While waiting for the right electrician — and because television filming involves so many timeless interruptions — I toddled off down the stairs of history (all the while talking coexistence with our Polish Interpress attache) until, in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, I saw town painter Moller's kitchenmaid, then pregnant, coming toward me across the Long Market.
Agnes Kurbiella has bought a soup chicken unplucked. It persists in being winter, although we were shooting the TV documentary in fine late-August weather, at the height of the tourist season. In January 1636 Agnes is in an advanced state of pregnancy; King Wladimir VI has taken up residence in the Green Gate, thus lending a date to the town's history. There he is chatting with the Silesian diplomat and poet Martin Opitz von Boberfeld. The king is planning to engage Opitz as secretary and court historian. The admiral of the Polish navy, a Scotsman by the name of Seton, is also present, as are several local patricians with
well-fed faces over stiff ruffs. Now that the armistice with Sweden has been extended, the king wants Opitz to negotiate a new schedule of harbor fees. Just a little while ago the poet had submitted some fresh-baked iambics praising the sovereign as a prince of peace, and it is plain that they have won the king's favor. The patricians assure the poet — recently driven out of Silesia — that here he will be able to live in peace. During a pause in the official deliberations, Admiral Seton, a Catholic well versed in letters, tells the Protestant Opitz, half in amusement, half in real concern, how his sons' tutor, a young man of the Lutheran persuasion and like Opitz a fugitive from Silesia, is sick in bed because the festivities of the hard-drinking burghers — who couldn't very well help drinking to the successfully concluded treaty with Oxenstierna's commissioners, could they? — have been too much for the young man, who is hardly more than a boy; so "at the moment he's writing bilious sonnets, proclaiming that all is vanity. His verses might interest you, all the more so since young Gryphius doesn't write in Latin but in plain German."
But, worn down by the long war, Opitz is too distraught to ask for copies of the sonnets. Through the tall windows of the Green Gate, he looks out (in the perspective of town painter Moller when he painted his Tribute Money picture) on the wintry Long Market, across which the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella in an advanced state of pregnancy is still plodding through the wet snow with an unplucked soup chicken. Now she is passing the Rathaus, where three centuries later we are waiting for the house electrician. Now she is turning onto Beutlergasse. She is planning poached chicken breast in chervil sauce with oaten porridge. Soon Agnes will be cooking light, easily digested dishes for Opitz. That summer, shortly before the departure of the recovered Andreas Gryphius, the diplomat takes up lodgings in the house of the preacher Canassius. By then he has entered the service of Sweden as well as Poland: a double agent.
When the electrician finally arrived and our three lamps, plugged into an auxiliary line, were again shedding light on the municipal conservator and on Anton Moller's Tribute Money scene on the Long Market, I had just left the seven-
teenth century with its varied religions and was back in the early fourteenth century — May 17, 1308, to be precise — watching the execution of the sixteen Pomeranian knights, all members of the widely ramified Swenzas family. One reason for my interest was that it is still uncertain whether the Teutonic Knights, as their first contribution to the history of the city of Danzig, beheaded only the sixteen Swenzases, or whether they butchered over ten thousand urban Pomor-shians, all of whom lived between Saint Catherine's and the old Pomeranian castle, which soon became the castle of the Teutonic Knights. The Pomorshian part of the Old City was still known as the Wicker Bastion. For when the sixteen nobles or ten thousand Pomorshians were executed, there was still no Charter City, although the Teutonic Knights had already decided to found a new city governed by Culm law to the south of the Pomorshian settlement.
In any event, more than sixteen Pomorshian-Kashubian counts and less than ten thousand Kashubian-Pomorshian inhabitants of the Wicker Bastion were executed or otherwise slaughtered. History, to be sure, tells us with chronological precision that on February 6, 1296, the Polish king Przemy-slaw was murdered in Rogasen, but the figures for the mass slaughter remain crude guesswork; just as in recent times I was unable to find out by random questioning of resident Poles (which I kept up as long as we were shooting the television film) how many workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk and how many shipyard workers and longshoremen in nearby Gdynia were shot in mid-December, when the police and army of the People's Republic of Poland were ordered to fire on the striking workers. For fire they did, and not without effect. Maria lost her Jan, who, when hit, was quoting the Communist Manifesto through a megaphone. What ideological contradictions provide whom with dialectical (in the Marxengelsian sense) entertainment when in a Communist country the state power gives orders to fire on workers, thirty thousand of them, who have just been singing the Internationale outside the party building in proletarian protest?
In Gdansk five or seven seem to have been killed outside the shipyard entrance on Jakobswall, where the shipyard
already had its entrance in the old days; in Gdynia the exact number — between thirty and forty killed — has been kept secret. Details were not discussed. The whole thing was subsumed and deplored under the head of "December Events." And the Teutonic Knights were also quick to proceed to the order of the day. The facts and Realpolitik argued in their favor: Pomorshian Danzig was allied with the Swenzases and Brandenburgers against Lokietek, king of Poland. On the advice of the Dominicans, who were loyal to the king, his bur-grave Bogussa had called on Plotzke, the provincial master of the Teutonic Knights, for help. The Knights had sent a battalion, which fought its way into the besieged fortress, forced the Brandenburgers to withdraw, drove Bogussa and his Poles out of the fortress, and seized the Pomorshian Swenzases. After the Swenzases were beheaded, and after a massacre whose victims cannot be numbered, the Knights made the inhabitants remove the city's walls, bulwarks, and other fortifications, and finally demolish their many defenseless mud huts and few frame houses. What was left of the population dispersed and a few years later was again decimated, by the famine that raged throughout Europe. And when, beginning in 1320, the first streets of the new Charter City were laid out at right angles to the Mottlau — Brewer Street (later renamed Dog Street), Long Street, Brotbankengasse, Holy Ghost Street — only sparse remnants of the Old City population, but large numbers of Lower Saxons, driven eastward by hunger, came to settle there. And at the same time the Wicker Bastion section, outside the new Charter City, rose up anew on the ruins of the old Pomorshian settlement.
By then no one spoke aloud of the sixteen Swenzases and ten thousand massacred Pomorshians, for one thing because a papal commission of inquiry had set its seal on the report of the Teutonic Knights' procurator. Don't forget that all the people involved were Catholics. Just as the strike and uprising of the longshoremen and shipyard workers of Gdansk, Gdynia, Elblag, and Szczecin and the order to fire given the police and the People's Army were all of the Communist persuasion. In any case, the municipal conservator kept thoroughly silent about the events of December 1970, all the more so because no striking shipyard workers
interfered with the reconstruction of the Charter City (in accordance with the plans of the Teutonic Knights).