cosovereign. Thereupon the Brandenburgers dug in, and Polish help was needed to drive them from the city of Danzig, or Civitas Danczik, founded in 1236 near the Pomeranian fortress and endowed with Liibeck law.
My Giotheschants, Gidanie, Gdancyk, Danczik, Dantzig, Danzig, Gdansk: you were a bone of contention from the very first. We Pomorshian fishermen and basket plaiters stayed in the old Wicker Bastion under the protection of the fort and went on eating grits as we had always done, whereas the new settlers, mostly from Lower Saxony, bearing such names as Jordan Hovele, Johann Slichting, lived as merchants and artisans behind the city walls and ate pork sausages with white beans.
The last Pomeranian dukes — Mestwin was childless — and the Polish duke Przemyslaw battled the margrave of Brandenburg and the Teutonic Knights, for so history ordained. In addition, the Polish governor Bogussa battled the Kashu-bian Swenzas until, on November 14, 1308, the grasping Teutonic Knights seized the city and occupied the fortress, from which vantage point they were able to control the city. Though the Polish Wladislaw bewailed the loss of his Pomeranian possessions and appealed to the faraway emperor and pope, he was obliged by the terms of the Peace of Kalisch (1343) to cede Pomerania.
My Dorothea to be was then three years old, and I, her Albrecht to be, though already of marriageable age, still clung to the apron strings of my Pomorshian mother, Dam-roka, who had married a city man. My father, the sword-maker Kunrad Slichting, raised me to be a swordmaker, too — a trade with a future. The city was growing quickly and wanted to be defended with handy two-handers.
The smooth synchronization of a German command to hold on at all costs, of the Soviet army under Marshal Rokos-sovski, and of English pattern-bombing was needed before the hardy product of bughers' toil, handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years, amassed here behind grandiose facades, there in humbler dwellings and workshops, could fall a victim to a generalized conflagration that smoldered for a whole week, and before all Danzig, its angular Old, Charter, Lower, New, and Outer Cities, down
to the brick walls of its big and little churches, could be leveled as though for all time. In the pictures preserved in the archives, the destruction looks total. In aerial photographs, the phases of the city's expansion in the early Middle Ages are discernible. Only at Leege Gate, near the Church of Saint John, between the fish market and Roaring Brook Street, around Saint Catherine's, and in a few other places, a fragment or two of something or other had been left standing by chance. But in the very next pictures to be taken, those shown in the memorial exhibition at the Charter City Rathaus, bricks are being cleaned, rubble shoveled off the perrons of Frauengasse, vestiges of facades on Brotbanken-gasse are being propped up, and the stump of the Rathaus tower is being encased in scaffolding.
And thirty years after the fire a young man, speaking into a clip-on mike for the Third Television Program of North German Radio and Television, related how the Inner City had been eighty-percent destroyed. Pan Chomicz, the municipal conservator, is responsible for rebuilding the historical Danzig, which has now become the Polish Gdansk.
That morning I had flown in from Berlin-Schonefeld airport on an Interflight propeller plane and landed in the new airfield, where only three years before my great aunt's Kashubian potato fields had still been moderately productive. What I had in my luggage: gaps in my manuscript, still-undocumented assertions about my earlier life in the days of the High Gothic Lenten cook Dorothea of Montau, and advertisements requesting information about the curly-headed kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella and mentioning Baroque allegories in which she figures. Objections on the part of the Flounder. My Ilsebill's wishes. And I also had with me a catalogue of questions, for I was planning to sneak away from the TV cameras and meet Maria, who is still canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard. "Tell me, Maria. How was it in December 1970? Was your Jan there when thirty thousand workers sang the Internationale as a protest against the party? And where exactly was your Jan when the police fired on the workers? And where was he hit?"
When they started shooting the picture, it all became two-dimensionally present. Historical quotations—1813, the
fire on Warehouse Island — became slips of paper to be thrown away. We had set up our three lamps, the sound equipment, and the camera in the restored treasure room of the Charter City Rathaus. For all his assurance about the facts, the municipal conservator stood somewhat embarrassed amid the paneled walls and the Dutch sink-of-inquity paintings. Behind him hung town painter Anton Moller's Tribute Money, its top forming a half circle; Jesus and his New Testament bunch are standing in manneristic agitation where in actual fact the wide Renaissance Green Gate (Gothic: Koggen Gate) should be separating the Long Market from the bank of the Mottlau. In the direction of the Rathaus, the Long Market narrows into the slightly crooked Long Street, leading to the High Gate. Moller painted this allegory against an urban backdrop immediately after his Last Judgment; this was in 1602, which like the year preceding was a plague year. (But no winding sheets are hanging from the windows. No overloaded carts enliven the background. No doctor is making his rounds with mask and rattle. Nowhere is straw being burned. Warning yellow is nowhere predominant.)
The conservator, obviously used to such tasks, looked straight into the camera. Neither one nor the other hand took refuge in a pocket. With economy of gestures he called Moller's painting a document, important for the reconstruction of the center of the devastated city and comparable to Canaletto's paintings, which had been helpful to the re-builders of the old city of Warsaw. "Astonishing" was his word for the proof provided by this painting that as late as the early seventeenth century nearly all the patrician houses on the Long Market were still graced by Gothic masonry and gables, exceptions being the Artushof and the broad Renaissance-style burgher's dwelling across from the Rathaus.
The conservator was explaining with a smile why, in rebuilding, not the Early Gothic, less cost-intensive form but (shunning no expense) the elaborate Baroque facade had been chosen — when in mid-sentence our three lamps went out. A fuse had blown in the Charter City Rathaus (reconstructed in accordance with Moller's picture). The house electrician was called but did not come. Instead, unannounced and walking ahead of his party, Prince Philip of England entered the historic hall. Some regatta or horse
race seems to have been the occasion for his semiofficial stay at the Grand Hotel in Zoppot. Visibly exhausted by his tourist program, Prince Philip winced at the sight of the camera. Although the prince could scarcely have been mistaken for anyone else, our sound technician, whose name was Klaus—"Hey, Klaus! Go get it, Klaus!" — wanted to put him to work as the long-awaited electrician. Before this mistake could be converted into an anecdote and make history, the prince and his escort were gone.
Later on at the Monopol cafe, I noted: what if Copernicus or the hoary-headed Schopenhauer had turned up and been mistaken for someone else? Ah, those great historic moments! If you've seen one, you've seen them all. Come to think of it, Peter the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler had been in the same place. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, the English nobleman Henry Derby, long before becoming a character in Shakespeare, arrived here with his retinue to join in hunting down the heathen Lithuanians, a popular Christian winter sport at the time. From Dorothea's husband, the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting, he bought a gold-plated crossbow, and never paid for it. A story fraught with consequences. Unpaid bills wherever you go.