EUROPE
A Cargo of Questions 1992
Poland
SZCZECIN
Szczecin, one-time capital of the Duchy of Pomerania, was captured by the Swedes in 1630. They sold it to Prussia for two million thalers in 1720 and until 1945 it was part of Germany. After the first partition of Poland in 1772, this city on the Odra River became the main port of Berlin, to which it was connected by canal. Today this is a Polish city, just across the border with Germany. After 1945, the millions of Germans of Pomerania, East Prussia and Silesia were evicted from this land. Millions of Poles from the L'vov region of the Ukraine were settled in the vacant towns and countryside.
As a state, Poland was wiped right off the map of Europe from 1795 until 1918. Poland endured a century of enforced Russification and germanisation.
So what makes a nation? A language? A culture? A religion?
Is solidarity identity?
Is resistance identity?
Is a sovereign state a state or a nation?
Or are we just confused?
Is politics searching for identity, or the exploitation of the crisis of identity?
Information Wrap
Deutsche Grenzchuster griffen in den ersten sechs Monaten dieses Jahres 18,000 illegal eingereiste Auslander auf, fast zweieinhalb Mal so viele wie im gleichen Zeitraum des Vorjahres.In the first six months of this year, German border police arrested 18,000 illegal immigrants, almost two and a half times as many as in the same period of the previous year.WELT AM SONNTAG, 16 August, 1992.
EUROPE
A Cargo of Questions 2017
To every place there belongs a story . . .
Szczecin is a sister city of Kingston upon Hull and Lübeck!
Szczecin is a city close to the border with Germany, but as with many Polish cities in the western half of the country, Szczecin was once known by its German name, because it was before 1945 the German city of Stettin.
The border between Poland and Germany was defined along the course of two rivers, the Oder and the Neisse, referred to as the Oder-Neisse line,and is essentially an arbitrary and political border drawn up and agreed at the Potsdam Conference (17 July to 2 August 1945). See Drawing a lineThe physical geography suggesting this border involves two rivers, the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers.The aftermath of World War in Europe included elements that are a strange mix of both punishment and re-construction of Germany. For the Soviet Union this was a sweet revenge. The new border meant a huge part of German territory became Poland. At the same time the eastern part of Poland, the Polish Ukraine, had been taken by the USSR.The territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II were very extensive. In 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Poland's borders were redrawn in accordance with the decisions made first by the Allies at the Tehran Conference of 1943 where the Soviet Union demanded the recognition of the military outcome of the top secret Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 of which the West was unaware.The same Soviet stance was repeated by Josef Stalin again at the Yalta Conference with Roosevelt and Churchill in February 1945, but a lot more forcefully in the face of the looming German defeat.The new borders were ratified at the Potsdam Conference of August 1945 exactly as proposed by Stalin who already controlled the whole of East-central Europe.At the time of the making the LODE cargo in 1992 the border between Poland and Germany was settled, but only agreed and ratified within recent months!The German–Polish Border Treaty of 1990 finally settled the issue of the Polish–German border, which in terms of international law had been pending since 1945.The treaty was signed by the foreign ministers of Poland and Germany, Krzysztof Skubiszewski and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, on 14 November 1990 in Warsaw, ratified by the Polish Sejm on 26 November 1991 and the German Bundestag on 16 December 1991, and entered into force with the exchange of the instruments of ratification on 16 January 1992.
The result of this historic moment was that the borders of Poland had returned to the boundaries of the first political and state entity of Poland of a thousand years ago!
The LODE compass was created close to the border with Germany and overlooking the city of Szczecin. In 1992 this place and part of the LODE-zone was significant in that it was beyond the borders of the European Community, as the European Union was known then. To this place the stories that wrap the LODE cargo of questions are stories from within Polish borders. However, Polish borders have come and gone over the centuries, in such strange and radical ways, that Poland as a country, as a nation, as a concept, as a culture and a language is profoundly informing in a search for Europa.
This physical geography, these territories are also "beyond" the regions of shared historical identity for the settled constituencies in the Liverpool-Hull LODE-zone, but for migrant communities it is a living "presence", albeit that these territories are "elsewhere"!
On the centenary of the country’s independence Poles should be unified. Yet behind the flag-waving lies a divided and unhappy country
However, the historical experience of a European state that has, it turns out, only a loose association with a particular territory, is what the unfolding story of Poland inevitably reveals, and therefore challenges many of the basic notions many modern Europeans hold, that; a particular area of the surface of our planet, bounded by geographic or political boundaries, and that such a territory, is potentially a "country", and that "countries" are the basis for "nations", or part of a larger nation state, union, federation or confederation.
Up until 1945 Stettin had been a city with a "German history"!In the second half of the 12th century, a group of German tradesmen ("multus populus Teutonicorum" from various parts of the Holy Roman Empire) settled in the city around St. Jacob's Church, which was donated in 1180 by Beringer, a trader from Bamberg, and consecrated in 1187.
Hohenkrug (now in Szczecin-Struga) was the first village in the Duchy of Pomerania that was clearly recorded as German (villa teutonicorum) in 1173.
Ostsiedlung, literally east settling, and in English called the German eastward expansion, accelerated in Pomerania during the 13th century. Duke Barnim I of Pomerania granted Stettin a local government charter in 1237, separating the German settlement from the Slavic community settled around the St. Nicholas Church in the neighbourhood of Kessin (Polish: Chyzin). In the charter, the Slavs were put under German jurisdiction.
On 2 December 1261, Barnim I allowed Jewish settlement in Stettin in accordance with the Magdeburg law, in a privilege renewed in 1308 and 1371. The Jewish Jordan family was granted citizenship in 1325, but none of the 22 Jews allowed to settle in the duchy in 1481 lived in the city, and in 1492, all Jews in the duchy were ordered to convert to Christianity or leave – this order remained effective throughout the rest of the Griffin era.
The anti-Slavic policies of German merchants and craftsmen intensified in this period, resulting in measures such as bans on people of Slavic descent joining craft guilds, a doubling of customs tax for Slavic merchants, and bans against public usage of their native language.
The more prosperous Slavic citizens were forcibly stripped of their possessions, which were then handed over to Germans. In 1514 the guild of tailors added a Wendenparagraph to its statutes, banning Slavs.
It is not the land that is the foundation of a nation, be it fatherland or motherland, it is formed out of a people, feelings, shared language and belief systems, ideas and identity!
Szczecin, as mentioned above, was, until 1945, the German city of Stettin, a major Prussian port city serving the needs of Berlin, and with German industries, including shipbuilding, chemical and food industries, and machinery construction. From the 1840's, Stettin became connected to the major German and Pomeranian cities by railways, and a navigable connection to the Bay of Pomerania was enhanced by the construction of the Kaiserfahrt (now Piast) canal. The city was also a scientific centre.
Before Stettin became part of the German Empire in 1871, with the unification of Germany, the city had a chequered history when conflicts between the German states, Denmark and Sweden occurred. In 1570, a congress was held at Stettin ending the Northern Seven Years' War, and whilst Stettin had tended to side with Denmark, and Stralsund tended toward Sweden – generally, the Duchy of Pomerania tried to maintain neutrality.
Stettin was one of only three places allowed to coin money in the Upper Saxon Circle of the Holy Roman Empire, the other two places being Leipzig and Berlin. However, before the Thirty Years' War reached Pomerania, the city, as well as the entire duchy, declined economically due to the decrease in the importance of the Hanseatic League economically and politically.
The Thirty Years' War had its impact upon the whole region and resulted in several partitions of the Duchy of Pomerania, and exemplifiying the fluid political situation in Europe when it comes to determining, and settling, political, national and cultural geographical domains throughout all European history.
Stettin and Pomerania. Empires, borderlands, partitions and The Thirty Years' War Have Christian teachings shaped European values and conservative politics?
A new 'civil war'?
The right to worship freely was a basic right given to all inhabitants of the independent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout the 15th and early 16th century.
Szczecin is now a Polish city, essentially separate from the fact of a physical geographic reality, and because it is inhabited by people who know they are Poles, and that they live in a country, a nation, that is Poland, even though they follow generations of the displacement of populations across this part of Europe!
December 1970: When Polish workers’ revolt threatened Stalinist rule!
On the website In Defence of Marxism, published by International Marxist Tendency, a recent page marks the anniversary of the December 1970 Polish protests – or ‘Black Thursday’ – when the workers of the coastal cities of Gdańsk, Szczecin, Gdynia and Elbląg rose in protest against a huge increase in the prices of basic foods, and were harshly repressed by the People’s Army.
The cost of striking against price rises was high: 46 workers and students were killed and thousands injured in the stand-offs, just a week before Christmas.
European commission tells member states that Polish government has put fundamental democratic values at risk
Widespread protests demonstrate the limits of Polish leaders’ radical, right-wing agenda.
It’s not just Trump. Authoritarian populism is rising across the West. Here’s why.
We’re seeing a deep and strong cultural backlash against changes in social values
Here’s why. Populist authoritarianism can best be explained as a cultural backlash in Western societies against long-term, ongoing social change.
Over recent decades, the World Values Survey shows that Western societies have been getting gradually more liberal on many social issues, especially among the younger generation and well-educated middle class. That includes egalitarian attitudes toward sex roles, tolerance of fluid gender identities and LGBT rights, support for same-sex marriage, tolerance of diversity, and more secular values, as well as what political scientists call emancipative values, engagement in directly assertive forms of democratic participation, and cosmopolitan support for agencies of global governance.
This long-term generational shift threatens many traditionalists’ cultural values. Less educated and older citizens fear becoming marginalized and left behind within their own countries.
What about the attitudes of young people?
Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire; but had previously been part of the independent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
On 3 August 1924, Conrad died at his house, Oswalds, in Bishopsbourne, Kent, England, a British citizen. He was buried at Canterbury, under a misspelled version of his original Polish name. On his gravestone are lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene which he had chosen as the epigraph to his last complete novel, The Rover:
Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, doth greatly please
"Ukraine" means "Borderland"! Crossing borders! Making a life abroad!
The borders of Europe
In 1992 when the LODE project was first realized, the eastern border of the European Economic Community along the LODE-Line and LODE-zone was a few miles west of Szczecin.
Fish over the frontier! Part of the new eastern border of the European Union! Land art!
Future locations for the creation of a set of new compasses for a LODE cargo point in a direction along the LODE-Line towards the Ukraine and beyond, beyond the border with Poland and within the borders of the present nation state of the Ukraine.
To every place there belongs a story . . .
This blog-post is a matrix that originates first in the context of an artistic activity that relates to this place, Szczecin, and then connections multiply through processes of association, suggesting links, articulations and juxtapositions that the contemporary information wrap affords us, in a particular and contemporary type of consciousness, where the "loop" or "ricorso" helps the zig zagging necessary to see what is going on.
That's just the way it is . . . but don't you believe them . . .
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