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A voyage of discovery into the world of prejudice
At the beginning of the 1980s Adam Soboczynski, then aged 6, moved with his parents from Toruń in Poland to Koblenz in Germany. One might suppose that he would feel equally at home in both countries, but his book gives the impression that, whilst he feels ties to both, these ties are very different in nature. The journey that he undertakes at the start of the twenty-first century to the land of his family and his roots becomes with each successive stage ever more a process whereby idealised memories and blithely accepted stereotypes are steadily demystified.
Soboczynski presents his experiences and insights with a very light touch yet without a trace of frivolity. He displays humorous detachment in his account of the first tentative steps of an immigrant Polish family in its new environment — the Federal Republic of the early ’80s.
He recounts how the family stuck together, how his mother and his aunts, highly qualified though all of them were, worked in those early days as cleaning ladies — and discovered to their great surprise that the cliché of the ‘clean Germans’ was indeed a cliché, and an empty one at that. He tells of the language problems that the family had to battle with, of his father’s astonishment that so many towns along the autobahn were called Ausfahrt (Exit), of the first two words that he himself learnt to use in German: Pause and Stillarbeit (‘break time’ and ‘working on your own’).
The family returned regularly to Poland for family celebrations, while their indigent Polish grandpa would come in the opposite direction to visit them in Koblenz — a circumstance that young Adam found embarrassing rather than anything else. What with one thing and another — the relentless sameness of these family visits, the eventual death of his grandparents, the advent of teenagerdom — Soboczynski’s visits to Poland became ever more infrequent.
As a result, Soboczynski’s first journey to Poland as an adult is also a journey into his past. He travels to Warsaw and Cracow, Masuria and Toruń, meeting friends and relatives, tracking down artists, chatting to casual acquaintances in pubs. And in so doing he manages to be at once completely involved yet slightly detached. The result is an account that reflects his own very particular perspective, one in which there is a finely balanced mix of empathy and sympathetic detachment.
Soboczynski is not short of topics. Wherever he looks, he finds cues in everyday experiences for a discussion of broader issues. The cleaning jobs undertaken by the women in his family lead him to reflect on the relatively anachronistic image of women and mothers in Germany, where even today working mothers are often regarded as uncaring brutes. His encounter with an exiled Russian homosexual who has been battling for years for permission to stay in Poland prompts an account of the backwards slide into reactionary attitudes that has become ever more conspicuous in Poland over the last few years.
Soboczynski highlights the stereotypical images that the Poles and the Germans have of one another, and shows how they serve above all to underpin the self-image that each group chooses to entertain. Although the iconic ‘Polish Cleaning Lady’ has long since been replaced by Russian women, she remains a permanent fixture within the consciousness of Germans, and similarly the Poles’ image of the Germans as eternal Nazis has proved indestructible. Given the reality of a booming economy in Poland on the one hand and a sixty-year history of peace and democracy in Germany on the other, these dyed-in-the-wool attitudes are simply typical examples of the staying power of prejudice.
The experiences and insights garnered by Soboczynski in his two very different ‘home countries’ thus give us both pleasure and pause for thought. The great sense of belonging and the sympathetic approach that characterise the author’s relationship to both countries and their inhabitants are plainly evident on every page. Whilst he would never dream of denying that in terms of socialisation he is a child of the Federal Republic through and through, it is his equally fierce love of Poland that chiefly makes him such a persuasive mediator between these two neighbouring yet so different countries.
Heike Friesel
June 2007
[Translated by Helena Ragg-Kirkby]
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