Fragments of a Journey

I come to the city of Wrocław, the former Breslau, by train. Until Pardubice, the train is modern and certain, spacious and sleek. In the arms of this doleful efficiency, I sleep. From Pardubice, we step through a looking glass, and the fabric and character of the journey are wholly transformed. The wagons, now subdivided into dark and cozy cabins, no longer slice smoothly through the cold morning air, they jostle and shake gently, a half-hearted rebellion against friction and gravity. A train of infinite patience, it pauses to stop at every hamlet, no matter how small, and heeds the whim of any local dweller to travel, from one whistle-stop to the next, on this particular day.

At each grade level crossing, we pass a semaphore, our motion smearing the sounds of the dinging bells, like a foley cue from an old spy film. It begins high on the musical scale and then smoothly sweeps downward, simultaneously rising and falling in loudness, a small seance to summon the spirit of Christian Doppler. It was he who, in 1842 at the Prague Polytechnic, proposed an explanation to account for the audible change in pitch of a sound that is in motion relative to a perceiver. Doppler extrapolated his principle to all forms of undulating energy, so it is due to him that we can divine the relative velocities of the stars, a fundamental tool for knowing where we are among all things that exist. This was no small contribution.


Crossing the border into Poland, the stops become less frequent, the scenery a bit flatter and more docile, a green land, fertilized with the blood of nations, and their ashes. Sometimes, this pastorale is broken by the sooty apparition of a vast complex of rusting equipment and fuming smokestacks, sitting among pits and piles of disturbed earth. The sky shimmers with surprising sparks, as small birds with wings black on top, but white undersides, flap their way over the fields in tight, elastically bound clusters, glinting like diamond dust rendered in an animated gif from a Japanese web site.

The postwar past of Wrocław is a tragic saga of mass migrations, people forced in large numbers to leave their homes, only to be replaced by waves of newcomers who themselves were driven out of their abodes. Architectural forms devised to suit the needs of the previous denizens at times found an odd fit with the recently arrived. This has left this richly layered city fragmented, but not broken. Wrocław spreads out in all directions from a center that is fractured by some dozen islands in the river Odra. These islets sit firmly in the brown water among a lacework of bridges, like so many foundering barges heaped up with earth and crowned with traces of a past cultural, religious and industrial. If the dazzle of the early morning sun blinds and obscures, its sieve also showers light on the diaphanous scrims of vapor that hang between us and Baroque façades, bell towers, blocks of flats, and chimneys that shy behind cold curtains of mist. Ducks glide, drawing wakes, recalling the resonances of sound waves made visible. Black crows in vests of gray, de-tuned trumpets squawking with the compressive thrust of a dog’s squeak toy, play games in mid-air, at times floating down to scrabble over bits of bread and other things interesting to crows. An autumn tree, its few remaining leaves rocking back and forth in the soft breeze, a glint of intermittent gold, a dazzle, a rustling of their almost silent tissues.


The trams here squeal like stuck pigs as they carefully round tight corners, blue painted boxes with large windows on steel wheels, filled with lego-land passengers moving on to the next moment of their lives. Old buildings are festooned with a blight of bubbling masonry, crumbling plaster façades, and a cast of thousands in the form of molded plaster busts crouch in dim alcoves, niches for effigies of the once admired, but now obscure.


We come across a meridian line on the sidewalk ceremoniously marked by a bronze plaque. The building it points to, the Uniwersytet Wrocławski, houses a museum crested with an astronomical observatory. Ascending the steps, we find a high opening in the wall that admits a single streak of sunlight, projecting onto the floor and forming a bright line that marks the meridian (in the modern exhibit, this line is “enhanced” with a string of LEDs). If Doppler’s shift is dynamic and ever varying, a dance of sound and movement, this line is steady and sure. It follows the edge of Euclid’s ruler, and fixes our location in time with a certainty that seems God-like.

A world saved on glass plates

Black warriors, Mediterranean children, streets of little Southern French towns, half-timbered houses, excursionists in the German mountains, costumed characters in rooms furnished in Dutch style. In the observatory tower of the Baroque university of Wrocław, on the exhibition Zatrzymane w szkladnym kadrze – A world saved on glass plates.


None of the photos has any caption. A few locations are recognizable: Ethiopia, the Cathedral of Ferrara, Lake Como. The rest is unknown: do you recognize any of them? The glass plates come from the educational aids collection of the university of Breslau, five thousand of them were digitized by the university of Wrocław, only a small proportion of the complete material. Once they were perhaps organized as lists written by hand or kept in mind, like the slide collections of our high school professors. These, however, have long vanished, just like the former professors, the university, and Breslau itself. Their single remaining organizing principle, place of origin and homeland are those hundreds of cardboard boxes in which they have survived the vicissitudes of a century, and whose exotic labels were put on show, with good historical sense, at the entrance.



However, without captions, and merging into one multicolored world, the photos let you feel much better, how they might have lived on in the minds of the students, to whom they were projected in the various lectures, and to whom they represented the big world in a small world, short of images.

Nevertheless, these photos are also excellent documents of such exotic lands, which were not visited by many photographers at that time. Who was the one who photographed Abyssinia in such detail, the rural world of the Mediterranean, the German villages? Whoever he was, he has his place among the pioneers of the photographic discovery of the world.

And the vanished worlds preserved for us by these images also include the one which preserved them, while itself vanished: the city carrying the promise of great development, Breslau at the turn of the century.

Breslau, the bank of Oder and the bridge leading over to the islands

Memorial wall of fallen plaques

The forest of plaques as a protective layer preserved the pre-war German ghost signs for a time, when they would not be beaten off any more, unlike thousands of their more unfortunate companions immediately after the war.

Ärztliche Beratung (für) Alkoholkranke (Medical consultation for alcohol dependents)

Aliens

Autumn

Warren Ellis, Three Pieces for Violin

Inner islands

Honoris causa

Whoever goes in search of a lost time, also knows that the imprints left by plaques removed from walls, their orphaned nails jutting out into the air, and flagpoles that have lost their function, are as much the documents of the history of a building, as the time that is marked when they stopped scraping the ad stickers off from the windows, so that the moss, the sumac, the graffiti can freely breed on the building.


The former museum of minerals and fossils, in what was formerly Breslau, was erected in 1866 in place of the former St. Matthias bastion, as the final building of the university, which was established in the gorgeous Jesuit convent that lined the river Oder. When, after 1945, with the total destruction of the collection the building lost its purpose, and, not incidentally, also changed its country and language, it was subsequently occupied by the pharmaceutical faculty of the new, now Polish university. Judging from the imprints left by the multitude of plaques which were previously to be seen on it, the building may have been too big for the university, and it was shared with a number of other institutions. The imprints of other plaques bear witness to the names, doomed to oblivion, of the neighboring streets. The familiar size and position of the imprints of even more plaques suggests that they probably erected monuments, more lasting than bronze, to events and persons no longer non gratae, over a period of almost fifty years. Small plaques, like flocks of sparrows, serve as a schematic diagram to the wires, pipes and tunnels running under and upon the ghost building, as long as they remain, and as long as it stands. That this will not be long is clear from the most recently placed plaques warning of collapse. When this agony might have begun, I don’t know. The sumac trees have already reached the second floor, but as late as, 2003 they attached yet one last plaque, the only one you can see today.