It’s a pro forma icebreaker and much more. Our seminar leader at Jagellonian University (est. 1364) in Krakow recalls disarmingly a period of unhappiness during his undergraduate days in Chicago. He inspires us to be as much ourselves as possible when it’s our turn to speak, so beyond saying where and what I teach, I admit I’m working on a novel, looking for a better understanding of my narrator’s early life here. (Thereafter, I’m “the novelist,” as another is “the historian,” and another “the journalist.”) The group of nearly 20 — university professors, actually, and one high school teacher, and the two in charge from CIEE — is reassuringly interested and warm. It’s my first academic seminar overseas, my resistance to organized tours giving way when I saw the title:
RUINANDREVIVAL: History, Modern Memory, and Identity. Poland and Germany.
by Lisa Birnbaum, Ph.D. ’ve wanted to see Poland, but also to return to Berlin, where a shard of my identity and just a little bit of my memory might be revived from 1979, that year I lived there. And where another wall, one in the novel I’m trying to finish by the end of summer, might yield at my return. I almost stayed to marry a German, and isn’t that old life in the novel somewhere, revived, in new pieces, new people? That first evening we dine at the famous 14th century Restaurant Wierzynek, delighted by the old-world elegance, the sort of place where waiters lift silver covers off entrees in rapid sequence. The next few days familiarize us with the tempo and truer nature of the tour. It is indeed quickly paced, but with a grim tone: by Day 3 we’re at Auschwitz. I’ll never be prepared, of course, for that, but I’ve been doing as much reading as possible. All spring and into June, I’ve been carrying around Tony Judt’s Postwar: The History of Europe Since 1945. I’m not “the historian,” so the book, almost a thousand pages, has been essential — though I’m only on page 463 when we get there. I’ve read some others on the list: The Uses and Abuses of History (McMillan) and Stasiland (Funder), the latter some of the finest literary nonfiction
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Auschwitz death camp
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