in the head of old Europe

Tim Garton Ash

Warsaw

Across the Oder, down the long monotonous road from Berlin to Poznan —straight as a line in a Prussian ledger — the West German Volkswagen pursues the puttering column of East German Trabants. Occa sionally a car pulls off onto the grass verge, scattering a gaggle of Polish geese, to effect repairs. The Germans. West and East alike, are equipped with astonishing arrays of tools, spare parts, cans, signs, lamps, pumps, gadgets, maps and documents.

Above all, documents. Many prepare for a holiday in Poland as for a military operation. Along the route once chosen by Hitler's armies they drive: 40 years on.

From Frankfurt on the Oder to Warsaw you drive across one immense mosaic of tiny cultivated strips and patches. A still medieval landscape. you observe, thinking of England. In fact this medieval landscape was created in 1945. The land was parcelled out amongst the peasantry by a provisional government desperate for their allegiance. Now over 80 per cent of agricultural land is in private hands, the average size of farm is about five hectars, the farming industry is correspondingly inefficient and the party gnashes its teeth over its os■im former prodigality. You have entered Poland.

'Polnische Wirtschaft' [Polish economy], is an old established term of abuse in the German language. One German tourist was tried, and convicted, by a Polish court just for using these words. The roads, at least. richly merit some abuse: 'You have to have driven along these Polish roads for days on end,' the Nazi author Hanns Johst wrote after a journey through German-occupied Poland in 1939, `to appreciate the death sentence which History has passed on the Polish state.' So of course Hitler, History in an armoured car, was justified in putting the Polish state out of its misery. Johst was not, thank God, entirely right about the Polish state. But Polish roads are still among the worst in Europe. You arrive in Warsaw shaken.

The city is now dominated by two styles, which one might label, in the manner of Osbert Lancaster, Late Stalinist Atrocious and Post-Stalinist Monolithic. The central monument of the Atrocious is the Palace of Science and Culture which towers over Defiled Square, a bad copy of the Empire State Building presented, as the Polish guide-book hastens to add, by the Soviet Union. The other masterpiece of this style is the lower end of Marszalkowska boulevard, where sculptures of ten foot tall Stakhanovitian worker-heroes bulge from the walls. I have seen nothing like it outside the Olympic stadium in Berlin. More widespread. however, are the ranks of tower blocks usually five or six in a row connected just above the ground —like a vast radiator — by a horizontal slab of prestige shops and offices, and surmounted by neon signs in colours as crude as the messages they convey. This is the classical form of PostStalinist Monolithic. You find the same radiator blocks from Leipzig in Central Germany to Constanta on the Black Sea, in Gdansk on the Baltic coast and Durres on the Adriatic. They are to Eastern Europe what the minaret was to the Ottoman Empire.

To Eastern Europe? We use the term all the time about the countries in the Soviet bloc, but glance at a map of Europe, If Europe ends, as a Soviet academician recently assured me it does, at the Urals. then Poland is near its centre. This area used to be called, in a language since defiled by Nazism, Mitteleuropa — central Europe. On Defiled Square there is a signpost giving the distances to various European capitals. Berlin is 518 kilometres away. London 1444, Moscow and Brussels both 1122. Warsaw is as close to Brussels as it is to Moscow, This the men of Brussels seem inclined to forget when they talk of 'Europe'. It was a message of the Pope's visit. Poland is at the heart of old Europe. It needed that astonishing week-long demonstration of the continuity of Slav Christianity to bring the fact to our attention, Slow economic development, relative to the West, has helped to preserve the old and the traditional. The buildings may be new, or reconstructed, but most of the fabric of an old European society has survived unreconstructed. Foreign rule and partition have strengthened the awareness of a 1000-year national history. What is incontrovertibly true of Poland, is undoubtedly true of Hungary and perhaps of Czechoslovakia. It may still be true of Rumania and Bulgaria, although the European traditions become rather thin — once you descend from the Carpathian mountains onto the Wallachian plain. These countries have in common a 19th century kind of nationalism which keeps them often bitterly divided. One encounters in the Comecon countries a hatred between natipns and peoples which would be unthinkable in any of the member states of the EEC. In this sense, too, there is more of old Europe here than in the West. The past is more present. The subject peoples of the Soviet bloc, more than 100,000,000 strong, are the old Europeans. One key to the tragic history of Europe in the 20th century is the simple fact that the boundaries of the state, the nation and the people have rarely coincided — not even in Britain. The British, it has been said, have a sense of themselves as a nation but not as a people. In Poland the two senses are inextricable. When the state tries, as it tirelessly does, to appeal to national sentiment it points out that Poland is now over 98 per cent Polish. The cost at which this has been achieved, the brutal mass expulsion of the Germans after 1945, the persecution of the Jews in 1968, is not mentioned. Ethnic homogeneity is supposed to compensate for the loss of some 70,000 square miles of former Polish lands in the East. Equally characteristic is the propaganda barrage which preceded, accompanied, and no doubt will follow, the 40th anniversary of the German invasion. September 1939 was the collective trauma of the Polish people. It is not surprising that the state wishes to exploit the resultant fears and neuroses for its own advantage. But it doesn't have it easy. For a start there are now two German states. and to one of them. the DDR, the People's Republic of Poland is publicly bound in eternal and fraternal friendship. And then, as every Polish schoolboy knows. It was not only the Germans who invaded in September 1939. It will be interesting to see what is publicly said and written next Monday, 17 September, the day on which, 40 years ago, Russian troops swept in to seize the territory assigned to the Soviet Union in a secret annexe to the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact; territory most of which they retained in 1945 and hold to this day. There is a Polish joke which gets to the heart of the matter. The year is 1944. A Soviet officer is trying to persuade a Pole to join the Soviet forces which have just 'liberated' the Eastern part of Poland. 'Why don't you want to fight? After all, we are fighting against the Nazis, for your freedom I"Comrade.' replies the Pole, 'have you ever seen two dogs fighting over a bone?"Yes, of course.' Did the bone fight too?' I was interested to find out how Poles now regard the two peoples under whom they have suffered so much; and how the embarrassments of this recent past are officially overcome. I discovered an organised hypocrisy. The very names of the Polish cities now in the Soviet Union are taboo; they have become un-cities. I am told that one reason why the Polish authorities objected to the planned BBC exhibition in Warsaw was a photograph taken in Scotland during the second world war. It showed a Polish pilot standing in front of a signpost. What could be objectionable about that? Well, it is bad enough to suggest that there were Poles actually fighting against Hitler from the British Isles. But the unforgivable thing was the signpost, for on it were the names of the most treasured Polish cities. Warsaw, so many miles. and Vilna, so many more. Vilna has a very special place in Polish literature; one of the great national poems, by Adam Mickiewicz, begins with a paean to the city. It now lies in the Soviet Union. It is therefore unmentionable — except, presumably, in poetry classes. What about a place called Katyn? In the Soviet Union, in the neighbourhood of Minsk, the authorities have reconstructed a village, one of many totally destroyed in the Great Patriotic War. It stands as a monument to the victims of German fascism. It is, of course, pure coincidence that this village is called Khatyn. If you're not quite satisfied with that, and have half-an-hour to spare, you might pay a visit to the church of St Antony of Padua, on Senatotska Street in the centre of Warsaw. In the south cloister, low down on the left hand side, there is a simple tablet in memory of a Polish airman 'murdered Katyn 1940', While I contemplated this inscription, I was approached by a sombre faced friar, Communication was difficult. He tried Polish in vain. I tried German, French, Italian; with no effect. Finally, I just pointed to the inscription and the date. There was a moment's silence. A slow fire kindled in his eyes. He took me by the arm and led me down the cloister pointing tb other tablets: `Jan R. Katyn 1940', 'Stefan F. Katyn 1940: Katyn ! Katyn! The Cloister echoed his refrain. Suddenly I realised how we might communicate. 'Magna est veritas,' I said. 'et praevaledit.' He smiled, We had found a common language.

About the Polish resistance, the schoolbooks and the propagandists lie by omission. The role of the home army is grossly under-played; that of the Communist party inflated out of all proportion. A Polish schoolboy would hardly. gather from his schoolbooks that there was an exile government in London, or that the BBC was the life-line of the home army. Indeed he is taught that Britain 'betrayed' Poland in 1939. 'No one believes that,' I was assured by several students. They are well served by Unofficial publications — of which there are an astonishing number.

The once prosperous town of Przemysl lies deep in the backward south-eastern corner of present day Poland, just nine miles from the Soviet border. Its peculiar and sorry distinction consists in having been divided between the Soviet and Nazi occupation forces for the duration of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. The road to Przemysl Will pass a death sentence on your suspension if nothing else. it is the kind of road Where farmers stop for long, philosophical conversations from one verge to the other. Between them, the inevitable geese are fatted for the German market. In one hamlet I saw a make-shift wooden chapel with a rusting corrugated-iron roof, close beside the burnt-out remnants of a stone church razed by who-knows which army: an artless memorial more eloquent than Coventry. Bitterness, a sense of neglect and want, apre the dominant expressions left by rzemysl. This sense of neglect, unpainted ho_ uses, uncared-for gardens, squalid Offices, is an instructive contrast to Warsaw. he disproportionate allocation of resources to one or two major cities, and to Prestige developments within those cities, is a common feature of all the Soviet bloc states. To those who live in the provinces, , is is not the least galling kind of inequal!ty. Real bitterness, however, is reserved for the Russians, and such bitterness here, on the boundary of the fourth partition of Poland. It would not be fair to my informants to repeat what was said to me on this subject. Suffice it to say that the emotions current in Northern Ireland are not more strong.

Although there may be silent prayers offered up in Przemysl on 17 September, wager there will be no public speeches. There will be a resounding silence. What a contrast to the grand symphony of rhetoric about the Nazi occupation! It is a question if this rhetoric has a desired resonance amongst the Polish people. How do they regard the Gentians today? There is no doubt that the German occupation was of a different dimension to the Soviet; it was more indiscriminately, massively, brutal. It lasted longer. It was responsible on some estimates for the death of one sixth of the population. This cannot be forgotten. But the Germans, unlike the Russians, are not the present oppressors.

Furthermore, the official treatment of the subject is rather queer. In the Forties no one doubted that the people responsible for the atrocities were Germans. and the thing responsible was a nation called Germany. There was even a proposal that, whereas all nations had previously been written with a capitalised letter — Great Britain, France, Poland, and so on — Germany should he deprived of its initial capital: germany and the germans would walk small in the Polish language, branded for all eternity with a little `g'. Then, in the Fifties, this thing called Germany was superseded on the maps produced by Moscow by tWo German states, the FRD and the DDR. In Polish schoolbooks a new word appeared: 110lerowey, the Hitlerpeople. It was the Hitlerpeople who poured across the Oder, the Hitlerpeople who destroyed the old town in Warsaw, the Hitlerpeople who erected Auschwitz. Now the point about the Hitlerpeople is that they all ended up in the Federal Republic; not „merely some — all. Heresy it would be to suggest that so much as one, just one. little Hitlerperson survived in the German Democratic Republic. No, the inhabitants of the DDR are the good Germans, stalwart anti-fascists to a man. So it is written, and so it is that when you enter Auschwitz past the ice-cream stalls under the rusting gates you find the barracks converted into a series of pavillions for the 'victim' nations: Austria; Belgium; Denmark; Hungary; the Soviet Union — with every justification; not Israel. of course, that would scarcely be in tune with Soviet foreign policy, although there is a pavillion to the 'martyrology of Jews'; Yugoslavia; Czechoslovakia; Bulgaria; and right at the end you find a little pavillion for the German Democratic Republic. The GDR, it seems, was a 'victim' of Nazi Germany, At the last memorial service in Auschwitz. so a Polish friend told me, the representatives of the GDR stood there as if they had no more to do with it than representatives of Uganda or Mozambique. Auschwitz, they imply, is West Germany's business. I have dwelt on this emetic hypocrisy not least because it goes some way to explaining current Polish attitudes to the Germans. The curious fact is that the West Germans are welcome where the East Germans are not. The Polish abbreviation of the Federal and Democratic Republics are RF and NR respectively. Poles explain that these letters stand for `Richtig Feine' and 'Nicht Richtige'. What is Not Right about the East Germans and Real Fine about the West? The treatment of the past is the first thing that ordinary Poles often mention. Then the East Germans have the grave disadvantage of being not merely German but Communist to boot. Put it another way; the West Germans are welcomed for their Westernness rather than their Germanness. This means their Mercedes and their Deutschemarks. Yet it also means their greater tolerance and spirit of reconciliation. The last few years have seen increasing numbers of West Germans returning to visit their birth places in Silesia, whence they were violently expelled in 1945. Some times they stay for weeks with a Polish family, living in the houses that were once their own homes. Here is none of the bitterness of Przemysl. Finally, the West Germans have the great advantage of being unceasingly denounced by the Polish government. The Polish people seem to have adopted Chinese principles that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and in government propaganda West Germany is public enemy number one.

Of course the Polish government does not practice what it preaches. In practice, as Mr Schmidt's recent meeting with Mr Gierek showed, the regime is eager for co-operation with the Federal Republic. The FRD is already their biggest Western trading partner. It is generous with credits to a state in a chronic financial crisis (Poland's indebtedness to the West is officially acknowledged to be some 15 billion dollars). In return, Mr Gierek offers exit permits for ethnic Germans. It is a striking illustration of the presence of the past in German-Polish relations that Mr Schmidt's government is prepared, in effect. to pay hard currency for these pieces of paper. According to West German sources, some 190,000 Germans have been granted permission to leave Poland since the Warsaw treaty in 1970. Mr Gierek has now agreed in principle to continued German emigration after the agreement he made with Mr Schmidt in Helsinki in 1975 expires. The problem is: who is a 'German"? Estimates of the numbers of Germans living in the present territory of Poland range from 50,000 to 1,000,000.

Many ethnic Germans have no wish to leave Poland. Many Polish citizens. on the other hand, who have no claims to Germanity would give a lot to live in West Germany. 'Tis all a muddle. But an emotive muddle. It is widely held that Mr Gierek gave his agreement with one eye on the forthcoming German elections. If he had not done so, then Franz Josef Strauss would have made electoral capital out of the issue. Mr Gierek would rather work with Mr Schmidt. Yet it is striking how muted have been the criticisms of Strauss's candidature for the West German Chancellorship, in Poland and throughout the Soviet bloc. Strauss is, after all, the representative of German nationalism in current German politics, a man who still speaks of a Germany with 'the frontiers of 1937'. But Moscow has made it clear that it will work with Strauss, and Gierek is pragmatist enough to realise that he cannot do otherwise. If Strauss does become Chancellor in 1981, then the gulf between nationalist rhetoric and co-operationist real. politik will be as wide in Bonn as it already is in Warsaw.

Does this matter? Is not nationalism in Europe Anyway a 19th-century phenomenon, a thing of the past? Why spend so much time in digging over mass graves? Because the Poles themselves do, is the short answer to that question. Mr Gierek is well aware that nationalism is a present and incalculable force in Polish politics. He and the public know what all schoolchildren learn: those to whom violence is done, do violence in return. The tradition of national uprising, the romantic gesture of magnificent doomed resisters, runs like a red and white thread through Polish history — from the Kosciuszko rising in 1794 to the Warsaw uprising 150 years later. Very sober observers consider that if there were to be a Warsaw spring, and the Soviet tanks were to roll into Warsaw as they rolled into Prague, the Polish people, and what is more the Polish army, would once again resist. Nationalism is a well-spring of opposition. The Pope's visit proved, to those who ever doubted, that the unity of Church and nation is organic and profound. It is no accident that the demonstration of the traditionalist, nationalist opposition (the ROTCO group), on the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of war, marched from a religious service to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Victory Square. A new political party was proclaimed before the tomb. The' 'unknown soldier' who lies in the tomb is in fact, as the ROTCO leaders surely know, a Pole who fell at Lwow in 1920: fighting against the Russians. The liberal opposition, on the other hand„ insist that it must never come to that again. I shall discuss next week the lessons which they believe they have learned from the Polish past.

This is a first of a series of six articles, following a journey through the Soviet bloc countries. Next week, in Cracow.