This week I spent two days in Warsaw for a work trip. Since we – my colleagues and I – had a short timeframe for discussing professional matters, most of the time I spent in Warsaw was taken up with discussions, later followed by talks and even later by chats. It was invigorating, inspiring and pleasant, as good work trips are in academia, but one consequence of this tight schedule was that my encounter with the city itself was relatively brief. However, thanks to the generosity of some of my Polish colleagues, those of us who had travelled to Warsaw from Norway were given a guided tour from the outskirts of what was once the early modern city to the interior what was once the medieval city. It was a crash course in the city’s history. It was very interesting. It was also profoundly moving.
Warsaw is in many ways a complex city, as it blends elements from late medieval cityscapes, the vulgar Baroque of the eighteenth century, the seemingly French-inspired neoclassicism of the nineteenth century, the vestiges of the Communist past, and the scattered skyscrapers of a modern city. But this complexity is in its way deceptive. Or perhaps I should rather say that this complexity is deepened by the illusory sense of history that envelops the flaneur as they make their way through the broad streets of the early modern city into the squares and alleys of the medieval city. This illusory sense of history is then shattered whenever one remembers that all of this – or at least almost all of it – is simulacra.
The great watershed in Warsaw’s history is the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, a sixty-three-day struggle in which Polish resistant fighters tried to take Warsaw from German control. The uprising failed, and on orders by Hitler almost all of the old town was levelled to the ground. The city was later rebuilt, and from photographs and paintings the individual buildings were replaced with replicas of astounding likeness to their originals. The effort was so successful that when walking through these streets, it would be impossible – at least for the non-expert in, say, architectural history – to see that what surrounds the viewer in as good as every direction is a collection of simulacra.
It was a very eerie experience walking through these replicated layers of history – layers that were in one sense coeval with one another, but which alluded to different epochs and created an impression of layers that once existed. It was on the one hand marvellous, because the recreation was done so immensely well – I could definitely sense something of the same atmosphere that I have sensed in cities where such layered history is preserved and strongly visible, cities like Rome, York, Salamanca, Split. Yet once I noticed that feeling of giddy joy that overtakes the enthusiast, that feeling was immediately followed by a strong note of sadness. The sadness came from the realisation that this was, despite an incredible effort, not real. There was something not quite genuine, something that was not quite guaranteed about the verisimilitude of this assortment of simulacra: buildings, streets, horizons, nooks and crannies.
It is not that cities like those mentioned above are not also grappling with some of the same issues. Wherever history is preserved in layers, there is a degree of uncertainty connected to it. There is always some restoration that has gone into the work, there is always a selection and discarding that has been done in order to decide what to preserve and what to give up to the changes that must happen in a cityscape. The preservation efforts are also hostage to the whims of human judgement, and it can be difficult to assess whether a restoration is actually a restoration or a creation: whether the past is presented on its own terms – whatever they might be in any given situation – or whether what we see is in actuality the fantasy image of the past as envisioned by an individual or several. Such uncertainties abound, even in the most historical of cities, however we want to understand that term. But in Warsaw, that uncertainty is different. Because on the one hand, we are certain that this is a reconstruction, and on the other, we cannot be certain about the number of liberties taken, or the number of gaps of knowledge that had to be filled by educated guesswork. This uncertainty is in a different configuration as that of other cities with a long history, and it makes for a very different experience when brought face to face with the city as it stands now.
The Trinity Church, Warsaw
There is no doubt that the reconstruction of Warsaw is impressive and based on materials that can be checked and compared with, and this post is in no way intended to denigrate that effort. Quite the contrary, I wholeheartedly applaud the effort, and it has given visitors to Warsaw an immensely beautiful scene. But it does come with a feeling I have never felt before, because never has the unreality of my surroundings been so clear, so well-known, so overt. These simulacra entice emotions that are similar to when I visit other cities as those mentioned above, but there is that constant and ever-returning knowledge that these emotions are based on replicas. (I studiously avoid the term “fake”, because that is not what these buildings are.) These feelings, brought on as they are by reconstructions, make me wonder what the difference is between the original and the reconstructed in terms providing that kind of emotional connection with a place and its past that people often encounter – willingly or unwillingly – in certain locations. These feelings also remind me that there is a very complex discussion to be had about the reality of the past, and about expectations, and about the value of simulacra in the absence of the original – and whether such differences matter all that much in certain situations.
My encounter with Warsaw often caused me to become stunned at various moments as I reflected on this resuscitated reality and the sadness that lingered in the very fact that what I saw around me on every side was an attempt to preserve what had been irrevocably lost, at least from the material point of view.
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