so far, we've mentioned a little bit the specific question of talking about this history and talking about the Jewish history of these places, given the destruction. Maybe we can talk about that a bit more directly now. How have the different places navigated talking or not talking about this history?
- [42:23]
D
I had a very interesting conversation with the curator of the Vilna City Museum, which interestingly is a very new institution. The emphasis on the national story and dullness use as expression of Lithuanian statehood as distinct from its own history, I think is highlighted by the way that it's taken a long time to establish the city museum and it's still not in its permanent premises. But anyway, the curator is. The director is. Is a woman who actually grew up in the old town, and she now lives very, very close to where she grew up. And she was telling me that there was an area very near to her home which was more run down than anywhere else. And she didn't really know what it was. She wasn't really aware of it. And it's only gradually that a sense has emerged that, hang on, this was the old Jewish quarter. And this is actually really pretty important to be a little clearer. There are two important areas for Jewish history in Vilnius. One is the Old Town bit, and the other is a more recent development which was a product of the modern period and which people were more proud of. It was. It didn't have the characteristic poverty and squalor that the Old Town, the Jewish Old Town had. And it was, of course, a very, very important sector of Yiddish culture. The Old town of Vilnius has developed in the sort of ways that you would expect. Big tourist industry, hotels, a lot of smart paint work, some very, very fine buildings in good condition. But the former Jewish area has lagged behind. One street has been restored or presented as a representation of the past, but much of it is still, frankly, amiss. The building that used to be a very important library and was actually a center of armed resistance in the war. So historically, really, really important both culturally and symbolically and to the memory of the Jewish people in the Vilnius was. Was just left in the sort of dilapidated condition which turns itself or can be turned into a kind of monument. So instead of saying, okay, we have to do up this building, it's easier to say, yeah, we'll leave it as a poignant monument of loss. And in this case, they did what's been done elsewhere. Took an example from Poland. You take old photos of people who used to live in Jewish areas and you blow them up and you fill the windows with them, so that it forms this sort of outdoor gallery. Very, very effective at a certain level. But it also speaks of a civic reluctance to really engage with the idea of integrating Jewish history into the history of the capital as a whole. So you've got two or three Jewish museums, but they're almost like external enterprises. And what you don't have in Vilnius, apparently, is much engagement with the city as it was. So this doesn't help. In places actually populated by people whose grandparents came from Vilnius, like GDASK and Wroclaw, there's an interesting cultural phenomenon has been the rediscovery of the embracing of the German past. The literal uncovering of old inscriptions that had been painted over. A certain sort of romantic and rather romanticized kind of engagement with old photos, but nonetheless a kind of embrace. Saying this in a certain sense is part of our history, because it's part of the history of the place where we lived in Vilnius, which is now populated by Lithuanians, There seems to have been nothing equivalent, and that, I suspect, may have affected the relative lack of integration of the Jewish history of the place. In other cities that have followed different paths. And Lublin in southeastern Poland is an absolutely extraordinary example where the Old Town has been reinvented, reframed as the neighbor of the vanished Jewish town, which was razed to the ground and is utterly invisible now except through the recreations, through performances, and through exhibitions and displays created by the center that occupies the gateway, the gatehouse that used to be the boundary between the Christian Old Town and the Wallace Jewish Town. A fascinating project and a really inspiring example of how civic society can reinvent Old towns. And one of the remarkable side effects of this reinvention was by adding to the cultural prestige of the Old Town, it actually helped regenerate the Old Town itself. So what had been a very rundown area, actually, which, to be honest, it still is in the back streets, so leading back from the center, which is very much about the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust. The success of that very difficult cultural enterprise has led to a parade of bright, jolly cafes and restaurants in which people can live the convivial kind of lives, relax, socializing, that are really what make Old Town so marvellous.
- [49:20]
C
Very interesting to see that all of these questions around sort of what history is remembered and how aren't just things that were of concern in the immediate post war years, but as you said, are still very much ongoing now with new projects and recent things. So what do you think we need to kind of keep in mind most about why these old towns matter right now and going forward into the future as well.
- [49:43]
D
Old tales matter because they are central symbolic districts, because they're concentrations of meaning, because they are intensely rich sources of text and narrative and imagery. And the choices that are made about which of the which narratives, images and text to highlight and which to obscure or to efface altogether matter because they help to shape the identities of the places that they're in, the cities, the countries and the nations that they represent. And at a time when there are profound tensions around visions of national identity and of civic identity and of place, of who belongs somewhere and who belongs, who doesn't, who are us and who are them. Old towns are potentially immensely valuable resources for, well, for healing, for improving, for enabling people to live better with each other. And by the same token, they're potential sources of division, potential resources for those who want to create exclusive national myths of myths of grievance, of superiority, of exclusivity. Myths that defy the Europe that we actually live in, which is a Europe that is perhaps more diverse or visibly diverse than it's ever been, but nonetheless a Europe that has always been diverse and has always been varied and has always found different ways of living together or not. So they help us find the best. And I actually want to speak up for banal old towns. I want to speak up for the idea that somebody from one country, one part of the world, can drift into an old town and be captivated and be carried away, and to sit eating ice creams surrounded by people of all different kinds of backgrounds and places of origin, and not feel frightened and not feel hostile because that's a precious thing in Europe. It's not, and I think it's one of Europe's greatest achievements. But at the same time it's helpful and valuable and important to, while you're sitting there enjoying your ice cream, to bring that detached eye, that critical eye to what you're looking at, to think about and reflect upon just why it looks the way it does and not some slightly different other way.
- [52:36]
C
None of it was inevitable. It was all decisions, it was all debates, as you very helpfully explained to us. And of course the book goes into wonderful more detail as well. And this is clearly a topic you're passionate about. So is this something you're continuing to work on? Are you moving to something different of any upcoming or current projects, whether or not they're book related, that you want to tell us a bit about?
- [52:58]
D
Well, I don't think, given what I've told you about My involvement with Europe and my concern with identity and with fairness and living together well are not really going to be surprising to hear that. My main involvement, really, since writing the book, has been with Ukrainian culture, working with the new Ukrainian community here in Brighton and the surrounding area. I had my own new form of enchantment when discovered the Ukrainian Midsummer festival of Kapala, which was held in a park near where I am now in Brighton, first in 2022, shortly after Ukrainian refugees began to arrive in the city. And I was standing there and thinking, yeah, this is great. These costumes look really familiar from my Polish childhood. The music sounds like it as well. And I really like this. I feel really happy here, despite the reason why we're here. And then I thought, I know what's going on. I recognize this because being of Polish background, I grew up associated with a community that had a profound sense that it needed to practice its culture in order to sustain the nation in exile until the homeland could be free and live safely and find its own way. Let's not get into the paths that that country has now taken, but setting that to one side. This feels to me like a really, really important insight, and it's one that I want to keep working with.
- [55:01]
C
Well, I'm sure that will continue to be absolutely fascinating. Do you want to tell us more?
- [55:05]
D
Well, yeah, I mean, you can see, you can read about the specific project that's come out of that Kubala Brighton project, which had been a Ukrainian cultural activist who organized the first Kabbalah festival. And in it, so it's kapalabriton.org and in it you can read, I think, read about why it matters. And happily, you can also, I think, see from the photos that we have on the site, why it matters. And for me, it's relating it to this book. Yeah, you know, with Old Towns, I was talking about. Am talking about physical heritage, and now I'm talking about what in the jargon is intangible heritage and its music and song and costume. And it's very uplifting. It's enchanting, and it's also a great source of strength. And, yeah, the possibilities of cultural exchange, of making it both British and Ukrainian, are really, really enticing in the same way that the idea of interweaving different narratives in old towns is something that appeals to me very, very deeply.
- [56:31]
C
Well, best of luck. As that project continues, and of course, for listeners who want to get more into what we've been discussing, they can read the book titled the stories Old Towns A Journey Through Cities at The Heart of Europe, published by Yale University Press in 2023. Marek, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [56:50]
D
Thank you so much for letting me talk about old towns, which I have. I hope you can tell I love doing and I hope, and I hope you and listeners can share some of that excitement and intellectual intrigue and pleasure.