Dispatch from Olsztyn: My Two Towers

By Marcel Krueger:

In 2019, I was selected as the official writer in residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Eastern Europe and lived there for six months. I wrote about my experiences on the official writer in residence blog www.stadtschreiber-allenstein.de in German, Englisch and Polish (thanks to my official translator a.k.a. my Polish voice Barbara Sapala) and also for the Elsewhere Journal. This November was the first time since the start of the pandemic that I made it back to the city. 

It is cold as I arrive under a low-hanging November sky. As I alight at Olsztyn Zachodni, the former Westbahnhof of Allenstein, the light over the city resembles dusk, despite the fact that it is 2pm. This is the first time since February 2020 that I'm visiting the capital of the Polish voivodeship Warmia-Masuria. But I know my way around, just like my family knew their way around before me. Up the road from the station is the red-brick Jerusalem Chapel from the 16th century, and a cross commemorating the 1866 cholera epidemic is set in front of the entrance. Opposite the chapel is the steep Królowej Jadwigi – Queen Jadwiga Street. Until 1945, this was Pfeifferstrasse, named after now-drained Pfeiffer Lake at its bottom. House number 10 was built in the late 1920s, an unassuming yellow building with two floors. This used to be the house and office of my grand-aunt Ottilie and her husband Emil Pomaska, who ran a haulage firm here. At this house in 1940 my grand-uncle Franz Nerowski, a spy for Poland, was arrested by the Gestapo and led away to incarceration and execution. But I’m not going there today, and instead shoulder my bag and set off down the street on the other side of the station, towards the city park and the ever-rushing Łyna river, the large red-brick castle from 1353 looming over it, and to my favourite building in Olsztyn: the Wysoka Brama.

What makes us haunt a place? A sense of familiarity, of knowing our way around? An extended network and community, the knowledge that we have friends in a place far from home? Or that a place is providing us with inspiration, with food for thought, and allows us to discover new aspects of it - and ourselves - every time we visit?

All of the above is true for me in the case of Olsztyn, but maybe the strongest allure of the city for me is the fact that I am forever drawn to places with multiple identities, where simple nationalistic stories and touristic whitewashing are absent. The port city of Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland, where I live, is also a border town, called "El Paso" during the conflict in Northern Ireland as it had strong Republican ties and the IRA used it as an R&R area, but for centuries before that it was the last outpost of English might in Ireland, protecting the Pale from the Ulster Irish. Its colloquialisms and idioms are mostly of English nature, brought here by migrants from England who came to work as part of the military or for the administration. On my street in Dundalk is a reminder of that, so-called Seatown Castle, which is actually the tower of a Franciscan abbey founded around 1240. The abbey was ransacked by invading Scots in 1315, and the majority of what remained of its buildings were destroyed in the early 17th century. The grey-green, lichen-covered tower of Seatown Castle is the only remnant of that abbey, today looked after by Dundalk City Council. Whenever I want to be reminded of the fractures and fault lines of Irish history, I take my tea mug to my back garden and look at it. 

Just like in Dundalk, I have a tower in Olsztyn. During my time as writer-in-residence I lived in an apartment in the old town, and from my living room window I was greeted every morning by the red brick gate of the city. The Wysoka Brama or Hohes Tor or High Gate is the only remaining gate of the three medieval city gates, originally built in 1378 and brought into its current form in the 15th century. In 1788, it became an armory, in 1858 it was converted into a prison, and in 1898 became a police station. Until 1960, one of the tram lines of the city passed through it. Today it also has a glass mosaic of the Mother of God facing the old town, given to Olsztyn by pope John Paul II when he visited in 1991. And just like Seatown Castle, it has lost its original purpose - there is no city wall any more, and you can even walk around the gate to get into the old town. 

But like Seatown Castle, for me it represents the many layers of history here: Olsztyn was founded by Teutonic Knights in 1349 on the hills above the Łyna, became part of the Kingdom of Poland in 1466 and, after the first partition in 1772, part of Prussia. The French defeated a Russian army in and around the city in 1807 and Napoleon paid a visit to the old town, and in 1871 it became part of the German Reich and the province of East Prussia. It was home to a multicultural community of Germans, Poles, Jews, Warmians, one with its minor conflicts of course, but one where the divisions of nationalism were maybe not as acutely felt as elsewhere. That all changed with the Nazis in 1933, and ended with a half-destroyed city and the flight and expulsion of many Germans in 1945. Today however, the city is a pleasant place, and I feel a sense of familiarity and, yes, joy, as I walk to my holiday apartment that coincidentally also has a view of the High Gate. I feel that Olsztyn, a place that was a military and working class city when it was Allenstein in East Prussia, a place that did not need to flaunt its unique selling points and never pretended to be more important or better than, say, Danzig or Königsberg, is again an administrative and working class city today, one that does not need to flaunt its unique selling points and never pretends to be more important or better than, say, Gdańsk or Warsaw.  

In my garden in Dundalk, I can smell the ocean and feel the weather coming in from the Irish Sea. The fact that I live on an island is then often extremely clear to me, and with it comes a sense of security and detachment, a feeling that I am in a good place that is somewhat benevolent towards me and keeps the worries of the world at bay, for the moment. Dundalk lies on an old flood plain and will not fare well in the future floods of the climate catastrophe that seem to be almost certain at this moment. From my holiday apartment in Olsztyn, I looked out at the Wysoka Brama on the night of my arrival. It was illuminated by spotlights, but the cold fog of November crawled in over the old town down from the Łyna and diluted the brightness, made the rest of the world seem detached from the place I was in. There and then, in the old medieval town on a hill and in the shadow of its tower, I felt the same insularity as I do in my old town by the sea in Ireland. I was safe up there, for the moment. 

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

A Year Walk

We return in 2020 with a piece from our books editor Marcel Krueger, on a walk in Ireland to reflect on the year gone and what is to come:

Setting sail
From a crushed rooftop
Fathoms deep
Shallow as a raindrop
- Down, The Tides

On one of my last days in Ireland in 2019 I set out for the mountains. I park my car in the car park of the Lumpers Pub in Ravensdale north of Dundalk, in the foothills of the Cooley Mountains, and set out on the Táin Way, the 40-kilometer looped trail across the Carlingford peninsula. But I'm not trying to do the whole loop in a day, or even half of it. This will be my final walk in Ireland this year, before I travel to the continent to celebrate Christmas with my family in Germany and France, and I want to walk up one of the hills that I've always bypassed on previous walks here, the 370-metre The Castle. It had been raining all night, but when I set out there's only a low-hanging, dirty-grey overcast sky and a few raindrops coming down. I walk up the small road that leads from the car park to the trailhead, past suburban houses decorated with Santas and sleighs and yapping dogs in the garden.

I first encountered the Swedish folk tradition of Årsgång, or year walk, playing an atmospheric game with the same title on my phone. Typically a year walk had to be done on Christmas or New Year’s Eve, during the night. Almost all regional variations involve having to spend a full day inside a dark room, not allowed to talk to anyone or eat or drink. At the stroke of midnight one should head for church. If the year walker managed to follow certain instructions and to solve particular challenges (such as potential encounters with supernatural beings), they would catch glimpses of what would happen the following year. I always tried to do a proper year walk myself on New Year's Eve but have failed so far, and so I guess my short excursion into the Cooleys today will have to do as substitute. It will give me ample time to reflect on both past and future, and encounter enough things in my life that might represent a challenge. 

I travelled a lot in 2019, maybe too much. I drank many beers and ate cheap airport food and put on a good few kilos, and I can feel it as I huff and puff up the steep trail that leads to the forest halfway up the hill. But due to the weather I have the trail almost for myself, and after half an hour I settle into my own rhythm and am promptly rewarded with a fine view past Drumisnagh and Trumpet Hill west of me towards Dundalk Bay and Dundalk town itself. The cloud cover is still a good hundred meters out and there is the sun glittering on the Irish Sea, so I can make out the spidery Dundalk pile lighthouse from 1853 in the bay, the curve of land at Soldier's Point on the Navvy Bank, one of my favourite locations in town, and St. Helena's Park just around from where I live. It feels good to have the sea and the mountains close. 

I'm writing professionally (as in somebody paying me to publish my words on paper or the internet) for ten years now, but 2019 was the first time I felt that my writing might make a tiny impact. People have started booking me and my words as part of academic conferences, readings and workshops, and it seems, unbelievable for self-taught history nerd like myself, that my knowledge is worth something, that I somehow can assist others in sharpening their understanding of the world. I published a magazine featuring many amazing writers living on the island of Ireland, gave a reading at the Leipzig book fair for the first time in my life, spent five months as the official writer-in-residence of wonderful Olsztyn in northern Poland, gave talks and readings in crumbling Prussian palaces from the 17th century, in a 16th-century water castle in Wroclaw, an academy set up for cultural dialogue between the Baltic states just 10 kilometres south of the Danish border, Northern Ireland's best independent bookshop, the modern library in the city of Gelsenkirchen, and in the birthplace of legendary German writer Wolfgang Koeppen in the lovely seaside town of Greifswald. It was a good year.

Like always when out walking alone, I feel a certain dread. I tried, but I can never fully and innocently seem to enjoy scenery just for itself - my imagination is always in the way. I see hidden gathering places of Neonazis in rural Brandenburg, skeletons of previous wanderers in the gorges of Crete where sheep have died, phantoms in the Irish mist. I enjoy these moments of childish dread up to a point, but then on the other hand it seems I have read too much W.G. Sebald to look at a nice place without seeing tragedy and horror. 

It is the same today. The higher I get, the more the rain clouds close in and the dark patches of conifer forest on both sides of the sandy trail seem ominous and menacing. Maybe, because of this dread that is the constant companion of many walks, it also feels as if the scales will soon need to tilt, that my personal triumphs need to be balanced by tragedy. In recent years I have the feeling that more and more misery heaped upon the world by old white men, and I'm often at loss at what to do about this. I go out and as often as possible tell my small stories about my grandmother and my granduncle and how Fascism and totalitarianism ruined their lives and killed them, and I try to write as much as possible against the rising tide of ignorance and hate that encroaches on us all, but I don't know if that is enough anymore. I often feel like the proverbial 'small chubby Berliner who tries to stop a catastrophe with a typewriter', as Erich Kästner called my favourite Weimar Berlin writer Kurt Tucholsky, a dedicated anti-fascist, once. I'm a small chubby bloke on a hill in Ireland and equally helpless. 

My dismal contemplations are interrupted by a jolly group of hikers in all colours of the Goretex range coming down the hill towards me, who must have made their way from the other side of the peninsula and covered 25 kilometres this morning - compared to my measly ten up and down a hill. They cheerfully wish me good morning and ramble on, maybe towards a late breakfast or an early pint. The scales tilt up again.

The friendliness of the locals also reminds me of the beauty of living in a small, working-class town like Dundalk; that it does not ask anything of you, but if you immerse yourself in the community it provides a lot, a lot more than other, more urban or 'sexier' places. And maybe through my travels this year this has become even clearer to me. The place I live in has all I need. I have a house with a fireplace and a cat and a room for all my books and plastic skulls and pictures of rusting ships, a lovely independent bookshop down the road of which the owner is a friend of mine (everyone needs bookseller and librarian friends is all I'm saying), all the pubs in the world, the harbour and the sea two streets down the road and a peninsula with a mountainous spine to walk in. And it provides you with a place to come back to and be yourself.    

I emerge from the treeline, cross a fence and enter the clouds. The wind is strong here, just 300 meters above the sea, and I have to put on gloves and set up my hood. I can only see a few meters ahead, the trail, the heather and the bog all shrouded in grey. I stomp on, trying to find the parting in the ways that will lead me up to the summit of The Castle. As if foreseeing the bad weather today, it is indicated by a series of stakes leading up the hill. But to me, even though I know that these have been put there to aid walkers, they seem more ominous and eery, Irish totem poles. 

The destination of my year walk is not a church, but a wide grassy summit with a small cairn. I look around and see nothing but brown-green bog a few feet in each direction and hear nothing but the wind screaming into my face and battering my waterproofs. I look right into it, in the direction of the unseen sea, and once more realise that I like living in the North as it reminds me of mortality. 

In January 2019, across Carlingford Lough in the Mourne Moutains, just a few meters higher then I am now, Robbie Robinson and Sean Byrne die. In separate accidents, both lose their way due to clouds and fog and are killed by exposure in the ice-cold winds howling down the mountains. And there it is, another reminder that death comes for all of us, and because of this we all should work together, for abstract concepts like peace and love and keeping the planet alive, but also for keeping the border in Ireland open and the communities in the north and the south linked to each other, and to help people in need anywhere we come across them, on the streets of Dublin or the beaches of Greece. In my life, and especially 2019, I made the experience that unity is always better than fragmentation, that solidarity is always better than ostracism. But standing on the hill in Ireland alone, looking into the wind, it seems that many people are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, and eaten up by nothing with the hope to take their cheap wealth and gadgets with them when they die, to paraphrase Charles Bukowski.   

Before I walk back, down the hill to my car and back to the old crooked house in Dundalk where I have to pack my bag for my travels, I lean into to the wind and look down the surprisingly steep seaward flank of The Castle, which drops away into nothingness. The clouds obscure everything here, both the bottom of the valley and the future.  

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and the upcoming Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Dispatches from Olsztyn: Olga Tokarczuk’s Chair

By Marcel Krueger:

This year Marcel has been selected as the official writer in residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Eastern Europe and until September he is living there, observing, taking part in cultural activities organised by local partners the City of Olsztyn and the Borussia Foundation, and of course writing about the city. You can find regular posts over on the official writer in residence blog in German, Englisch and Polish (thanks to his official translator a.k.a. Marcel’s Polish voice Barbara Sapala). But he has also been writing some  irregular dispatches from Olsztyn for the Elsewhere blog: 

In an interview with the Calvert Journal last year, writer Olga Tokarczuk expressed her shock about the age of the furniture that she discovered on an old Scottish estate where she stayed for a writers’ scholarship, some of it dating back as far as the 16th century. “We don’t have such a stable reality,” she said. “Poland is in the central corridor of Europe.”

This is a notion I concur with, living on an island. While Ireland has and had its fair share of violence and tragedy over the centuries, it often feels as if more objects and places have been given longevity, by fate or coincidence. On my street in Dundalk I have the bell tower of a Franciscan abbey built around 1240 AD, and the last time the building has seen targeted violence was around 1315 AD, when invading Scots under Edward the Bruce burned it and killed 23 monks. There are Victorian post boxes strewn around town that were erected in the second half of the 19th century and are still in use, the royal insignia clearly visible under the Republican green paint applied after 1921. There are plenty of hundred-year old tables and chairs still in use in households across town that are not in a museum.

It is different in Olsztyn. Here the tragedies and invasions feel more numerous, the past more unstable. Last week I walked around Park Jakubowo with radio journalist Alicja Kulik, and we talked about melancholy and what Olga Tokarczuk said in the interview. For me, the park provided an almost perfect cross section of the horrors that have visited the city, and I didn’t have to go back to the Middle Ages to find them. The park was first established in 1862 as part of the expansion of Olsztyn from a small provincial town to one of the main cities of the area thanks to Prussian railways and army barracks, and over the following years saw the erection of a panorama restaurant, a dance hall and tennis courts. 

Today it is a pleasant place to wander around in, with a small lake, playgrounds and tall trees providing shade in summer – the oldest tree here is an oak tree, 28 metres high. But even here the currents of history are visible, mostly through the buildings and memorials. The large green area across the street from the park used to be a Protestant cemetery that was closed in 1973 and turned into a park. The small neo-Gothic red-brick chapel that stands there was built in 1904 and is today the Orthodox Church of the Protection of the Mother of God. Right next to it is the memorial to Bogumił Linka (1865 -1920), a social and nationalist activist who campaigned for Warmia and Olsztyn to join the newly created Poland at the Versailles conference, and who was killed by a German militia during the 1920 East Prussian plebiscite. The memorial was created by sculptress Balbina Świtycz-Widacka and erected in 1975. Maybe fittingly so: back across the road, in 1928 the citizens of Allenstein erected the so-called Abstimmungsdenkmal, the memorial to the result of the plebiscite where the majority of the inhabitants voted for remaining in East Prussia and the German Reich. Together with a similar memorial in Malbork and the Tannenbergdenkmal Olsztynek it was one of the main nationalist memorial sites in East Prussia.

Across the street from it is a remainder of what extreme nationalism can result in: here lie those killed by the Nazis. Some of the people buried here were patients of the sanatorium in Kortau (location of the university today) and killed by the Nazis as part of their euthanasia programme, some were killed in sub-camps of the concentration camps across East Prussia. The remaining patients, staff and refugees that had gathered at Kortau were massacred in 1945 by the Red Army.

Back in the park, the Abstimmungsdenkmal was replaced by another memorial in 1972, a monumental slab commemorating the ‚Warmian-Masurian Heroes of the National and Social Liberation‘ created by local sculptor Bolesław Marschall. Down the road from the park, at the end of nearby Sybiraków street is a memorial to those Poles taken to work at the GULAG and forced labour camps all across the Soviet Union. It lists the places the people were sent to, among them Sverdlovsk in the Urals (Yekaterinburg today), where my granny was also sent from her farm on the outskirts of town.

All these tragedies and horrors, and some people always trying to claim them for political gains. But I think there is a better use for the past and what it leaves from the people that were here before us. As Alicja and I continued on through the park, we walked past one of the playgrounds were a group of young children were playing noisily, the sun was shining and the park was beautiful. We stopped next to what looked like an old unused fountain, a stone bowl now empty of water but still looking beautiful. Alicja said that ‘maybe this is our version of Olga Tokarczuk’s chair’, and I think she was right. This then, perhaps, is a better way to look at the past. Regardless of who created it, we should be able to share the good things, without jealousy and hatred. A German or Jewish or Polish or Russian sculptor might have created the fountain, but I don’t know if this is relevant. It’s a beautiful old fountain in a nice park.

Dispatches from Olsztyn: The House that Erich Built

Photo: Marcel Krueger

By Marcel Krueger:

This year, I have been selected as the official writer in residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Eastern Europe and until September I will be living here, observing, taking part in cultural activities organised by my local partners the City of Olsztyn and the Borussia Foundation, and of course writing about the city. You can find regular posts over on the official writer in residence blog www.stadtschreiber-allenstein.de in German, Englisch and Polish (thanks to my official translator a.k.a. my Polish voice Barbara Sapala). But I will also write irregular dispatches from Olsztyn for the Elsewhere blog.

Erich Mendelsohn had a skewed relationship with his hometown. The man who would become one of Germany's most prominent inter-war architects was born into a Jewish family in Allenstein in 1887, as the fifth of six children of Emma Esther (née Jaruslawsky), a hatmaker and David Mendelsohn, a shopkeeper. The family home was situated in the old town (just one bloc down from where I'm living at the moment), and Erich went to the nearby humanist gymnasium. But from there he went to Berlin and Munich to train as a merchant and study national economics, but soon switched allegiance to architecture and began studying his profession at the Technical University of Munich in 1906.

Photo: Erich Mendelsohn, cropped from an image donated by National Library of Israel to Wikimedia Commons and used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

From there, he went on to a stellar career as one of the most visionary architects of Germany: first working as an independent architect in Munich, then after the First World War opening his practise in Berlin which employed 40 people thanks to such iconic buildings like the Einstein Tower in Potsdam, the Schaubühne in Berlin or the hat factory in Luckenwalde. He even designed whole neighbourhoods like the WOGA-complex at Lehniner Platz in Berlin, and together with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius founded the influential progressive and humanist architecture group The Ring. Erich also travelled extensively, often with his wife Luise: to Palestine (where Erich built a hydroelectric power station), the Soviet Union, the US.

He did rarely return to his hometown. What he did do here however was to realise his first ever project: the Tahara house of the Jewish community. Commissioned when Erich was still studying in Munich and completed in 1913, the Bet Tahara (a place where the Jewish deceased are prepared for burial) was built as a component of the Jewish cemetery of Olsztyn and also came with a second building designed as the residency for the cemetery's caretaker. The building showed many of the organic-looking characteristics that made his later buildings stand out, and came with a fine tiled cupola, while simplified geometric elements around the main hall and specially designed lamps showed the influence of Art Nouveau and expressionism.

Photo: Marcel Krueger

After 1933, Erich and his family emigrated to Palestine, London and subsequently the US. He died in San Francisco in 1953.

Many other Jews from Allenstein did not survive the war: in the summer 1942 the Germans deported them to the Minsk Ghetto and the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Jewish community ceased to exist, but the cemetery and Erich's building remained. After the war, it was used by the new Polish administration as a magazine for the municipal archive, the headstones for building materials and the cemetery slowly turned into an unofficial park used by the neighbours (my own grand-cousin, who lived in Olsztyn until 1961, remembers using it as a shortcut often).

Today, Olsztyn is rightfully proud of its famous son, also because his building is accessible again: in 2005, the Borussia Foundation (Fundacja Borussia) initiated the reconstruction of the building. Borussia is a group of local writers, artists and teachers founded in 1990 and dedicated to the research of East Prussian heritage and cultural dialogue (and one of my main partners in the city). The restoration project was realised with the support of European Founds, and the building and the adjacent cemetery were acquired by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland. Since 21 March 2013, the 126th anniversary of the Mendelsohn's birth, the building has been used as a center for intercultural dialogue by Borussia Foundation and was named Mendelsohn House (Dom Mendelsohna) in memory of Erich.

There is however another instance that might symbolise Erich's skewered relationship with his hometown: in 1943 he collaborated with the U.S. Air Force to build a "German Village", a set of replicas of typical German working-class housing estates and other building types, where the effects of incendiary and other bomb types could be tested. In this way, Erich contributed to the Allied war effort in the way he knew best. And even though Allenstein was never bombed during World War 2, I wonder if he thought about his hometown and its fate when he designed the buildings to be bombed, and about the first house he had built there.

Dispatches from Olsztyn - Practitioners

By Marcel Krueger:

This year, I have been selected as the official writer in residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Eastern Europe, and until September I will be living here, observing, taking part in cultural activities organised by my local partners the City of Olsztyn and the Borussia Foundation, and of course writing about the city. You can find regular posts over on the official writer in residence blog www.stadtschreiber-allenstein.de in German, Englisch and Polish (thanks to my official translator a.k.a. my Polish voice Barbara Sapala). But I will also write irregular dispatches from Olsztyn for the Elsewhere blog. As an amuse gueule, here is one of my first pieces for the Stadtschreiber blog, about a wander along the local river.

***

“Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

I like walking. This seems to be an odd statement, given that anyone does that on a daily basis. But I think we don’t walk enough these days, and not consciously enough. Or, as writer and editor Paul Sullivan writes in his essay Walking the City:

Like writing someone a letter by hand, visiting a friend across town spontaneously or just sitting on a bench and watching the world go by, the act of meandering slowly through the city streets with no particular destination in mind is one of life’s simple pleasures – and an almost entirely lost art. While most of us would argue that we do stroll through the city to some extent – to the post office, through the park, around the block – a combination of factors, chief among them a general deficit of leisure time and an abundance of convenient public transport options, conspire to ensure we usually don’t get very far on foot.

So during my first week in Olsztyn I did what I always do when I want to learn about a place: I went for a walk. I actually went on a walk every day, though some days I cheated by taking a bus or the tram. I first drew circles in and around the old town with my feet, exploring the main thoroughfares and shopping centres, but also the back alleys, laneways and suburbs of the city.

For me, someone who is now living in a central location and without a car, Olsztyn really is a city that lends itself to walking. The new parks along the Łyna river (the German Alle) are pleasant places to stroll and to linger, and on Friday afternoon there where students and teenagers sitting under bridges or on the wooden steps that lead down to the water, swigging from beer cans and smoking; office workers on their lunch break sat on benches and licked ice cream, parents leisurely pushed buggies along the pathways left and right of the river.

From the parks, I then walked northwards, past the castle from 1346 and the Warmia brewery from in a former mill building from 1868, and finally under the railway viaducts from 1871 and 1893 and the newer road bridges into the city forest proper. Every time I see the viaducts I’m reminded of Robert Budzinki’s tongue-in-cheek travel book 'Die Entdeckung Ostpreußens' (The Discovery of East Prussia).

Budzinski (1874 -1955) was a painter, graphic artist and author, and – even though he himself was born in East Prussia in Klein-Schläfken (Sławka Mała today) – in 1913 published his 'travel book' which is not only full of wonderful woodcuts, but also sardonically talks about East Prussia as the proverbial distant eastern province. He also records the often exotic-sounding East Prussian place names, before they were 'Germanised' by the Nazis 20 years later:

During my wanderings I continuously discovered places with not very known but quite illustrious names; so that I often thought I was roving about in a magical landscape. One day I took the train from Groß-Aschnaggern to Liegentrocken, Willpischken, Pusperschkallen and Katrinigkeiten, breakfasted in Karkeln, arrived in Pissanitzen, Bammeln, Babbeln, and had dinner in Pschintschikowsken while aiming to overnight in Karßamupchen.

The book remains in print until today, which I think is a testament to his enduring humour and skill as an artist. From under the bridges then I made my way into the city forest proper, with the Łyna growing wider to my right and only the occasional biker disturbing my solitude. I like to be out, walking, slightly removed from the noise of the world. Or, as Walter Benjamin writes in 'Berlin Childhood around 1900', 'Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.' The beauty of Olsztyn is that the forest proper is never far – so I can train to get lost both here and in the city. The lady walking her dog just that came towards me on the forest path did not seem to agree with my Waldeinsamkeit: the look she gave me over the rim of her sunglasses seemed to suggest that only idiots stand in the middle of a forest and scribble in notebooks.

I continued for another 30 minutes before I decided to leave the Łyna valley and loop back to the city centre. I walked up the wooden slope right of the river and came across the Leśny Stadium, now almost completely reclaimed by grass and trees, where athlete Józef Szmidt (the so-called 'Silesian Kangaroo', born in 1935 and an honorary citizen of Olsztyn today) broke the world record for triple jump in 1960 with a length of 17.03 metres. I wonder if the soft peat soil here had something to do with that. Further on, I came across a graffiti of three knights on a wall, maybe a harmless reflection of the Teutonic Knights that haunted these woods long ago.

A not so harmless reminder of the violent past was just up the road – two cemeteries of honour, one a German one with dead from both World Wars that was restored and is looked after by the German Minority Association of Olsztyn, with men who died in 1914 lying next to men who were born in 1914; and the other a small Russian plot, with no headstones left but a German memorial set up in 1914 that reads:

Here rest Russian soldiers who followed the orders of their ruler, found their death fighting against the liberators of East Prussia and are now buried far from their home

It seems a futile honourable gesture, something that would have surely not been set up following the industrialised mass murder of the Somme and Verdun and during the Brussilov offensive, which surely eradicated all humanity left then.

When I walked back from the cemeteries, my head full of somber thoughts, chance and sunlight and the city cheered me up: a pizza taxi stopped near the forest entrance and two teenage girls emerged from the woods, inexplicably wearing white plastic antennae and white plastic fairy wings. They paid for the pizza and skipped back into the woods, to what I can only imagine must have been the first fairy pizza picnic of spring in Olsztyn this year.