Down, out and in between: a gonzo travelogue exploring Europe’s borderlands
In the middle of the Nysa river, between Polish Gubin and German Guben, there was an island, and on the island – a park. It was hard to say to whom the island belonged: Poland or Germany. The pavements were neat, so were the lawns. I couldn’t tell until I saw that dog walking was banned. Must be Poland, I thought. I figured that the Germans would have set up a poo bag dispenser instead. I glanced at the map on my phone: indeed, it was Poland. A couple with a pram were crossing the bridge towards the island from the German side.
They saw a few Polish chavs wandering among the trees, exchanged a look, swerved the pram and returned to the Federal Republic.
‘Scared of us, the jerries are,’ said a well-built young man, with a certain satisfaction, as I talked to him in Gubin, on the Nysa’s Polish bank. ‘When a German crosses over to the Polish side, they suddenly get all polite and in line.’
Well, yes, perhaps they are a little scared, and that’s probably why along the whole Nysa border – on the German side – there are posters of far-right parties calling for the borders to be closed. In the countryside, nobody touches these posters. It’s only in major city centres that they’re splashed with paint or torn off.
‘Scared is an overstatement,’ said Tobias, a 30-something from Guben, whom I met on a walk in Gubin. ‘Sure, after Schengen there was a slight uptick in crime, but that’s normal when divergent life standards equalise – and it’s not an everyday problem for anyone. The neo-fascists play on anti-Polish sentiment, poor and angry people easily pick it up, especially that everything on your side really does look, um,’ Tobias looked away from me and hesitated, ‘well, a bit different than on ours. Though everything’s changing quickly on yours,’ he asserted hurriedly.
‘But nobody hates anybody here,’ he continued. ‘Poles are no longer seen as people from a wild, unknown land which suddenly appeared in the east. We’re becoming normal neighbours.’ He hesitated again, and then added: ‘Slowly.’
Generally, things have started to happen on the Polish side. Supposedly, Poles and Germans worked on the same foundation, within the same landscape, on the same urban tissue, but it was incredible to watch the different variants of how this tissue developed in both countries. In Germany, it was simply tediously consistent. In Poland, it took the shape of a joyous barbaric dance on the corpse of a conquered civilisation. Old, tiresome urban patterns got lost under the lawlessness of Polish construction; the architectural ones disappeared under extensions, expansions, things fastened with wire and patched with sheet metal. Germany was painfully predictable. Poland had surprises around every corner.
And so, for example, a petrol station by road 286, near the German border, featured two dinosaurs. A Tyrannosaurus and, I think, a Dilophosaurus, with a crest. Both life-size and very realistic. They looked like were about to pounce on the passing cars.
The village beyond the station was called Starosiedle. In a very Polish way, its Germanness was collapsing into itself. Decaying calmly. Some souped-up Audi was roaring on a grubby courtyard by a stately red-brick church, stirring up clouds of dust. All this brought to mind a Mad Max post-apocalypse. Someone had put a Christ made of plaster on the wall surrounding the church. It must have been recently, because it hadn’t turned grey yet and was terrifyingly white. Like a ghost who’d tried to haunt this village, but had frozen solid and couldn’t move.
Translated by Marta Dziurosz
Down, out and in between: a gonzo travelogue exploring Europe’s borderlands
Translation rights: Zofia Dimitrijević, zofia.dimitrijevic@czarne.com.pl
Ziemowit Szczerek translated Hunter S. Thompson into Polish, and echoes of gonzo journalism return again and again in the nine extensive chapters of this travelogue. Szczerek wanders around countries including Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Ukraine and finally Poland, exploring the nuances of the periphery, the liminal Europe vacillating between East and West. His tone is conversational and breezy, but he is deeply conscious of the intertwined histories of these countries, their political particularities and uneasy present, often complicated by huge diaspora populations. There’s a sweary lightness to his style which does not take away from the depth of his knowledge and seriousness of his thinking.
By practically living in his car and drinking with the locals, Szczerek witnesses up close the convulsions of political, economic and social transformation, as well as multiple, often divergent notions of Europe and identity. His themes are wide-ranging: from armed conflicts in various border regions to the realities of the migrant crisis, from the idea of ‘Slavicness’ to how the social situation is reflected in urban space and architecture. A main line of his inquiry are the two main forces which, in his view, shape Europe – Russia and Germany – and their immense cultural and political influence. This is street-level reportage, fuelled by the author’s genuine interest in the fluidity of the borderland. The Ends of the Lines will appeal to anyone curious about the societal complexities beyond news headlines.
Marta Dziurosz
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
