| Lancette Arts Journal Founded in 2000 |
Book Reviews From our Archives |
March 2005 |
Death in Danzig
by Stefan Chwin, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm, Harcourt, $34.00, hardcover, 260 pages, ISBN
0-15100805-1
By Alidë Kohlhaas
When we think of books written about Danzig (Gdansk in Polish) to mind comes German writer Günter Grass, who has written a whole litany of books about the place where he was born in 1927, but had to leave in 1945. Grass is a fabulist whose tales have a dark, satirical tone. They often lack compassion and never really tackle the problems that he supposedly wants to address, and one senses that he has a 'chip on his shoulder'. Enter Stefan Chwin, who was born in Gdansk in 1949, a very different city from the Danzig Grass once knew and has tried to memorialize in its pre-1945 era. Chwin's picture of the city and the people who once lived there and who live there now is of a gentler, and more compassionate kind. There is no cruel or political satire in his book, Death in Danzig.
Chwin writes like an Impressionist painter paints, in layers. The lower layers keep shimmering through the upper ones. His Danzig only slowly fades into Gdansk. As the city is deserted by the German population fleeing westward, ahead of the approaching Russians, the "free city" on the Baltic coast becomes inhabited by Polish refugees. These Poles have been made homeless by the Russians, who took over the eastern part of their country. Many have also escaped from the uprising in Warsaw and now find refuge in a city that its German population knows it cannot hold.
It takes many layers — or years—before the old city, despite having been heavily bombed, finally disappears into being Gdansk. Chwin allows the transition so gradually that one realizes he paints the truth without bitterness. He has no axe . . .
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