In Cracow- relevant today

In Cracow, Poland, you can find the burial places of the medieval kings of Poland- dating from the 14th century until the end of the monarchy over two hundred years ago.

You can also find what was formerly one of the most important Jewish centres in what was one of the most popular nations for the diaspora at the beginning of the 20th century- Kazimierz.

All of this is just 70 km from Auschwitz-Birkenau, known in Polish as Oswiecim, where around a million European Jews died, as well as about 5oo ooo others, many of those Poles (many of whom died in the first years of WW2). I undertook a journey there on a sunny Sunday, and it was a very physical and - (can I coin a word from factual and practical?) - 'factical' experience. I went without food and water from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon (the train journey out, and the tour, were actually physically discomforting as a result, but I didn't feel much like consuming anything despite that), and this enhanced the physical reality of seeing with one's own eyes the puff-light piles of hair, the twisted heaps of shoes, the piles of distressed spectacle frames etc. It seemed to me, reflecting on it, that when doubting the sincerity of feelings about the Holocaust then to method act a small fragment of hardship was a good way to enter fractionally into some of the terrors that the place contained.

But, forget the Nazis if you can for a moment- the Communists contributed substantially to a massive collapse in the numbers of 3 million Polish Jews, mainly through persecution leading to emigration, to the point where today estimates of their numbers are, at the more optimistic end, around the several dozens of thousands mark (counting the very many people who are unwilling to allow their Jewish identity to be known.)

So how many did I see in Cracow, in the winding streets of Kazimierz, in amongst the showers and warm sunshine? Probably very few if any, considering that the pre-war population estimated at 60,000 has been considerably more than decimated. Maybe the man in the Noah's Ark bookshop on Miodowa street wasn't even Jewish, though, er, he looked it. According to what seems the reliable source linked above, the known Jewish population may currently stand at around the 150 mark. Yes, that's One-Five-Oh.

Yet Cracow is not an unhappy place. One reason is that the Poles generally were not responsible for the massacre of their valuable-in-every-sense Jewish population, and actually most of Cracow's jews did not got to Oswiecim but to Belzec near the Ukraine. Even the period of communism seems, on casual examination at any rate, difficult to categorise as having had a Polish nationalist movement of real potency, though it sanctioned anti-semitism at times (not that the two are synonymous, but nationalism under communism is an equation difficult to compute without anti-semitism, at least in Europe). One support for that assertion would be the large number of Jews who took a part in at least the early decades of the communist regime- until 1968 when things changed a lot for them- seen as liberating them from the old world view which had culminated in the Shoah.

In Kazimierz you can find the best restaurants in Cracow, as well as some very lively looking clubs. In many areas well kept, it's also, perhaps understandably, home to some stylish dereliction- but the Jewishness is alive somehow in this vibrant cultural life. From synagogue(s) to ritual bathhouse, even to the well-kept graveyards, there seem to be no empty touristic shells, whatever use is made of them. There are many signs in Hebrew- and local Polish students of Jewish Studies at Jugiellonian University have courses to help them with the difficult Hebrew language. There's also one of the few authentic (ie. featuring real live Jews!) European festivals of Jewish culture, held biennially in Kazimierz.

The Jewish area is found on the Southern side of the city (a city of around 700,000 people- map), just outside the extensive old town. Most of the old town (excepting at least the part adjacent to the Jewish area) is surrounded by a 'moat' of greenery and footpaths. It's not a place to walk, but to stroll lazily there gives one a perfect introduction to the style and scale of it. Any time one cares it's easy to dive into the network of streets comprising many ancient but well-kept buildings. A foray into them confirms the sense that often they go back several centuries at least- Cracow was saved for our modern taste for tourism, from our modern taste for destruction, by the Swedish empire's decision to relocate the capital closer to home, in Warsaw, in 1609. Today there's a plethora of cafes- both cheap internet and ordinary ones- and boutiques in these streets.

One also can't forget the main Town Square, which I saw under a variety of conditions but which seemed truly magical at dusk when the smoke from some fast food stalls was drifting around in the moist-still air beneath a rain-filled sky. The medieval quality then was stunning, something I haven't felt elsewhere in central Europe- rivalled in my experience only by the much less grand but nonetheless delightful sensations of York in the UK.

Still, having said all that, Poland's lack of Jews today seems crushing in the light of its rich history of association with the Jewish nation, and Cracow, though perhaps aided by the film Schindler's List which popularised one of its interesting old boys, is only an obscure current in the tide of history as it relates to the future of the Jews. This overall tide still doesn't seem to be washing away the cruel high tidewater mark of European oppression and malevolence towards the Jews with something far more tolerant and respectful, but instead allowing that high-tide mark to become, largely through ignorance and indifference, all Islamo-scummy. I would say Cracow is clearly an exception to that rule, though a faint one- a fact which allows its beauty to be enjoyed without guilt that we are walking over the bones of victims to do so.

(main source- apart from internet- 'Poland and the Jews' by Stanislaw Krajewski, Austeria 2005.)

The end of history?

It really is all encapsulated by something that Mark Steyn has been pointing out again and again: the tendency to think we've reached the end of history; that things cannot change beyond a certain span of what is conceivable.

It's a place where psychology and philosophy mix and mingle with sociology, economics and science. In other words, contrary to all appearances of banality and shallowness, modern society is an interesting place in which to find oneself.

It's also a place where we've been before, though perhaps not every society has been there- and not every society is there now. It seems undeniable that more countries are there now than have ever been there before, though I wouldn't want to make an exhaustive list; while anyway in the future it's almost certain the current record for numerousness will be broken. Certainly Britain has been there before, and though we're there again we are not quite the innocents that we were the first time.

Where was the place we have been before? I wouldn't want to say it too precipitately, because although it's a place we've been before the significance of it has changed- you might say the map reference is the same but the lie of the land has shifted due to nature and man in combination.

Ok, well, to end the suspense, the name of the place is summertime, 1914.

Why that particular time? Perhaps Larkin expressed it best in his poem MCMXIV :

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word- the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting just a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

I want to focus on the three middle lines, the lines I highlight. This is not literary criticism, but it might help to visualise the then and now parallel tracks.

When Larkin talks about 'innocence', it's clear (especially when you know something about Larkin) he means a combination of sexual and societal innocence. The idea he outlines which died in the war that followed was that fidelity to the twin concepts of marriage and social responsibility created some kind of concept of sustainability, or even eternity.

The central features of life have moved on; Larkin was right that marriage and social responsibility - and religion- in Britain would never be the same after the Somme.

It needs to be said, however, that what changed was not so fundamental as to abolish the idea of marriage and the idea of social responsibility; what had changed was society's trust, or faith, or worshipful posture, towards these words and their manifestations. Thus marriage survived, and so did a notion of social responsibility, but the emphasis on an individual and personal commitment to them went- especially the desire to retain the standards of such commitments across all the units that then comprised society. After all, the War made, actually forced, people to see that forced loyalty, assumed loyalty, resulted in stupidity of different kinds among all kinds of people, from the high to the low ranking in society. To put it in the war context, from the donkeys to the lions simple loyalty to abstractions guaranteed bestial outcomes eventually.

And that may be the nearest thing you'll find to a generalisation that works- although anyone reading it had better beware that it too is one of those abstraction thingys which we can't rely on without dehumanising ourselves.

But where does it link to today's society? Haven't we very little in fact to do with these abstractions of marriage and social responsibility, having developed 'open' relationships and created state apparata to deal with the social responsibility end? Well, it's precisely the settled nature of these resolutions that mirrors the error of the past. It's always a mistake to think you've got human relationships 'fixed' in some way that can't be improved on- especially if your idea of improvement is, in the face of criticism, more of the same.

Thus, at one extreme, preachers in the noughties no doubt said that what was needed for society's ills was the comittment of ordinary men and women to loyally improving the condition of the social fabric, and greater fidelity to institutions like marriage. Today the status quo junkies, in between their dessert and their coffee and occasional cigar, would be saying that we need to be more flexible about our view of relationships and invest more in social welfare. Though utterly irrational, failing to link at all with the evidence around them, this passes as sophisticated thought- as did the preacher's noughty waffle. Both exemplify futility, like blowing at rain clouds in an attempt to halt the rain.

To draw such a simple parallel will not do however. We also need to look at the underlying power-politics which indicate, contrary to our deepest wishes, that we've arrived, after so much travelling, at a place where we've been before.

Recently we've had several votes in which Europe's mistrust of itself at the level of nation-states has reared its head even against the people who claim that Europe can't be trusted- that is, the politicians for whom the end of national histories, subsumed within an EU which is almost above and beyond what was once considered history, is the goal.

In this almost reflexive distrust of our leaders we can see a good reflection of the close to reflexive trust that Europe's leaders enjoyed prior to 1914 amongst the overwhelming mass of society- and of course, given the nature of reflection, we can mean that literally apparent is a near doppelganger along antonymical lines. Those who would trust their politicians, not out of blindness but out of a sense of urgency (the origin of which I will address), are a small minority, with views largely unarticulated and unheard- as were indeed those who distrusted their politicians with a fervour before 1914.

I suppose that here is the place to insert a waiver to this argument- that among the people of Europe trust in their leaders was far from uniform before the First World War. It was apparently most striking in Britain, and also partly in Germany. Today cynicism reigns, but to differing degrees across Europe. It's most subconscious and hampering in Eastern, former Communist Europe, while cynicism is most robust in Britain- half the time appearing to be quite a jovial arrangement.

[ Insert: here I stopped writing, on July 02 2005. I rapidly forgot this wordy piece, despite a lot of enthusiasm about it during writing. Then, on July 7th 2005, something quite momentous happened when 58 people were killed by a series of terrorist-jihadi bombs on the London underground. This tragedy was followed by a lot of panic in London, all the while we heard reassuring noises from the authorities. As I write, on the 24th of July 2005, the media are just absorbing the impact of a brutal killing by nervous policemen of an innocent Brazilian whom they had under surveillance at the Stockton underground station. This came in the wake of a series of apparent follow-up attacks which failed to detonate their intended explosions. It also occurred just before a series of terrorist bombs exploded in Egypt at a tourist resort there, killing 80+ people including several Britons. This terror put into perspective the above argument.

There is no doubt that the European dimension of our troubles will be a factor as we try to deal with the Islamic terrorist assault, and the challenge of their ideology. Although it may be one of the causes of our weakness and lack of understanding, it is merely a crutch which we have joined other Europeans in leaning on. We will have to kick it away, grimace through the pain, and stand upright, before we can confront the threats against us.]

Now, to go back a little, to Larkin, we can see that there are two salient features of those three highlighted lines. One is that the changes happened 'without a word'. No doubt there were lots of words, far too many perhaps, said in the pulpits and written in the newspapers at the time, but none of them addressed the deeper issues, for instance the validity of the struggles between the great powers; the reality of the struggles of the great powers, or the social order which underpinned them. Yes, there was a discussion among a certain group of radicals, but they were intellectuals and bohemians. Really those discussions needed to have been part of mainstream discussion at the time- much modified and cleansed of the rabid, millenarian quality, but nonetheless part of ordinary discussion. Failure to do that meant that the old order was philosophically attentuated and brittle enough to collapse, or nearly so, during the stresses of a stupid and inflated conflict.

The parallel to that which I see today is the uncontested virtues of statism, protectionism, and political correctness. This nexus of correctnesses is every bit as attentuating socially and economically as the shibboleths of deference and social immobility were to the mindset of pre-1914 Britain.

Moving to the 'men leaving the gardens tidy', one can see the automata of social and economic conformity. The sixties represented the culmination of the processes put into train by the first world war, which was why the latter period fascinated Larkin, being also the time just before his birth. The cry in the sixties was for individualism; that you should make your mark in your individual way without attending to the moraes of society. Unfortunately the requirement of freedom seems to be that we make money, and the 1980's showed the realisation that the 60's dream needed hard work and long hours. Thus a new breed of hard working high maintainance man came into being, and the orthodoxy of that grew dramatically until the consumer's demands seemed to be paramount. Today's men would leave their dependants with some nice possessions, but, after the package holdays and the fast food and the videos and gadgets and portable computers, rather than the mealtime conversations, the picnics and the church fetes, above all without any real need to recall their former guardians at all- unencumbered by memory, unencumbered by guilt. The space left by the average man today would take no time to fill at all. Today's men consume and leave little behind. They are throughly historically biodegradable- not even a garden to keep as it'd all be under decking or concrete.

So one can see that Larkin's poignant line about leaving things tidy is a poignant now as it was then.

Finally I need to return to the concept of urgency- something that basically went beyond Larkin's lugubrious and morbidly intellectual ken. When I wrote about it before, I meant that there were people who felt that the storm clouds were gathering, and tried to buck the trends to create a more robust response that might avert disaster. Certainly this was true for people from many quarters before 1914, though undoubtedly they were overcome by the enormity of the conflict that ensued. I mean people who tried to address the social gaps, who attempted to criticise the social order, who didn't trust the politicians automatically but attempted to engage their minds in responding individually and vitally to changing circumstances- without hopping onto the nihilistic bandwagon of the communists. It's of course true that they failed to prevent the carnage of the Somme and the other battles which have forever disfigured the body politic that emerged from that time. They also failed to stop the advance of the nihilistic communistic mindset which viewed all social distinctions as a social ill. But perhaps they stopped us losing the war and secured a space of time, and maybe helped turn later intellectuals away from the nihilism just enough to gain a ground out victory over communism. Perhaps they made all the difference, though it's difficult to know- but when you think about it, between the communists and the aristocracy something squeezed through, and it was a functioning, unbroken democracy, with attendant prosperity.

This optimistic note leads me to suppose that, since, though it's difficult to see clearly, the many dissenters of 1914 (no, not conscienscious objectors, though I don't disparage them)- those who organised themselves and fought through the war period successfully, and endorsed democracy throughout the 20s and 30s and beyond- did enjoy real success. Is it possible the smaller number of dissenters against the consensus hatred of British values might be successful today?

In these times there have been a number in British society who have been trying to support their social model, however difficult and fraught that might be, in the face of those who, relentlessly or complacently, assume that what is wrong with the world outside us must be a fault of the way we have dealt with and are seeing the world. The simplistic assumption that our social model determines all the evils of the world is one that's very difficult to oppose, but there are people who are trying to, even from the ranks of politicians and journalists.
One thing I think is for sure- if they do so it will be a clear victory, and not a muddy one, for the clarity of the opponent, and his determination, is such that his defeat would be crystal clear, and represent the end of a militant analysis of society stretching back to Marx. The maths is difficult, but the nature of the challenge means that even one dissenter, raising his voice with clarity against the angry waves, could, with a word, turn the tide of nihilism whose victory was the essence of Larkin's despair.