By Andreas Heimann, DPA
Gdansk (Poland) : When German author Guenther Grass was born in a suburb of this historic city on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea 80 years ago, it was known to most of the world as Danzig.
The port now goes under the Polish name of Gdansk and the district of Langfuhr, where Grass first saw the light of day, has changed its name to Wreszcz.
A great deal has happened in the meantime including a war unleashed by the Germans, which killed 50 million people and destroyed the free city of Danzig. The Old Town was reduced to rubble.
The German population was forced to leave and only a small ethnic minority remained. Thanks to excellent restoration work, the seaport is now as handsome as it was before hostilities began.
Once a free city under the protection of the League of Nations, the Danzig of yore lives on in the novels of Nobel Literature laureate Guenther Grass. Echoes of the heroes of his first and probably best-known novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum)- especially of the diminutive Oskar Matzerath – can be found in the streets of the old Hanseatic city.
Gdansk attracts countless tourists who are fascinated by the places that inspired the work of Germany’s most famous post-war novelist. Their numbers are sure to increase in the run-up to the author’s 80th birthday Oct 16.
Langfuhr or Wreszcz used to be on the outskirts of Gdansk but is now an integral part of the city.
Mieczyslaw Abramowicz, a member of the Guenther Grass Society in Gdansk, has devised a route through Wreszcz, which follows the biographical and literary footsteps of the author. A total of four such tours are planned in various parts of the city.
June saw the inauguration of the first of these literary round trips, one that has been given the name “Eight gifts to mark the 80th birthday of Guenther Grass”.
Each of the “presents” is a place that reminds visitors of the writer or one of his characters – such as the old brewery in Langfuhr or the Church of the Sacred Heart.
Grass was christened here, just like Oskar Matzerath, whose frenetic drum-playing later gets him into a lot of trouble.
Abramowicz is very familiar with all these places, such as the market square in Wreszcz where in The Tin Drum Oskar’s grandmother Anna Koljaiczek peddles her eggs, butter and geese every Tuesday with hot bricks secreted under her skirts in order to keep warm. Not far from here is the site of the former synagogue in Wreszcz, which has since been converted to a school for music.
Most tourists who come to Wreszcz find their way to a street that used to be called Labesweg. Here stands the house where Guenther Grass was born. It was a cramped place and he often alluded to it in his writings.
The street has been renamed Ulica Lelewela, but the appearance of number 13 has hardly changed down the years. It is easy to imagine how uncomfortable it must have been to grow up here.
One of the most memorable passages in The Tin Drum describes how World War II was triggered when Germany attacked Poland. The first shots were aimed at Danzig. They were fired on Sept 1, 1939 by the elderly German battle cruiser Schleswig-Holstein.
A German police unit then stormed the city’s Polish post office building. In The Tin Drum, Oskar’s uncle and his assumed father Jan Bronski were among the “defenders of the Polish Post Office” who were later murdered.
The original building remains standing and parts of it are still used by the postal authority. The other half is a museum dedicated to those dramatic, opening events of the war. Plaques above the main entrance list the names of those who died in the fighting there.
From the Post Office the city’s main attractions are only a few metres away.
It is just a short walk to the church of St. Mary, the largest brick church in the world, the Golden Gate (Zlota Brama), built in 1612-14 and the Long Market (Dlugi Targ) with its famous Neptune fountain. Equally close by is the “Krantor” medieval crane on the Mottlawa river.
The Polish restoration teams made such a good job of restoring the ruins of these ancient buildings in the 1950s and 1960s that they are scarcely distinguishable from the originals. Thanks to them, Gdansk is the most handsome city in Poland next to Wroclaw.